It’s been a few weeks since we last wrote. We have dried out from the floods and so has the city, although there are still many problems because of it.
We had quite a few leaks in our house with all the rain so we had the landlord come and take a look at everything a couple of weeks ago. We had black mold growing in several spots on our ceilings and walls and our staff had several inches of water in their kitchen and bedrooms after the rain.
Our house was gutted and rebuilt right before we moved in, so the landlord brought the original contractor over so they were both able to talk about what to do and see everything. Now, for the past two weeks several workers have been in our house every day fixing things. I laugh every night when they leave after seeing what they’ve done. It’s really interesting to see what they think will fix the problems. I have no confidence at all that what they did (tearing up our bathroom ceiling, completely taking the tub out of the guest bathroom and then reinstalling it, drilling countless holes, making huge holes in the balcony floors and putting a pipe down to the ground and sealing up cracks) will fix any of the problems. We will see. They just don’t do things very logically here.
We celebrated Grant’s birthday on the 11th. He and Nash had to go to a strings bash at school that day after church and then we came home, opened presents, and had cake. He had a great birthday. A couple of days before, he invited two friends to go rock climbing and to dinner.
Nash has been very busy with the middle school musical, Flapper. He has one of the key parts and they have had rehearsals almost every day after school. The performances are this next week. We are excited to see him perform.
Luke has just finished up a transportation unit at school. During which, he was able to ride in several traditional Indonesian transports: the bajaj, delman, and becak. The school has the drivers come to the parking lot of the school and spend the entire day taking kids around. It’s a great way for the kids to experience it in a safe environment.
They also had bike day. They shut the school parking lot down and the kids ride around for over an hour. They had a blast and were completely wiped out by lunch time. It was a great day.
Mallory is enjoying her swimming lessons and has made a lot of progress recently. She can go under and swim about a meter to the side of the pool then pull herself up and out of the pool. She loves to be in the water and especially loves to jump in. She stands up on the side and tells me to scoot back so she can jump farther.
Mallory has also begun to say her own prayers. I have to try so hard not to crack up. The other night I was putting her to bed and decided to let her say the prayer completely by herself. She started correctly and then began saying, “tank tee for…um…my bruders, tank tee for um…Mommy and Daddy, tank tee for Ann (one of her nursery teachers), for um.( I could tell she was looking around the room) da door, and bed and um my flip flop…’ this went on for some time and I couldn’t stop laughing.
Creed took the kids all up to the school last Saturday to play in the big soccer field and run around the track. Nash and Grant started to run and to his surprise, Mallory was right with them. She ran one whole lap around the track without stopping. I think Creed said she could have gone more. She loves to be with her brothers and has to do everything they do.
This is Creed. One more thing: last Sunday on the way home from church we got in a small car accident. We were driving on one of the many very narrow roads near our house when our driver’s side rear view mirror was hit by an on-coming car. It was interesting to see how this sort of thing is handled in this culture. A lot of people were standing on the side of the roads and saw or heard the impact. Cartim, our driver, pulled over to the side of the road as soon as he could. Before he could stop, though, about 4 or 5 guys ran down the street after the other car to get that car to stop (it continued going another 100 meters or so). We watched out the back of the car window as Cartim ran to catch up with the other car. When Cartim got there, the driver of the other car tried to drive away, but he ended up hitting a motorcycle. There was a bit of a scuffle, during which Cartim punched the other driver, reached his hand in the car, turned off the ignition, and took the keys out of the car in order to control of the situation. After a lot of talking, Cartim and the other driver came back to our car. They looked at the damage to our window, talked some more, and then talked with me. We settled on an amount that the other driver would pay us for the damage: 1 million rupiah (about US $100). Cartim followed the other guy to an ATM for him to withdraw the money from his account. As I said, it was very interesting to see how they handle things like this here. We’re just glad that nobody was hurt from the car accident.
