Tomorrow we celebrate the ascension of Jesus into heaven. Here in Indonesia this day is a hari (day) merah (red). Red days are holidays. So even though this country is predominantly Muslim, they will still make some Christian events into holidays. They do indeed believe that Jesus lived, but they don’t believe that he died. They think that it was actually Judas who died because good people don’t get punished and die and Jesus was, to them, just a really good man, a prophet.
Once a week we meet with the director of the school for an hour and we can ask him any questions that we want. One day he was talking about how perceptions can be so very different from the truth. Before he worked with folks like us, he thought all Americans walked around with guns in holsters and shot at each other just like in the John Wayne movies he liked to watch. Too funny!!
The end of this week marks the end of Unit 7 and on Monday we have our evaluation. Evaluations in the higher units are one hour and we are given a passage from the Bible and told to explain it and the same with an article. This will be really fun as both the Bible and newspapers/magazines often use a slightly different type of language. Oh well, like I’ve said before, evaluations are a mere formality and no one ever fails any unit but unit one. The teachers use the evaluations from unit four up to give us a score. MAF requires that we reach a score of 61 by the time we are done Unit 9. Hugo and I reached the high 50’s at our unit 6 evaluation so we are well on our way.