The Trapani's in Timor Leste

This is Father Joseph who is the head of the Dom Bosco trade school. He is signing our legal agreement which is the final step for us to purchase a busbar machine for the school. We have to write up the agreement and then have it approved and edited by the legal staff in the area office in Hong Kong. Fortunately we have done enough of these now that we know the wording that should be in the document. This is a prototype of 1 of the electrical switches that they will make with the purchased machine. They will make everything but the electronic circuit breakers here at the school. They already have an order for 1,000 of them. This is the exterior of the house that our investigators live in. It is one of the nicer houses in the area. It really gives you perspective. This is a very hard-working couple with two incomes and this is the best they can do here. It's remarkable how gentle the weather is here. Even though it's hot and humid it's never too windy or stormy. T

We had some extra time so we went to the movies. One more person did later join us in the theater. We saw the new Mary Poppins movie. It was actually pretty good. It is a modern movie theater. Tickets were $3 each. On the weekends they go up to $6 each. In the country there are four Burger King franchises. The food actually taste better then in America I think. Prices are probably about 20% more than in America which makes me wonder how anyone in this country could afford to eat here. At least half of the people we see in the restaurant are foreigners. There are no other fast food franchises in the nation. In the morning everybody water the street. It doesn't matter if it's dirt or pavement. It doesn't matter if you have a hose or just a bucket. We can't figure out the purpose of it. Especially in this country where water is scarce. On Wednesday we had a visit from a cruise ship. We could see the lifeboats actively tendering the passengers to and from the doc

This is a picture of a fluency line in our English class. There are four lines of five students. Two of the lines rotate forward so the students can talk with a different partner each time. Cheryl directs the dialogue from the front and blows a whistle when it's time to rotate The one on the right is an English class student. The other two are from his university class. They were given an assignment to interview us. These are our church brochures. They're all in Bahasa. We give away a lot of them. The English students are very interested. Bahasa is their second language. Now that so many are becoming fluent in English we are trying to get a set to read in English The one on the right is Jeffrey. He's one of our volunteers in English class. The other three are his friends from the University. He brought them by our apartment to introduce them to us and they asked if they could attend our next English class. We are slowly finding the restaurants in the country t

This year we had a Christmas tree. It made our lives seem a little more normal. The two little gifts under the tree are empty. Cheryl just thought we needed some wrapped gifts to make it look better. There's also a small carved manger scene. That was made on a neighboring Island in timor-leste. Last year we didn't put up the tree and it felt terrible. We called our children and my parents on their Christmas Day which was the day after Christmas for us. This Christmas felt so much better. Last Christmas we were only out for 20 days and it felt so lonely and we felt like we would be away for ever. In our church group three of the four adult members are living alone here in Timor-Leste. We had them all over for Christmas dinner. Sitting next to Cheryl is Nikki. She works for the Philippine Embassy. Across from Nikki is Eden. She has three children that are currently living in the Philippines because one of them needs special therapy. She'll be alone until they return th