Tangerang is great so far! I am enjoying my time with Elder Green. It is so different from Solo though... It is so huge! We have to ride bikes for about 20-30 minutes to get to the church and we have to ride about 15 minutes in the other direction to get to the edge of our proselyting area. It's way big. It's also very metropolitan, and very hot, with lots of rich people. Our first day we rode around so much I was so exhausted! I got used to Solo where everything is close and so I wasn't ready for the bigness of here :)
Ramadan just ended so now people are starting to come back home and school for the kids will start up again later this week. We had a hard time teaching people the last few days because none of our good investigators were at home--they all went to different parts of Jawa to visit their families. Idul Fitri was a crazy party festival time, there were tons of fireworks and lots of people. One funny story: we were trying to find the house of this referral and we couldn't find it. So we decided to ask this guy for directions. It was a Muslim guy with his wife and a few other adults and they were in front of the gate of their rather large mansion. We ask him where "Jalan Lestari" is at and he starts trying to explain it in English, which he did a surprisingly good job at but which still felt a little bit like talking to a chicken. We encouraged him to simply use his native tongue because we are actually able to speak Indonesian despite the color of our skin. As he began to explain again, a ton of people started coming out of his house. They were having an extended family get together for Idul Fitri and now people were piling into cars to go home or maybe continue onward. But when they saw two white guys at the gate, we got assailed with requests for photos and a few young women desired to take selfies with Elder Green and myself. We felt like celebrities. We relished in the experience, invited them to come to our English class and add us on Facebook, and then continued onward. Turned out his directions were faulty and he led us in the wrong direction, but we ended up finding the referral anyways by total chance :) Pretty cool.
Also I got to meet the families in this ward! This is the best ward I have ever served in. The WML set up a day later this week when we will split with the Priests from the ward. In the youth class (which we were invited to attend) nobody was on their phones and everyone paid attention. In elders quorum we had a discussion and everyone was listening and we actually studied from the book and there was no false doctrine taught. Church was a miracle :)
Elder Green has really good language skills and he keeps teaching me new words which is super nice :) He's been learnin' me the ropes of being a ZL (zone leader). Later today we will go to Bogor and go on splits there with the DL Elder Anderson. I am so excited because Bogor was my first area so I get to see it again and maybe visit some of the investigators or members that I knew from before. It will be so much fun :)
As for the answers to your questions, Mom:
It feels sooo weird to be an "old" missionary. But kind of cool at the same time. Elder Green is in fact my first English-speaking companion. And it is super weird because in our house we are all native English speakers. It feels like the Best Two Years or something because we are all white and all speak English. The other two elders in our house are named Elder Wills and Elder Lovelock. Elder Lovelock is new and he is from australia. Elder Wills goes home in December and he is from the same mtc group as Elder Green. I like them both a ton so far :)
On Facebook, we try to teach people and see if they are interested in having the missionaries come to their home or not. It's pretty cool and we can talk to people who maybe wouldn't feel comfortable meeting in person but are cool to talk on fb first. To use it we have to find a warnet first and then email from there (we don't get a cool device...). Which reminds me of a funny story: this week the main 2 warnets that we use are not open because the owners are out of town for idul fitri. So we ended up using this gaming warnet that has what feels like literally hundreds of screaming children and violent video games going on all around us. When we report stats for the zone, we do it on the computer so we had to go there to do stats. So, we called all the DL's and we were trying to talk to them and get their stats from through the appalling din of gunshots and screams and loud music haha. To top it all off, our phone didn't have good service from where we were in the warnet so the calls kept dropping and we had to call them back over and over :) Haha my first day of reporting stats was the worst! But a funny experience :)
Yes, I was companions with Elder Arthur for a mere two weeks. But still companions, count my lucky stars :)
That's exciting to hear about the temple, Im glad to hear from all of you! Love you so much momma!!!
Elder Paskett
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