Weekly Update

Originally Posted 31 od December 2006

Dear Family and Friends,

It is currently 6:20 AM on Sunday 31 Decmber, 2006. It will soon be 2007 and a brand new year wil be upon us. Happy New Yera to you all. We pray that 2007 will bring you all the richest of blessings. we wanted to send out our update yesterdau but we could not get access to gmail for the entire day. We hope that everyone is having as much fun as we are.

It is early Saturday morning as we sit in our home in Bogor Indonesia, planning our day in the absence of our driver/translator, who has the day off. It will be our first day in Indonesia on our own and we are interested as to how it goes.

Bogor is cooler, cleaner and much rainier than Indonesia. It is the place that the Dutch chose to rule Indonesia from because of the better weather. It is however known as the rainy city and it is earning its reputation as I write. It rained almost all day yesterday, except for a brief period in the evening when we went our for a walk. The temperature is probably around 27 C, so it is very pleasant.

Our house is very spacious and located in a nice neighborhood with excellent security. The Indonesian people are very warm and friendly and respond with huge smiles when you greet them anywhere. Our Indonesian is virtually no-existent, other than our capacity to say hello and it will be a real challenge for us to learn it in the absence of a real need to. One of the limitations of having a translator is that we will never likely get proficient at the language. That being said, it would be impossible for us to conduct any real business at all in the absence of the translation. It would be impossible for us to do much driving around without him either. The style of driving here has the look of being reckless, yet hardly any of the millions of cars and scooters have any dents or scratches. The driving style is very un-nerving, yet they appear to be comfortable with it.

We have likely been able to put our jet-lag behind us but the process took much longer that we expected. We were exhausted by 8:00 PM and fought off sleep as late as possible, only to awaken at 4:00AM to repeat the same pattern. We were up until 9:45 last night and didn't awaken until close to 6:00 AM, so we are just about there.

We arrived in Bogor on Tuesday, December 26 in mid-morning and then spent the day getting groceries and a general orientation to the city. We still have not bought maps of the city or country and we have not yet been able to get a reliable orientation as to direction or relative distance. People here do not seem refer to distance when they talk about going anywhere. Everything is discussed in terms of the approximate time it will take to get there. Although there are some stretches of freeway, they are short and the bulk of the driving is done on shoulder less two lane roads that are congested with cars and trucks. It takes little to cause serious delays and slow-downs. Yesterday it took us two hours to go 30 kms to visit an orphanage where we are doing a mushroom project. It was quite an impressive place but it took a long time to get there and the same amount of time coming home. There were two points of congestion en-route that took up half the time.

The highlight of the first day in Bogor came when our debit card worked when we withdrew money from the local bank machine. It was a great relief to know that we have ongoing access to local currency at an appropriate exchange rate.

It was also a thrill when our credit card worked when we were buying a few things for the house. That joy was short lived, when it suddenly wouldn't work any more. We were able to telephone the credit card company the nest day and get it resolved, Apparently they have a computerized system that disables any credit card that is used repeatedly in quick succession in strange places. It is part of their defense system against stolen cards.
The missionary Sisters came by for a visit on the first night and it was great to se them and to get their impressions of things. One Sister was from Utah and the other was Indonesian. Sister Bytheway is going home to Utah in two weeks.

Indonesians are early risers and we entertained our first guests for the day at 8:00 AM on the second day we were here. Rolland Leis and his family came by as they were heading off to Jakarta. Rolland is a counselor in the District Presidency and his wife ( Lily ) is the Relief Society President in the Bogor Branch. Sister Kane will be her visiting teaching companion. They will usually drive us to church on Sundays, as our driver has Sunday off. They will pick us up tomorrow. They are a very impressive family. We had returned from our morning walk by the time that the Leis came by and I had not yet changed into my missionary clothing. They didn't seem to mind.

In the afternoon we went to visit a previous community school where the church had provided the cement to allow the community to build a cement path to give students access their school more easily. It is in a very beautiful part of Java about an hour away from Bogor. The school sits on the opposite side of a small but steep valley that is completely terraced in rice paddies. There is a brilliance and orderliness to the to the flow and lines of the rice paddies that is breath-taking. It was like a story-land world.
We walked the length of the steep path and visited at the school with one of the teachers. It was very warm and humid and the perspiration poured.
We discussed the possibility of teaching the teachers to speak better English. Tentative arrangements were made for Sister Kane and I to teach them on Saturday mornings for two hours, beginning on January 8th . It would be the realization of a dream as I think it would be better to teach a group of teachers, that could in turn teach students, than to just teach students. We were visiting with the son of the School Mistress and you would have thought we offered them a free trip to Disney World. There is something about being in the radiance of genuine gratitude that stirs the heart. We look forward to it and we hope it works out well. While we were visiting the school it rained. We were equipped with our umbrellas. On the drive home the rain turned into the " Real Deal ". It was nice to be a car and out of the elements. The explosion of the lightening was particularly impressive. The massive explosion was preceded by a microsecond by a tearing sound, like a huge ice-field rupturing through the middle.

In the afternoon when we visited with the Indonesian man who has been the key architect in the provision of clean water to over 80,000 rural Indonesians through the church humanitarian aid programs. It was a privilege to be in the presence of someone who is absolutely inspired and innocently unconscious of it. His name if Toffic. It looks like we have two more major water that will soon be ready to go and we look forward to helping them along. projects that we need to get.

We also discussed a goat breeding project that would have the local goat breeds upgraded through a selective breeding program that could be initiated by a stock herd of 20 purebred goats. The plan was quite impressive and appeared to be very well thought through. The plan was to bred the high quality purebreds with the local variety through 5 generations until the local variety were substantially upgraded in terms of their capacity to produce increased quantities of both meat and milk, thus increasing the long term prosperity of the local farmers. I did some immediate follow up with the Country Director and was advised that this project had already been initiated by the church in one section of Indonesia but the farmers had all sold their first generation of baby goats ( 50 % purebred ) because they felt they needed the income immediately. As a consequence the breeding program was killed off as the 50% goats would have been bred with the purebreds to get a 75 % goat and so on for 5 generations. It seems to be a sad reality that a significant part of the poverty problem is the incapacity to value the long term dividends of investment over immediate gratification.

On Thursday 28 December, we picked up the young Elders in the early afternoon and drove out to a remote little Branch for their Christmas party. The members of the Branch ( around 16 in total ) had invited other Christians to be with them so they had quite a little group and they had a program, which included a play about the council in heaven. Unfortunately that is about the time that Elder Kane had his first ( and ongoing ) experience with Indonesian diarrhea. The good news is that they an outside outhouse. The bad news is that it was the Asian variety with no lights. Necessity is a powerful force that intermittently drives us well out of our comfort zone. It was an otherwise great night. The missionaries were able to teach a first discussion to a man that is married to a member. They live two hours further away from the Branch that is already 1 ½ hours from here.

En route to the Branch we went by a large business that specializes in polishing up petrified trees and marketing them. They had the most beautiful specimens of 3,000,000 year old wood. We will buy some and have it shipped home after our mission.

Yesterday morning we went out to an orphanage that was only 28 kms away but took us two hours to get there. It is the orphanage that we will be doing the mushroom project with and we were very impressed with the organization. In the late afternoon with picked up the Sisters and drove them to an appointment with a woman whose mother died one month ago. The mother had one of the wheelchairs from the church and the woman felt that it should be returned for use by some one else. We stayed there while the Sisters reviewed the First discussion on the Plan of Salvation. It was a remarkable thing to see a young woman from the USA play a powerful teaching role in a foreign language, supported by her companion. It was evidence of the miraculous work in which we are all engaged.

We are still in the early stages of our orientation but we feel guided and protected in all we do. We pray for the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit and are thankful to be part of the work. Our hope and prayer is that we can be effective in our service.

Elder and Sister Kane