Road to Indonesia---Mission Trip 2 (and Quarantine)

 The students are home from the 2 week mission trip.  They report very good things. I will hear more as we get back into school next week. However, as the students arrived back and headed out with their parents to home, they were given an announcement: the director of our school has covid.  Much of the office staff is unwell too and they are being tested.  The office is closed for a while. (How do you run a school without an office?) And the director and wife are in quarantine, but his one daughter who was on  the mission trip has not had contact with family for 2 weeks, so she is moving into the dorm for right now so she can go to school, etc. The director has been over at the principal's house, interviewing prospective teachers on Zoom for next year. This means that the principal who is at home still waiting for her fractured pelvis to heal and her family are also quarantined.  The director of maintanence also has covid, and apparently he is sicker,than the school director. School will continue to meet unless another major group of us are infected.  Quarantining here is usually only about a week. (The farewell for the sick kindergarten teacher is canceled for tonight. We are losing staff like flies.)

We heard the news on our way home on Friday.  It was unclear how long people had known the director had covid. (I worried that everyone had known for a week ???) I have said before that I have spent most of my adult life wondeirng where I am suppose to be when. It is difficult to get info that everyone else seems to know when you are new in a community and do not speak the language. We also still do not have a phone! Much of the info from school come

s through What'sApp, but they also usually remember to send out emails.  They are still working on getting our Chinese phone registered so we can use that. We could go out and buy an Indonesian phone, but can't figure out why we should when we have a nice Chinese phone that we will never use again otherwise, so we have not pushed for it.  A major piece for us, of course, is that we are quite happy without a phone.  It is an inconvenience for others to contact us, but no inconvenience for us not to be bothered with a phone. I know most of you cannot understand our contentment in this regard.....and others of you are jealous of the absence of a phone in our life. Again, put it in context.  In the early 80's we lived at a very rural college in Zambia. The phone number for the one phone on campus was "6"....one digit. Even when we have had a cell phone, we just have one phone for the 2 of us. Consider that. 

Covid really is not very present here.  And no one seems to be very sick with it. The medical facilities, such as they are, are not overwhelmed. We are not hearing about many cases, etc. But please pray for the entire situation.  Schedules for next week are still very much up in the air.