The Trapani's in Timor Leste

This is the sunrise from our morning run. Every day is almost like this. Best sunrises ever We eat out about 5 days a week. Eating out isn't too expensive. This is the road home. We are buddies with all the kids. They're all very friendly. I had another meeting with the u.s. ambassador to Timor-Leste. This time it was with me and only 5 other people. The Ambassador wanted our impression of security and problems in the nation. I was really out of place. The other three Worden all were associated with larger companies and had been in the country for 3 or 4 years. I guess the important thing is that now I have a relationship with the Ambassador in case there are future needs. This is the water tank at church. Because the water pressure is so poor all buildings have to have their own gravity fed tank so that water will consistently flow. Whenever we have any activity at the building we first have to plug in the pump so it starts to refill the tank. The country hasn'

 Cheryl and I visited a rural Village about 2 hours away from our home. Fortunately the road was pretty decent. This is a village that has been selected to receive garden equipment, seeds and training. The construction of the barn and the fencing are common in the area. Everything is made out of local materials.  We were given the seats of Honor on the tarp. I was the third speaker. My speech of course had to be translated.  Like all of our projects we were given a ceremonial meal of gratitude. This is what Cheryl had to eat for the initial snack. Later on in the day we had another Meal which was mainly rice, fish, chicken and beans.  After the meal I was able to view the kitchen. This is where the meal was prepared. Those are baby pigs.  The meeting started out with us being presented with ceremonial gifts. Cheryl is wearing the tais that we all received. On the left hand side of the table are green leaves with some sort of white powder in the white container.

The US Embassy is only about a block from our house. It's a pretty big walled compound that has the ambassador's residence, the embassy and some utility buildings. There's a lot of embassies here in this city and this one is by far the largest in terms of total land area. It is just across from the beach so it has a great View.  The picture is of the ambassador's residence.  It is so large that it serves as ofices also.  The interesting thing about it is that there is only a total of 200 US citizens in the country. I was asked to be on a committee of business and organization leaders that would have responsibility for strategic planning in the event of a natural disaster or civil violence. I was asked to be on the committee as the leader of our church on the island The lady on the far right of the picture is the ambassador. She sat in during our meeting and participated. There was about 20 people in the meeting. I'm also on another committee that will me

 We had a mission conference for all of the senior missionaries in the Jakarta Indonesia mission. Cheryl and I were the only humanitarian missionaries. It was in a city in Indonesia called Yogyakarta. We stayed at the Marriott hotel, which was pure luxury compared to Timor-Leste. We had three quarters of a day of meetings and the rest of the two days was sightseeing. We visited the Hindu temple called Pramban. It is a 9th Century Temple. There were no significant internal rooms. All of the worship took place outside in the courtyard. There was intricate carvings on all of the wall panels Sightseeing was a lot of fun. The area was only a three-hour plane ride from our Island. It was a remarkable blessing to be able to visit such world famous sites with such little effort. On the next day we visited the Borobudur Temple. It is a Buddhist sanctuary. The group of missionaries were very remarkable people. There were a few couples that were in their 80s a