Joyful Visit From Our Daughters and Sadness over Natural Disasters

 

All three daughters came to visit us. We spent a couple of days with them in Jakarta and then flew to Bali for 5 days of fun and sightseeing. Brother Sihol helped us arrange the trip. He and his family are in the picture above in front of the Bali branch building. Our daughters from left to right are Kali, Mallory and Sydney. They have been to Bali before when we lived in Hong Kong, but that was about 22 years ago.
One of the really fun things we did in Bali was to take  Balinese cooking class. I have to admit that I was not very excited about it but it turned out to be super fun and we made a fantastic lunch for ourselves. 
Vegetable curry in a bumbu bali sauce, sate, with  bali style peanut sauce, fish cooked in banana leaf and mie goreng. It was all super delicious.
The Balinese are famous for many forms of art. This artist is carving a huge statue of balinese ramayana dancers. He has been working on it for over a month. He has no picture to go by nor any measurement instruments. It all comes from his experience and his imagination. I can't include all of the beautiful types are artwork here but I will simply list them: Wood Carving, Stone Carving, Painting, Dancing, Gamelan Music, Silver and Gold Smithing, Batik, and Textile Weaving. We visited several locations in Ubud where we could watch the artists work.
I was surprised when we visited the Christmas Shop in Bali. Sister Lambson got the address from Sister Gable and we stopped by. There were hundreds of different types of hand-crafted Christmas Decorations.

This was a fun week for us and it was wonderful to have our daughters with us for a short time. It was also a week of much sadness. The day before we left to travel from Jakarta to Bali an earthquake occurred about 100 km from where we live. We didn't feel it but we noticed people around us panicking and I quickly asked what was happening. There was a 5.6 magnitude quake in a town called Cianjur and over 300 people died, many of them children. Thousands were injured and thousands more were displaced from their homes which were damaged by the quake. At the same time, and in the days that followed, landslides occurred in many parts of West Java some of which were initiated by the quake and others from the heavy rainfall. These landslides killed scores more people and destroyed hundreds of homes. We have spent so much time with children and Indonesian families since coming here and we feel great pain and sorrow for these tragedies. There has been much effort and heroism to help those affected. I read of one case where several rescuers were working to save people covered in a landslide when several of them were swept away and killed by another landslide while they were working. I am sure that the Humanitarian Foundation of the Church will respond with aid along with many others in the coming months. 

I will leave you with a few pictures from beautiful Bali























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