Russell and Eileen's Church Missions: THE LORD'S HANDS/HELP FROM HONG KONG

It has been said that often God answers our prayers through the kind acts of others. Sometimes he even sees fit to help us with things we have not yet expressed through prayer. Since we have arrived in Indonesia we have struggled with dealing with a large number of active humanitarian projects, and other assignments given to us. At times it has been quite overwhelming. It was with mixed feelings that we learned that our supervisors from Hong Kong were coming to visit us for 6 days to train us. We felt like we desperately needed the time to catch up. We had been traveling outside of the office for 2 weeks, including a period of 9 nights in 7 different beds prior to their arrival. We assumed the polite thing to do was to invite them over for dinner on Mother's Day after church. This was the first time I (Eileen) haven't been with my children on Mother's day for over 30 years. Russell usually cooks dinner and it is my day off. As it turned out the Meehan's were enjoyable to be with and an answer to our prayers, expressed and unexpressed.

For most of Sunday afternoon and Monday rather than sticking with their scheduled training, the Meehans (our supervisor's from Hong Kong), spent the time answering our questions, which made us feel that they were more concerned with our needs than their agenda. We were asked the first week we were here to teach at youth conference in June about the dangers of pornography. This has been a great stress to both of us, as it would be a difficult topic to teach in English, but to teach in a foreign language was beyond our comprehension. Neither of us have worked with Young Men or Young Women other than raising our own children. Last Sunday, shortly after the Meehans arrived, Russell was approached by one of the youth leaders with an agenda for the conference. Russell's ability to read Indonesian may not be the best, but it was good enough to realize that the two of us weren't teaching the class on combating pornography together, it would just be him. I (Eileen) would be teaching a class on first aid for an hour to the young women, while he taught the young men and then we would swap audiences and repeat the hour long presentation. This was a huge surprise to both of us. Although he remained calm outwardly, I know Russell well enough that I could see the panic in his eyes. I was relieved to be speaking on a topic that was very familiar to me.

When we met the Meehans Sunday afternoon we mentioned our concerns. Elder Meehan made some suggestions regarding a presentation and told Russell that if Russell could come up with the content he could help prepare a powerpoint presentation. It turns out that Elder Meehan is a computer whiz. While he helped Russell make up the presentation, Sister Meehan and I were surfing the web as fast as we could trying to find resources to use. During the process of preparing the content for this presentation, I found a website regarding combating pornography. The site is www.fightthenewdrug.org. I would recommend the site to anyone that needs to teach youth about the evils of pornography.

During the week we took Elder and Sister Meehan on two visits to potential humanitarian project partners. The first was with NU (an Indonesian Islamic group with 70 million members which focuses on health issues). We also visited with a women's group in Bogor that is proposing a cleft lip/cleft palate project. The mountains near Bogor are the site of the recent plane crash, a Russian made jet liner, that killed a number of people while on a demonstration flight. We are not sure how this will affect sales of the plane but it can't be good for business. We tried to get pictures of the mountains behind Bogor but due to the heavy rain, they didn't turn out so we will show some that others have taken. If you are interested in reading the Meehan's blog for this week it is called Hooray for the Healys. The link is at www.meehansinchina.blogspot.com

Since coming back from Central Java Russell started eating at the warungs again (like he did 36 years ago). These are small stalls that sell food. I am not really interested in eating there but don't mind looking. This particular warung that we have pictures of is near the mission office. The acronym for it's name is BYU. Two sister missionaries arrived from the MTC this week. The new red headed sister missionary got a lot of stares as we walked up the street together. In fact two guys on a motorcycle slowed down and just kept staring at her while they were driving. I guess there aren't many redheads here! Fortunately there weren't many cars on the road Thursday and so there wasn't an accident.

Site of plane crash

This past Thursday and Friday were holidays. Thursday celebrated Jesus' ascension into heaven. It was amazing how empty the roads were. On Wednesday night the cab ride from the office home took 70 minutes. On Thursday morning it took less than 10 minutes to get to our office. We kind of wish all days could be holidays.