Wesley is an amazing husband...he gets me fresh flowers every week. These flowers were about a dollar! They are beautiful and they smell amazing! You gotta love living in the tropics

The man in this video rides a bike with a mobile kids ride in the front of the bike. He pedals and "relaxes" while the kids get the ride of their lives!

Taking a Ride in Front of Our House

Our Kampong (neighborhood) celebrated the Indonesia Independence day early because of Ramadan. We had contests, games, and laughed a lot. Here is Hadassah helping prepare for the event by filling plastic bags with water for a water "balloon" toss. I'll write more later on the day's festivities!

Hadassah continues to be a joy! Praise God her health has been great and she has adjusted so wonderfully to her new culture here.  Hadassah is so outgoing and friendly and she is catching on to the language quickly. With that comes great blessing, but also challenges. 

The other day as we were walking, Hadassah saw a group of children playing in the street. She ran as fast as she could up to them, yelling "Permisi, permisi" (excuse me, excuse me) over and over again. The children laughed and ran away from her, which caused Hadassah to run back to us crying, "They didn't permisi me!" 

We comforted her, but later died laughing. I think they thought the little white kid was a little aggressive and it scared them :)! She is learning quickly and now can ask "excuse me, can you play with me?" She's is making lots of friends and loves playing with them! Often we have kids over to play and color.

Here they are checking out each others art work!

We've been here 4 weeks now and although we haven't officially started lanugage school (we start July 9), God provided us with an amazing tutor. She's our neighbor, she's 18 years old, and she's never taught language before...she's PERFECT! Language does have academic features (grammar, formal structure for writing), but it's not often in your daily life that you talk in a written form of speech...formal, perfect grammar, etc. Language is not primarily academic, but cultural. Culture forms language and vice versa. This is why our neighbor is perfect: she's not really teaching us the rules of the game (ie, the "game" of language--we'll learn these when we begin school), but rather she is playing the game with us...and we are learning the rules as we play. Much like you would learn Settlers or Monopoly. Often when you read the rules of a game you are lost, but we often say "watch us play, play yourself and you'll catch on." So we are watching, playing and slowly catching on. 

Here is an example of some playing:)