April 7,
2018
Greetings
from Jakarta, Indonesia.
I greatly
appreciate your prayers and encouragement as I make this journey through
Indonesia. Your emails and notes are a blessing and I look forward to them each
morning. I thought you might enjoy joining with me a bit in the highlights of
this journey, so I plan to write a brief update once each week along the way.
Monday, April 2, started out as a bit
of a shock. After a beautiful Easter Sunday, we woke to snow lightly falling in
Elizabethtown. By the time I began to put my suitcases in the car for the trip
to the airport, we had more than three inches of beautiful white snow
blanketing our cars and neighborhood. Friends at church have often accused me
of knowing when the snow is coming and planning a trip out of the country
before it arrives. I guess I misjudged this one.
The snow did
not delay my departure, and I was in the air headed to Atlanta by 6:10 PM,
Pennsylvania time. After a two-hour flight to Atlanta and a four-hour wait for
the next flight, I was on my way to Seoul, South Korea. Even as a pilot, it is
amazing to me that an airplane can stay in the air that long. This flight was
fourteen hours and forty minutes. Wow. After a twelve-hour wait in the new Seoul
Incheon Airport, I was settled in for the seven-hour flight to Jakarta,
Indonesia - my first stop on this trip. After a one-hour taxi ride, I was very
ready to stop for a bit. Berton, from the Yayasan Suluh office, helped me take
my bags to the apartment they had arranged for me. I really appreciated his
staying up late to meet me, as it was 11 PM Wednesday, Jakarta time, when I
arrived. If you are wondering about, or even working on, counting up the hours,
I’ll help you out. By the time I closed the door on the apartment and headed to
the shower, it had been 44 hours since I walked out the door of our home in
Elizabethtown. It was a good but very long trip. Your prayers carried me
through those miles and I’m thankful for them.
Thursday morning, I was up early… you
know, jet lag. It helped me to get ready for the first day of Security and
Contingency training with the Yayasan Suluh staff. Several of the staff had
previously worked with SIL when SIL had an official presence in Indonesia. Now
they are carrying on the work of Bible translation and language development as
a national organization led by an all Indonesian Board of
Directors and leadership team. I had been talking with their Director, Veni,
for several years, offering to help her and her staff with this training. The
timing of this trip worked out to be just right this time.
The first half of Thursday, all of
the Yayasan Suluh staff met together to work on personal safety and security
training. This included six members who are working on a Scripture translation
into one of the Indonesian sign languages. Just imagine, twenty people in a
rather small room, six are hearing impaired and many are limited in their
understanding of English. I had Petrus sitting next to me to translate what I
was saying into Bahasa Indonesian, while another person was translating what I,
or Petrus, was saying into sign language for the six hearing impaired members.
Petrus was also translating comments and discussions from Bahasa Indonesia into
English so I could keep up with what was being said. As one of the hearing
impaired folks “said”, “Please speak slowly”. I got the message.
We had a
great time that morning, and after a very nice lunch, we continued the training
with the Yayasan Suluh leadership team. The eight of us worked on the
principles of risk assessment and contingency planning, then began working on a
real risk assessment for the Jakarta office and neighborhood. That took us
through the end of Thursday. By that time, jet lag was catching up with me and
I was very much in need of some rest.
Friday began
with a nicely packaged breakfast of rice, noodles, chicken, and a few things
I’m not sure of, but very delicious, all wrapped in a fresh banana leaf. A very
nice touch of the tropics.
The
leadership team and I continued working on the risk assessment we had begun
Thursday, and settled on twenty-seven items that need attention. This was also
a very good time to talk through not only how to do this assessment, but what
they can do to care for these issues they identified. After another very nice
lunch (are you getting the impression this all revolves around really good
food?), we began working on the contingency planning process. The Chairman of
the Board for Yayasan Suluh joined us for this session, and we had very good discussions
and interactions among the whole team. Several times the discussion went on for
quite a while till someone in the group realized I had no idea what they were
saying, so they stopped and filled me in, in English. It was great to see them
so fully engaged and working together on this task.
Our time finished with a group
picture to remember the days together. It has been a great blessing to be with
them. The work with Veni and Yayasan Suluh is far from finished, and I’ll be
working with them from my office in Elizabethtown via Internet calls and email.
I’m looking forward to that.
Today I’m
back to emails, finishing documents from the past two days of training, and
preparing for the flight to Bali tomorrow morning. Next stop is the conference
of leaders from Asia and the Pacific. About 130 of us in all. I look forward to
bringing you a bit of that story next week.
Blessings,
Al
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