Elder James in Indonesia: Bandung Week 11

Hello!

This past week was really great. We stayed quite busy and were able to see the progression of the work here. Elder Mangum will be transferring to Solo this week, so he is doing the best he can here before moving. We were also able to have some fun experiences, and some funny ones as well. Here are a few notable things that happened.

To start off, the Zone Leaders were able to visit us in Bandung this past week, and we had a great time with all of them. While we were messing around at the house, Elder Johnson fell into our standing fan, breaking it. The next day, we tried to attach the top part to the wall with tape. We used a whole roll of tape, but it only stayed on for about 7 hours. It fell down at 5:30am, waking us up and scaring us to death!

We bought rope and attached the fan to the wall with nails. It has stayed up since then, and I hope it will stay that way.

We were able to visit Thomas in Sukabumi, and also got to teach his wife. She has made a lot of progress, and is learning more each time we go there. At first, she did not really want to learn, but now she is close with us, and very enthusiastic. We are focusing on his family, so that they can be baptized all together. I hope they will be able to come to church soon, since it will help them so much.

After more than a month of planning for, and inviting people to our Bible class, we held it on Saturday. We planned on many people coming, since we invited all the members, and asked them to bring their friends. We also invited all our investigators, and anyone that we thought would be interested. We decorated the room in the church really well, and had some great lessons planned.

When the time came for it to start, nobody showed up. One guy eventually came later on, but he just wanted to debate with us. We didn't even get to teach the lessons we had prepared.

Our investigator, Laurent, has been making some amazing progress. He came to church yesterday, which was the first time an investigator has come to the church in Bandung for almost a year. The members were great with him, and he felt right at home. We taught him about the word of wisdom, which he accepted right away. He has a date to be baptized on the 15th of June. He is amazing! I am so glad that I contacted him on the train, and gave him our number, or all this would have never happened. It is so important for Missionaries to always talk to everyone.

Elder and Sister Lucherini came to Bandung this week, and they invited us to go to Kawa Putih, a Volcano/crater lake near Bandung. It was a lot of fun, and a really pretty drive. The crater smelled really bad, but it was very interesting. The water was really green, and smoke was coming up from random places. I am so grateful that they invited us there.