Photos July 8 Siantar

On Thursday night we decided to be adventurous and have our first meal out without benefit of any assistance. I asked the security guards at the Nommensen gate for a recommendation and they immediately named a small spot nearby. It had the standard chicken-fish-little bitty fish-egg offerings (see pictures from earlier) and we tried some. Hot, hot, hot! Our biggest disappointment was a vegetable offering that we believed would be like tempura. Instead it was smoking hot spicy, to the point you had to mix it with rice to choke it down. But there was plenty of rice so all was good.
This is the classroom where we are doing most of our classes. It is called MENSA, why it is called that we do not know. This is the scene at 10:10 this morning for my presentation on doing Powerpoint, which was scheduled to start at 10. We are continuing to work to understand time here. Students began arriving around 10:30 and continued arriving through 10:45. However, when someone says they will stop by to pick you up at 8, they actually arrive at 8.Proof that someone did show up!The young girl with her head down in the front row is the Dean's daughter, obviously not a big Powerpoint fan. But she is a big Jacob fan!
This is the scene on campus in the late afternoon Thursday. The buildings are situated around a central field, where football (soccer) matches are sometimes held. When we arrived a week ago there was a big match going on. This one seemed to be more of a pickup match. Students sit in the shade up a number of big trees lining the field.

As I understand it this is the high school dorm and high school students are on break. I imagine the college kids are just using the second floor porch as their "sky box" to view the soccer action.
Thursday afternoon Jacob was followed back to our house by the neighborhood young girls and he taught them several songs from the TEC/WOW songbook.


On Thursday we joined many pastors and officials of the HKI church, the Christian Church of Indonesia. This is the headquarters for the denomination. This church is spread further throughout Indonesia than the HKBP church, which is has mainly Batak members. The HKI has over 300,000 members.
We met two seminarians (called "candidate pastors") who are receiving scholarships from the ELCA.Here we are taking to several pastors who are responsible for the social ministry program to encourage organic farming and to manage a palm oil project. It was very interesting to hear of their efforts and we may get the chance to visit several farms in the future.