Thursday, July 21 - Today is our last day of ministry since we plan to debrief Friday and Saturday (there are 38 of us plus Aaron Poli who has been with us the last week) so it will take a long time. Sunday, we are singing at 2 churches and have our Indonesian Home Concert for the parents and friends of our Indo-Vision team. We have also invited the bus driver to bring his family over as well as various people we have met (like Ibu Etna) so we are hoping to get something like 100 people for our Home Concert. Slim is busy putting together a video to show so she looked really sleepy today. Anyway, we loaded up the bus (38 of us - only Fanny was missing) to go to the juvenille prison located reasonably close to Karawachi Lippo Village where we are staying. For once we got there a half hour early, met up with Ibu Etna and a couple of her coworkers but we had to wait over an hour before they would start processing the girls (this is a boy's prison). Another half an hour passed and then all the girls came out. It seems our paper work for permission to enter the prison did not pass the desk of some higher official in the prison system so he said only 5 of us were allowed into the prison. This was a disappointment for 33 of us but we selected Pastor Ben, and 4 Indo-Vision members to go in, soprano Holy, alto Yosi, tenor Andrew, and bass Ronald. The rest of us prayed for them and empowered them to be our ambassadors. This prison used to hold over 100 (Christian) inmates - remember that M prisoners are segregated from the Christian ones - but we were told there were only a dozen inmates left there, the rest having been released for good behavior or completed their prison sentences. We went back to sit in the bus and pray more for these 5 who went in at 10:30. Almost 2 long hours later, they came back. During debriefing time, we found out that 6 more prisoners had just been released, one was in a cell, so only 5 prisoners were there for our 5 team members. Clearly, God has a sense of humor and was teaching us some valuable lessons in humility. We heard that 4 of these young men were in for rape, one also committed rape and murder, and one accused by the parents of a girl who wanted to run away from home and the boy was accused of kidnapping. Several prisoners testified that they have repented of their crimes and thankful that God has disciplined them to bring them back to God. One was a worship leader before falling away from God and finding Him again in prison.
We then returned to our dorm, eating lunch on the way. After a few minutes to rest, we asked the team that went to the prison to share what they learned and had our small group daily devotions. We then divided up the guys from the girls and spent about an hour discussing the museum next to Stephen Tong's church which expanded to how we are to use our resources best for God as well as practical issues of dating and flirting. We then drove to the radio station where we spent about 3 hours recording our singing. This combined group of 33 singers is one of the larger Vision groups and sings very well so we wanted to do some recording while we still had a chance to do that. During break, we ate our box lunch dinner and in the 3 plus hours, recorded all 21 of our songs. We returned to our dorm around 9 PM, had a snack that Fanny bought for us before going to bed. We start our debriefing tomorrow.
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