Last Week in the Mission

The last hurrah! It was a very busy week with trips to Bogor to help with the new missionary apartment, finishing the training Power Point for new missionaries, cooking for large groups, and trying to get our banking and packing finished. Whew!
We also managed to work in a day at Taman Mini, a large park in Jakarta. We thoroughly enjoyed seeing different styles of homes and different wedding clothing from all over Indonesia. The Indonesian Museum was first class. We loved the huge bird aviary and the IMAX theater.

 The Gong Factory is in Bogor and we visited
there to buy our very own Indonesian Gong!
Top picture is the fire they heat the brass,
middle picture is where 2 men take turns hitting the metal to shape it, while the first man rotates
it. Ari, the office employee and driver is in the
background looking on. The man below is shaving the metal smooth on a gamelan (a smaller kind of gong).

Elder and Sister Lisk, from Eugene, OR, went with us to
Tamen Mini--riding the cable car.

  

This is a beautiful wall-size tile map of Indonesia, with people
in all the different dress of the islands.

Every culture seems to have a "tree of life" and Indonesia has
theirs, with fire-breathing dragons, no less!

Inside Museum of Indonesia

Bali architecture

Sumatera homes

We saw lots of these style homes around Manado.

These designed homes are from Sulawesi--could be fun living in one, don't you think?

My favorite bird at the aviary--thoroughly
disgusted with all the interruptions to his sleep.

The island in center of the lake is part of the "map" of Indonesia, best viewed from the cable cars.

Manado Visit

February 20, 2013 we flew to the island of Sulawesi to the city of Manado. We went at the behest of President Groberg on assignment to cheer up and socialize with the missionary couple, Vaughn and Diane Rasband from Heber City, Utah. What an onerous assignment :) The first evening we ate at a hotel restaurant within walking distance of their beautiful new apartment. The 21st was all missionary work of the best kind. We drove an hour and a half to the town of Tomohon where Steve and Elder Steve Rasband taught an all-day seminar on personal and business finances. They did a terrific job and were rewarded with a corsage, a great lunch and some beautiful fabric as a gift at the end of the day. The best part was that the missionaries were able to tell a little about the Church at this Christian university seminar of about 100 people. Then Elder Rasband did an excellent job of giving more information about the Church.

On the way back to Manado we saw a couple of interesting sights:

This large statue is Jesus looking over the predominately Christian city of Manado.

These school children were singing the Chicken Song.
We got to do high fives with several of them and  hear
them sing another song for us as we walked
around the lovely park.

While visiting in Manado, the Rasbands took us to see some unusual monkeys in the rain forest an hour from their home. The first group was hard to find, but when we found them they didn't seem to be afraid of us and we were able to watch them from fairly close up for quite some time!

Crested Black Macaque

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This rare monkey, Tarsier, lives only in this one location in all the world.
It is the smallest monkey ever found and has a rat-like tail. It only
comes out at night, so we had a long and rapid uphill hike to
get there just as night descended, then walked back to
 the car in the dark. What a delightful privilege to see these amazing monkeys!

The trip was 5 days altogether and we enjoyed every moment of it before our return flight to Jakarta.