We're still here!!

For those of you who are avid readers of our blog (Aunt Frieda….) and have been wondering where we are, we are still around. The flu bug has hit our family pretty hard. Not just our family but also our pembantu’s. They still came in today as they were feeling better, but had been sick the night before. The only ones to escape the wrath of this flu bug so far, are Hugo, Brynne and Aidan. The rest of us are slowly on the mend.
Unfortunately this means that we will miss the open house at the kid’s school today.
Tonight an Evangelist and, I think, an elder from the GKI church are coming to visit us. We are thankful that they have embraced us and are being so welcoming to us. In fact the Evangelist, named Eric, talked with the manager of the apartment/conference building where the church meets about getting us a pass to use the pool there. He was willing to make an exception for our family as normally only tenants of the building can use the pool. Yippee!! Some of the other pools here aren’t always so clean…
We have hired a tutor named Ibu Nining. She is coming every day for two hours to help us get up to speed with our bahasa Indonesia. She lives just down the hill from us in the middle of a rice field. In fact she was born on this very hill and has lived here her entire life. So she finds us rather fascinating as Hugo is from Holland, I am from Canada and Marc was born in Papua. I’m fascinated that someone could live in the same place their entire life!! I also told her that on Sunday when I walked by her house, it was the first time in my life walking through a rice field! This she found kind of funny of course.
As we are attaining more language we are better able to understand the questions that people ask us. Here it is very normal to ask someone where they are going. Not that you expect a specific answer, it’s just a greeting like we would say, “Hey, what’s up?” So we have learned just to say “jalan-jalan.” This means “traveling”. It is also very normal here for people to ask you how old you are. They are also very curious about how much things in Canada cost. I just tell them that everything is “mahal.” Expensive. Most things here are really quite cheap. A lot of the time that means cheaply made too… People also express surprise that we have five children and that some of them are really quite large. Marc is the same size as the almost five year old who lives beside us .
These are photos of the kids school. The photo on the right shows the "gym" area with the classroom doors to the right.