We Work Hard Too

With all the beautiful pictures of places in Indonesia, please don't get the wrong idea.  We really do work hard each day to fulfill our mission here.  I'd like to share with you what we actually have been doing with our calling of "member and leader support."
First of all we visited the 111 households listed on our branch roster.  Many of the members have moved, some 20 years ago, and left no forwarding address.  There were several who have died. I reported on some of this on a previous blog page.  Here is Joned, our branch clerk. He's a college student in art and also teaches a Sunday School class every week.

The pages are all limp and worn out!

Here are the first, second and third lists of changes for the roster--8 pages worth!
Then we gave up on typing the changes and just started sitting with the clerk
and showing/telling him of the changes needed.  Joned actually got pretty good!

We are now into the 2nd edition of the branch roster:

And then comes the 3rd Edition!  It's looking better all the time and we're down to the REAL families who are actually in our branch!  From 111, we're now at 72, with 2 more that need some 

research and then we'll be able to send them off. 

The numbers on the left side correspond to the dots on the map of Surabaya, the Letters correspond to the dots in Sidoarjo, an hour south of the meeting house.

Sunday, March 18th was a red-letter day!  They handed out Home Teaching lists to the brethren!  We had encouraged them to organize the home teaching using the new list of members and the map so the routes could be done by walking if necessary.  My Visiting Teaching list takes 3 days minimum because I go to the homes furthest from the branch, but we have a car and driver and plenty of time to do it!  My partners are our driver and Elder Seiter.  First time I've ever given a VT message with the whole family there and 2 extra men as my VT companion.  But it all works!