Our new mission! Hint- just add "ones" in the middle

 We're changing up our regularly scheduled blog to bring you some confirmed news. Did the hint help at all?  Well, no matter. It is official now with a Zoom call from Elder Kelly Johnson from the Asian Area Presidency. When our Indian visa expires on March 20th, we will spend the last 6 months of our mission in the...

     IndONESia Jakarta mission!!! In 6 more weeks we will be all-in-in Indonesia where we will serve as MLS (member/leader support) missionaries. We feel so very blessed that the Lord has given us yet another opportunity to fall in love with a new part of the world and a whole new set of people. If you think about our one year time in India being split into two halves with our YSA mission in Coimbatore and our office assignment in Bengaluru, and then include the 5 months spent in Church Headquarters at the Familysearch Library, we really will have 4 distinct mission experiences. We never expected to have the 4for1 mission special but we've always said we love variety and we love diversity! We know our time is short in India so we want to maximize our efforts here before we leave and really hope to hit the ground running as seasoned missionaries in a brand new country to maximize the relatively short time we'll have there too. It will be overwhelming at first like India was, I'm sure, but we can trust our Heavenly Father that he'll lead us by the hand in all new situations just as he has all along the way so we won't go with fear, only with immense gratitude and some curious delight. 

Though it's only Thursday, I'll make this our blog entry for this week since we have plans to go to Cubbon Park on P-day this Saturday that will take up a big chunk of the time I normally write. I'll make next week's extra long. Oh goody. 

The big event of the week was Elder Dunlap's 67th birthday! We started out with the idea of taking our co-worker Micheal to lunch with us since he's the only one who knows where we can get Mundi in Bengaluru. He's the current mission assistant but has been offered a new position as the Media Something Something Director for the church for all of India, so we wanted to celebrate that as well. But President Bushi came into the office and he caught wind of our plan and then he invited himself and the APs along and two other full-time employees and suddenly we had ourselves a party at Barkaas! His treat! 

The caravan's all here!

Trough for 4 

We had Mundi on Tuesday, then a sundae!

The birthday boy

Rockin' the Casbah

Wood you like to join us too?

The AP elders joined us again for late evening cake and ice cream at our apartment to finish the day. I think he felt duly celebrated. Everybody, including me, loves Elder Dunlap! 

It seems like for the last few Sundays we've had at least one foreign visitor a week at church and this week was no exception. Makenzie works for Amazon and she was in India for her work.  We invited her and Joel, our new friend, over to have Sunday dinner with us. This has become a treasured practice. Because we try to not go out to dinner as part of honoring the Sabbath, our guests seem to be glad for a home cooked meal, as simple as they usually are. We don't get many visitors to our home either so we love the company. 

     Come one, come all to the Dunlap Diner

You may have noticed my chopped off hair. It may surprise you to hear that for all our time in India, I'd never as yet gone to a "saloon". (Not a typo, that's what they call them here.) Nor did I ever go to a "salon" in SLC.  The reason is because I hate them. I've whacked at my own hair for over a year now partly because they never ever cut my hair the way I ask them to. I always just ask them for a tiny trim to fix my blatant mistakes but they disregard my requests and it's always the same. I take pictures of Lady Di and get Jamie Lee Curtis. Suddenly I'm all ears and chin. The problem with very short hair is it doesn't grow out well and so you need to keep cutting it short. Aha, now they've got you as a return customer! Dag nab it! But they aren't going to be seeing me again in this country. Now don't feel you need to tell me how much you like it. I've heard it all before and it doesn't help. I know what I had before was horrible too and was not actually a style but fair warning, I'm getting really close to being a weird old lady who wears a wig. End of rant. 

While we were at the mall having my wishes dismissed again, we saw something surprising that made all my dreams come true. A wall of happyness. A place where you can drop off your clothes you've outgrown or are tired of and if you want you can take something you need. In a mall. I love it. 

This is the closest thing to a thrift store in India.

I could end with photos and videos of our grandsons or our missionaries ( I'll save that for next time maybe?!) But instead I'll share an un-mission related incident that happened to us this week. Out of the blue one morning I got a WhatsApp from someone named Solange asking how I am. I'm racking my brain, without a picture, I was clueless. Someone we met in Coimbatore? She was talking about her 3 brothers and her mom. Then she sent a picture and it all came back. This was the Rwandan family we knew back in Sandy probably a decade ago. The boys were in elementary and jr high when they first came to America. Her mom spoke no English so we'd sing Rwandan spirituals in the car on the way to her job to fill the awkward silence. Now she reports her mom has a driver's license, speaks English, and the boys are all working and in college. 

                  Alivera looking like an angel

                 They've all matured just a tad! 

                          Lovely Solange

This just made me cry with joy to see this family, who in the beginning were refugees with nothing but an empty apartment, who thought a dishwasher was a storage closet. Now look at them all! If I had a bucket list, (which I don't) I'd like to have a friend from every nation. I'd like to teach them all about our Heavenly Father's love for them and his great  Plan of Happyness for all of his children. I'd like to be united with them in our faith in the God of Heaven who created our spirits, and his Son, our Savior who died to save us all. So now we get to add Indonesia, a Muslim nation, to where we will go to spread the good news of the restored gospel and the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. I never knew that, I would've supposed Indonesia was Buddhist. Nope, that was my Korean mission. And now Hindu in India. And next Muslim. Is there some divine plan to all of this? It sure feels like it to me! Well,  I gotta go, its time to learn some Bahasa. 

"He gave some apostles and some prophets...for the perfecting of the saints,,, for the work of the ministry...till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God"

Ephesians 4: 11-13

"One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all."

4: 5-6