The Trapani's in Timor Leste

Beautiful Skies here. It's great to live where there is no smog. He visited church last week. I forgot his name. He works for the US government and was here to facilitate some sort of personnel change. He was here for only a couple days. How we found out about the church was that he saw a picture of the Hong Kong Temple in Eden's laundry drop off service. This is Nikki one of the members of our group. We take her out to dinner usually when we go to home teach her. She is single and doesn't get out much. She works at the Filipino Embassy Edin is  another one of our members. She came over to our house for dinner on Sunday. She is a very resourceful woman. She has a cleaning service, laundry service and a party planning business. She recently sent her three young children to live with their grandparents in the Philippines so they could get better education and for one speech therapy. The kids are very active so we never had them over when they were all here toget...

This is the crocodile. Starting at the left with the nose, head, neck, then the back. Many years ago a small crocodile lived in a swamp in a far away place. He dreamed of becoming a big crocodile but food was scarce so he decided to go out to the open sea to find food. He was too weak to make it and was very near death when a small boy came along and took pity on him and carried him out to the sea. The crocodile instantly revived and said, "Little boy, you have saved my life. If I can ever help you in any way, please call me and I will be at your command. " A few years later the boy called the crocodile,  who now was very big and strong, and asked him if he would help him see the world. The crocodile told the boy to climb onto his back and he would take him wherever he wanted. The boy told the crocodile to follow the sun. After traveling for many years, one day the crocodile said to the boy, "Brother,  we have traveled for a long time. But now the time has c...

On our way to English class we saw this banner and Gathering of youth. The man in the picture is Robert baden-powell the founder of the Boy Scouts. The Insignia is a combination of the Boy Scout insignia and symbols from the Catholic Church. They were having some sort of gathering and they were staying overnight in tents. All of the participants had either a scout shirt or at least a scout neckerchief. This field is in town it's surrounded by businesses and houses. You can see in this picture a young man filling up water containers. I think that is the only running water for the whole area. I have no idea what they're doing for bathrooms. In the picture you can see that there are two girls camping also. Apparently the scouts here have welcomed girls much earlier than the ones in the United States. This he is a remarkable sight in that they seem to have a lot of The Scouting equipment which for most people would be very expensive. The sign says they're going to ...

3 years ago this month Elder Holland and Elder Gong visited Timor-Leste and dedicated the land for the preaching of the Gospel. The date was August 21st, 2015. Elder Holland This is a group that attended the dedication. Included are our humanitarian missionary predecessors It's over 400 steps up to the dedication area. It's impressive they kept their suit coats on. This is the statue of Christ that's at the top of the area where the land was dedicated. The statue is modeled after the one in Brazil. It was created by the Indonesians during the occupation and visited by the Pope. Here is a view of the beach below the dedication area Our new Mission president and his wife, Elder MacKay visited us this week. It was his first trip here to the island. We took him and his wife to visit the dedication site. There is still no word on when full-time process lighting missionaries will be sent here. This is our Sunday school class. We had better better ...

A cruise ship came into the port on Saturday. It was from P&O Cruise Line it is going from Brisbane Australia to Singapore on a 15-day Cruise. Our taxi driver was very excited because it brings in a lot of tourists that will pay higher taxi fares. I remember when I used to be a cruise ship passenger and visit third world cities. I would always wonder what's it like to stay in a city like that for more than a few hours. When we left for church on Sunday morning the ship was gone. This is our walk back from or restaurant to our apartment. There was a wildfire in the hills. This is the view from our apartment. There are no wildfire fighting capabilities here on the island so it just burns. The fire must have just put itself out because it didn't spread any more than the picture. We went and visited a Village Garden that we helped to finance. The netting over the small Keyhole Garden is to keep the chickens out. After our visit we had to walk about a half a ...

 Every morning fisherman go out in these small boats and fish with nets.  Usually it's one person to a boat. Most don't have motors. The boats are usually made from hollowed-out trees. After their catch they bring it on shore and they are sold on the sidewalk around the ocean. It cost a dollar for a fish for about a 12in long fish. Usually on the way home from work cars and motorcycles will stop and buy a fish or  two. Sometimes they hang them on the outside antennas so the fish smell doesn't get into the car. The fish that don't sell that day are then salted and dried and then sold later. About 3 miles outside of Dili is a banana plantation. This lady is bringing some of the bananas to Market.  The bananas here come in all shapes, colors, variety and sizes. They seem to have everything but the type of bananas we eat in America. None of them are very pretty. Most have bruises on them. Most of the rural Farms have very interesting fences. Because of cos...

This is what the main river that goes through town looks like now that it's winter time. Rain has stopped. That is a huge problem for the farmers because there is no water storage on the island and very few lakes. The villagers call this this season of hunger. This is the same river in the summer rainy season. Crops grow much better than winter time. One of the problems is the rain comes down so fast it erodes away or floods everything. It never just sprinkles here. This is the 1/2 mile walk from the Australian restaurant back to our apartment. The weather has been surprisingly mild in the late afternoons and in the mornings. It's been a great surprise. On the right is John. He is a member of the church. He is in the Navy. He is here to help make arrangements for a a medical humanitarian Navy boat to visit the island. Next to him is Daniel his coworker who he invited to come with him to church. Daniel is also here on the same mission. They both currently live ...

Providing assistance to rural Villages that has beneficial lasting effects is extremely difficult. Much money has been spent and wasted on projects that have good intentions but no results. Charity organizations have gotten very clever in recent years in diagnosing impediments to success and implementing programs that have a much higher chance of success. In this program we funded a project that created gardens, reduced domestic violence, and created a rural banking systems. The banking system was needed because there are no banks in the rural areas and what banks there are in the city have such high service fees that it eats up almost all of the modest savings that rural people put their. This program created 50 rural Banks that use boxes such as this. Each box has three locks and is kept at the house of a fourth member of the village that doesn't have access to the locks. Villagers agree to the rules of banking and of distribution. Its benefit is that it allows the villager...