Road to Indonesia--- SuperBowl and Beggars

 Monday was Superbowl Sunday here. Everything is 10 hours later.  Kind of messes things up a bit.  The director of the school took a half holiday and stayed home and had a get together to watch it at his house at 8:30 in the morning.  Those who did not work at steady jobs could go watch it.  I considered putting my laptop in the corner of the classroom and running it obscurely while I taught, but decided that probably would not work.  So instead we watched it recorded on Monday night.  The director had it recorded and came over and set it up on our tv.....without telling us who had won. The grade 3 teacher, who had gifted us the helmets, and we were the ones who wanted to see it, and we had posted around saying anyone who wanted to come, please do.  Only the friends who take us to the market on Saturday and she came. For the best. I was a little concerned about the warnings about not getting together in groups, and I did not want to ignore that, but it was only 3 people and they are people we regularly are with. It also had become more important not to do too much in the way of meeting. On Sunday we were told that a grade 5 girl with parents who work for Mission Aviation Fellowship had contracted covid. That meant that grade 5 students and families and MAF families are all on quarantine for a week.  We are half way through that and will see what happens. Although the school has had a few cases, the week quarantine for the grade level has not resulted in any new cases and things have continued as usual afterwards. There are no reports that I am seeing about spread of the new variant. Always a juggling game, but exponentially fewer cases here and although we are reasonably careful about masks and distancing, it is not really observed too closely.

Then Tuesday we went for our first massage here. It was such a wonderful treat in China to do this every week.  Here it is even cheaper, if we go between 10 to 5 during weekdays.  Our friends who take us to market drove us. They go regularly.  As we were walking into the building, a lady who seemingly had mental health issues followed us in. She came up to me and started to talk.  I certainly had no idea what she wanted, but assumed she was begging.  I put my arm around her and said in my best faltering Indonesian what I think was "No, thank you, No, thank you." and lead her back outside. She accepted that and went on her way. I suddenly realized that I had not seen a single beggar since being here. That is pretty remarkable! One sees more people standing on streetcorners asking for money in the US.  It is particularly unbelievable because this is supposedly a Muslim country. One of the five pillars of Islam is that one needs to give alms every day.  Senegal was one of the few places we regularly gave to beggars.  They truly did need it, but it also would have been very bad for our testimony as being any sort of decent human being if we had not.  So how does Papua meet the needs for daily alms giving? I have not found the answer yet. I will keep asking.  Oh, and the massage was wonderful and only $10 each for 2 hours worth of massage. Oh, and the maid came and cleaned the house and did the laundry on Tuesday. So it was an expensive day: $30 all together.