Morning Devotional, English at the Catholic School, and Mini Indonesia Park

 

I have pasted above two screen shots from one of our morning devotionals. Tuesday through Saturday we hold a morning devotional with the entire mission. Everyone who is available joins by zoom. The agenda is pretty simple. One companionship shares a spiritual thought, another shares a miracle and then we have a prayer. There is also time for announcements and singing happy birthday whenever someone has a birthday. It is a great way to start our morning and to feel unified even though we are spread across a geographic area that would span from the east coast to the west coast of the US. There is a lot of love among the missionaries. We are all united in common cause, far from our homes and families, and we all face pretty daunting challenges every day. We draw strength from these meetings and from the bonds of love that form among the missionaries.
Last week we were invited to visit the nearby catholic school campus to practice English with the students. We really enjoy these experiences and we are encouraged to do community service. In the top picture I am with the English club of the technical school on campus. In the lower picture we are both with the Science/English class of the high school. We just go in and practice conversations, role plays, story telling and comprehension, and try to help the students develop confidence and say some things that will motivate them to continue studying English. It might surprise you how spending just an hour with these youth will lift your spirits and give you such bright hope and confidence in the rising generation. We will visit them again next Thursday and then our schedule is too packed until the end of our mission so they will continue with visits from the other senior missionaries and the young missionaries.

We went to Taman Mini on Tuesday with some of our friends here. We met Brother and Sister Kusumarmanto during the first big task we were given on our mission. We were asked to cover FSY in Bogor and the Kusumarmantos were the heads for the planning committee. Taman Mini is the Indonesia Miniature Park. It has areas dedicated to each major culture of the islands with buildings from each area and artifacts. Sometimes there are people doing demonstrations of local dances and other cultural practices. It covers many acres so we rented a golf cart to take us around to the areas we were interested in visiting. I didn't take a lot of pictures but I will post of few of the ones I took at the end of the blog posting today. An interesting thing I learned from talking to Brother Kusumarmanto is that I visited his house as a missionaries while they were being taught the gospel. It was on a split with other missionaries in Solo. This family was baptized at about the same time as the Soeratman family. 

The most interesting exhibit for us was the room dedicated to the new capital city that is being built on the Island of Borneo. It is called Nusantara and it will be the future capital city for the country. The entire national government will move it's offices there when it is finished. They plan to make it a model city with low carbon emissions, 80% mass transit, green buildings, modern housing complexes and so forth. They showed arial views of the work that is currently being done there. A lot of heavy equipment, road construction and building of various facilities including the presidential palace. I didn't take pictures of the exhibit but you can read about it on the internet if you are interested. I have heard about this plan in the past but I always thought it was more of a dream than a reality but after seeing the master plan and the current progress I'm starting to become a believer.






Selamat Datang means "Welcome"






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