New guitar

 During the mission presidents visit here two months ago Januario  asked him if he knew how much guitars cost in Indonesia. He is interested in buying a new one. The prices in Indonesian are substantially less than in timor-leste. During this last visit president Mackay brought him a guitar as a gift. Of course Januario was very grateful and appreciative.

It is difficult mixing the American culture and the Timorese culture together because of the vast differences in wealth. An American salary would be 10 to 20 times more than a Timorese salary with the same skills.  There is a natural tendency to want to buy them stuff because they have so little and you have so much.


 This is my mission president, president Mackay. He is a marathon runner. He has run about 20 of them. Whenever he comes out we go for a run together. He usually is stuck running in Jakarta Indonesia with the air pollution in the traffic. He loves it here. This was an 11 mile run up the river bed
 This is Saul. We met him running one day. It's hard to tell from the picture but Saul's left-arm is missing. It was the result of an accident. His English is pretty good. He comes to our English class to help out sometimes. On this day he came over to our apartment so that we could help him prepare for his scholarship interview. He is applying for a full-ride scholarship to Australia. In order to get this he has to pass several exams and oral interviews. He came over the day before his oral interview to practice. He will know in a few more days whether or not he has qualified.
Almost every Friday evening we visit Januario and his family so that they can receive a gospel lesson from the missionaries in Indonesia.  This is them saying goodbye at about 6:45. We walked for about a mile to get home. It is on a long paved road full of small markets, taxi cabs, buses and a lot of people. All of the people are real friendly and are glad when we greet them.

Once again she fed us dinner before we left. She has gotten very clever about only serving food that we will eat. It was actually pretty good. Our favorite is the cut up fruit inside of sweetened condensed milk.

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