Finally, Ramadan is over!  For the past 30 days, most of our friends have been fasting from sunrise to sunset.  During the fasting month they are not allowed to eat or drink during daylight hours.  Places like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut hung curtains in their windows so that no one could see in the restaurant and see who was not fasting.  The “holy month” ended last Saturday with a big holiday called Idul Fitri.  During this holiday most people go back to their home villages to ask for forgiveness from their friends and family.  It is crazy how a city of over 4 million people can look like a ghost town!  It’s actually quite nice because everything is much slower around here and there is hardly any traffic at all!   

 We also went to a village for Idul Fitri.  We went to the eastern tip of our island with an engaged couple we know, A&N.  We were gone from Thursday until Saturday.  We had a great time living with a family for a few days, even though the whole experience was a bit stressful.  We also had to endure some pretty strange food.  The people were extremely friendly and made us feel very welcome inside their home.  We also got to play at the beach and go parasailing!  We are very excited about the relationship that we have with this couple and we pray that The Father would continue to give us opportunities to share The Truth with them.             

 

 The main day of Idul Fitri was very exhausting for us.  We woke up, ate breakfast, and then spent the next 5 or 6 hours going from house to house to visit all of their relatives.  With each stop we were forced to eat more food, shake more hands, and explain that we are English teachers in the city.  We definitely got to practice our language skills!  After that was all over, we packed up and rode in our friends’ car for the 6 ½ trip home.  We are still recovering from our trip!  

               

 Roger has been doing a guys movie club with David, a single guy on our team and Courtney has been doing a girls movie club with Jessica, the girl who we came to the Island with back in January.  The clubs are still drawing a good number of people; pray that we will continue to attract people to come and that we will be able to share good news during these times. 

 

Finally, please pray for us and our team.  Sometime early in 2008, our supervisor will be moving to another island to start a new work.  This will definitely mean that there will be a time of transition within our team.  For us this means that we will be taking on some new responsibilities at our English center.  We met with our supervisor about the responsibilities and it was a pretty good long list.  Pray that God would give us the ability to handle this task and that he would guide the team as we lose the strong leadership of our supervisor. 

 

Praises

• Roger’s back is better! He completed a round of physical therapy and has not had any other problems.
• We met a new (almost) married couple, A&N, and we went to Banyuwangi with them
• We were able to share our testimonies (in the Island language) with one of our language teachers

 

Prayer Requests

• Pray for opportunities for us to share with A&N
• Pray for a smooth transition at our English center as we take on new responsibilities
• Pray for Courtney’s mom and dad, her dad has been sick and in the hospital recently
• Pray for us to remain patient and cool! It has been getting hotter and hotter in our city and will not be cooling off for another month, we are getting to the part of the year where even an air conditioner does little to cool off a room.