1st Week in Indonesia  August 25-Sept 1, 2013

Jakatar is known for its traffic . 20 million people on small two lane roads. Itsometi mes can take up to 2 hours to go just a few miles.

A cemetery beside our apartment complex. Most interesting to watch the burial process. The casket is removed and the body is placed in the grave.

This is the top view of a few houses along the roadside right by modern buildings. it is all mixed together, new and nice with poor and old.

A roadside vendor. It will be quite sometime before Mary will ever be convinced to try some vintage Indonesian food. She won't even drink the water in Roy? But 18 months is a long time....we will see?

 Our apartment. These next several pictures are of where we will be living for the next 18 months. Called Puri (Which means royal castle) Casablanca. For Indonesian standards it is very nice, and we are grateful. It is on the 20th floor and overlooks a cemetery. We a have air conditioning which is very nice. It is like stepping in to a sauna when you walk outside.

The front entrance to Puri Casablanca (above) our apartment area is very clean and nice. This is our bedroom the bed is big, but it took us a few nights to get use to the firm-more like hard- mattress. The first week of sleep came hard, we had to overcome jet lag, traffic noise, the Muslim call to prayer that starts at 4 am in the morning over loud speakers, and a friendly cold bug that found Mary as we landed in Indonesia.  We are very happy to report that we are finally getting a good nights rest. yeaahh!

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One of the many different types of taxi's.

We are standing in front of the church with the Lisks(office missionaries), Sister Donald, the mission presidents wife, and that's us.

Our first opportunity to attend church. We first attended the Jakarta 3rd ward which is English speaking ex-patriots from around the world. Mostly Americans, British and Australians working here with their embassies or a business. Later we attended the Jakarta 2nd ward which is all Indonesians. We were asked to bear our testimonies, and of course we tried to do them in Indonesian. It was a humbling experience but these wonderful people just smiled and nodded as we spoke. I'm sure we got many words wrong, but they understood. We are grateful to be here with these people. They are so kind and patient. They live in this very big city, yet you see no anger, no frustration. They have so very little, yet they are always smiling.  I hope that we can love them and support them. It is a blessing to be here. There is so much we can learn from them. I suspect, in the end, we will have learned and gained far more from them , than they from us.