English Bahasa and Tetun

The family that fills the second row are investigators to the church. The mother at the end is one of our English students. They have come for the last 3 weeks. They only  speak tetun and Bahasa. For their first two weeks we had a member in attendance who speaks both those languages. This week he was gone. None of the other members of our congregation speak those languages.

We struggled on what to do to provide her with a Sunday service that would be of any value to her and her family. It was complicated. On the row in front of her family is Janu and his fiance Zelia. Janu is our voluntary assistant for our English class. He also attends church about 1/2 of the time. When I gave my talk in sacrament meeting he translated for me. As usual in our meetings we have a talk from General Conference. We played the Bahasa version and gave the English-speaking members a printed English copy to follow.

After sacrament meeting we had primary and Sunday School. Cheryl taught primary with Zilia.  Zilia and Dominique's two children do not speak English. The young man in the red shirt speaks English and tetun.

Somehow through the universal language of color crayons, scissors and string Cheryl was able to put together a meaningful lesson.

This is a fruit and vegetable stand about 3 miles from our house. Everything here is grown in the country.

Because the weather here is always the same most people don't have heating or air conditioning or even screens on their windows. The owners of these fruit stands just sleep in boxes behind the stands

They just opened a new bridge across the river and so we ran across the bridge and on the new Road leading up to the bridge. It felt so modern until a herd of goats watered into the street.

The city has several statues that are hard to interpret.

Our humanitarian duties include seeking out partners to do projects with. We visited this one called ChildFund. They are worldwide organization that seeks to improve the lives of children in third world countries. We were invited by the in country director to explore ways that we might work together. She sought us out on the recommendation of other ngos who gave LDS Charities a good recommendation.