every six weeks. These young and women are remarkable in so many ways; they
are young and really enjoy being together and being instructed by their mission
president. Zone conference is wonderful for Margo and I as well. These young
people are devoting two full years, at their own expense to serve others. It is truly a
miracle to witness. We just try to keep up!
One of the many significant differences in our service from the young
missionaries is that they get transferred to other cities while we will spend our
entire mission in the same area of Solo and Central Java. This week we experienced
our first transfer of two young missionaries we serve with and love so much; the
Sister is from the Philippines and the Elder is from Georgia.
We do many different things during the course of a week. I love this picture
where Margo put stickers on each of their fingers of her piano students indicating
fingers 1-5 . I thought the older kids and parents would think it was silly but
everyone had a great time…I even had fun with mine until they pulled the hair of my
fingers trying to get them off!
Margo cooked an American tasting version of an Indonesian vegetable “pare” for
a church women’s group cooking contest and won fourth place. It was fun for her a
reminder that everything here is very different, especially food. Even though we
enjoy some of the Javanese foods and many spices we still love a good KFC and Pizza
Hut from time to time.
On Saturday we flew to Jakarta, about a one-hour flight, and a fifty dollar fare, to
listen to one of our Church leaders from Salt Lake City, an Apostle, Elder Stephensen,
and the Area President from Hong Kong, Elder Funk. They spoke of how the church,
is now reaching into the fourth generation in Indonesia since the first members
were baptized in the early 70’s. Faith is becoming stronger and lifting each
succeeding generation.
The highlight of the week was a visit to Magelang, a city about three hours away
on the other side of the volcano. We visited our small church building on the way to
an amazing Muslim boarding school we were asked to visit to see how we might be
able to help them.
The school has about fifty permanent students from a wide variety of
circumstances that live on site from first grade through high school with some
college classes even offered to the older students. They currently have a few more
boys than girls. The young missionaries teach English classes there twice a week
and the students love them! The leaders and teachers couldn’t say enough good
things about them.
We volunteered to teach 6 special workshops over the next 15 months for the students on topics related to life skills. We are excited to develop warm and lasting relationships with these
beautiful children, their leaders and the many volunteer teachers and coaches.
Here are a few pictures of the children, the school and their devoted teachers.
The school is self-reliant and consists of all volunteer teachers. They mix
teaching with traditional Javanese life style including the students building all of
their own buildings, raising all of the food that they eat, and teaching the young men
and women academically and how to succeed in the world. They boys collect
firewood for cooking from the jungle and the girls cook all of the meals in traditional
Javanese ovens. They raise fish and have semi-hydroponic gardens to raise herbs
and greens for cooking. They make their own soap, traditional medicine and other
basic necessities use and sell on the streets. They are learning basic computer skills
from old technology but have no access to TV’s or cell phones. Each student is given
a bank account and all of the money they earn from selling their products on the
street is deposited into their accounts so that when they are finished school they
will have capital to start their own businesses.
students are building under the direction of an LDS project manager and coach. The
picture below shows the toilet before the tile is applied.
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