Ian got invited to speak on a panel to educators about Christian education in the US.

Youth camp we attended. All the young people come and build their own stall/booths in which they live. Jonanthan spoke to them and we sat and listened for about 3 hours!! These young people are patient listeners!

The layout of a Torajan village

Effigies for the dead are placed outside the mausoleum or cave.

The bottom of the rice barns, used for enetertaining, eating, picnicing, which we did, and also for just sitting and contemplating life!!

Note the buffalo horns on the front of the house. It is a marker of family members who have died in that house. This is known as "The Culture of Death". The dead body may be preserved and live with the family for up to about 10 years. This is done because the whole clan must agree how to bury the body. It is a really expensive cermony involving many rituals and until there is enough money( the unit of exchange is buffalo), the body must be kept in the house. They spend more time caring for the dead and the funerals in this culture, that not enough money or time is spent taking care of the living. Jonathan sees that this is what he and his family want to bring to this culture - to transform it, not change important parts of the culture that don't matter in Christianity, but to avoid wastefulness and excessive caring for the dead, instead of being productive and taking care of the living.

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It is a VERY,very complicated system and time does not permit me to say more now, but I am having to write an article about it, so I don't mind publishing it later for those who may be interested.

One of the houses in his family village in Toraja, now a National Heritage site.

Jonathan and all of us visiting his family grave yard up in the limestone cliffs - 9 generations of the Parapak family are buried above us in this place

visit to toraja

As night was falling we had no appreciation of the beauty of the scenery until we came back down from the village at the end of the week.

Our second stop was at a place overlooking the gorgeous mountains surrounding Toraja land. Fruit stalls lined the road and bananas like you have never seen before - from tiniy lady-finger-sized bananas to these gigantic sized ones - all absolutely delicious!

Ban and Ian - we stopped along this pretty drive at a restaurant overlooking the sea. The first half of the journey was flat and pretty along the coast line, with homes in this typical style all along the road side.

Anne is a native Tasmanian who married Janathan, a native Torajan about 40 years ago and is just a fabulous person. We really clicked!

This series of pictures is about our trip to Toraja, an area in North Sulawesi. We traveled with the family of Jonathan and Anne Parapak, their daughter Lise and her husband Tagor and their two children Talya and Renier, Lili. the lady behind Ian, who can to do workshops for educators, and Ban, the guy scratching his head in the picture, the campus minister from UPH who was a missionary with OMF in Toraja for 6 years.

We left early Saturday morning last week from Jakarta, and flew to Makassar, and then drove for nine hours up into the mountains in a convoy of 3 vehicles.

our trip to tour toraja, sulawesi, indonesia

The vegetation is all so colorful and many plants are recognizable from Rhodesia. The is the Heliconia flower.

Anne outside the hotel rooms.
Hard-working chair carrier loading up after the church service on Sunday.

The child on the right was a scavenger - she came after the big Sunday service event outdoors and picked up all the plastic water cups to recycle them and to get money for her school fees. She couldn't have been more than 6 or 7, but she sure knew how to work!!

Everywhere Jonathan went in the village, he was approached to help with scholarships, buy rice fields, lend credit, etc, as he has been a very successful businessman and a VP for Tourism in the Government and is probably the most prominent man in the community.

He is actually the land owner of the hotel, and has shares in it with other Govt. men who built it in the height of the tourism industry in that area. Unfortunately, the economic downturn has hurt the tourism business since the Bali attack several years ago.

This is the church of Toraja, a most prominent place in the city of Rantepau, the village Jonathan grew up in and where we all stayed for the week.

It is Dutch Reformed, now just Reformed in denomination, and the community is known to be almost 100% Christian as a result of a Dutch missionary who came there in the early 1900s and was killed in an ambush 3 1/2 years later.

There are few Muslims in the community, but they are coming in for business purposes, much to the alarm of the Christians there. They are surrounded by Islamic communities who have persecuted the Christians sorely over the past years, especially in the 1960s.

We arrived in time for Jonathan's initiated Spirituality Week.

His vision is to transform this Christian, formerly animistic community, to less wasteful traditional ceremonies, using their time more for helping with real needs in the community.

The hotel from the front

The rooms were so comfortable and we wish we could have taken the the rattan furniture with us!

We loved the flower in the loo~ Nice touch!

We arrived at the Torajan Heritage Hotel in the dark and had no idea how spectacular the hotel or the surrounding scenery was until morning light. The rooms were so inviting and comfortable and Ian and I had our own "house". Each boat-shaped roof is a unit - some single units but some, like ours with apartments above and below. We were above another apartment, but it was in a stand-alone house. The Torajan clans build their villages in these units of about 6-8 houses with barns for their rice storage in identical designs opposite them in a rectangular area. So, as you see these houses in the picture, they are designed with the roofs designed like traditional houses, but real houses in the villlage consist of 3 rooms and underneath is a platform for sitting on, for eating, and entertaining guests.

Note the mountains in the background. The air was welcomingly clean and cool after Jakarta's heat and smog. We slept with our windows open and could hear the roosters crowing in the morning to wake us up - after the crier to wake the muslims up for prayers and before the inevitable motorbikes putting around.

Exhausted, we all arrived at Jonathan's (left) deceased parents home where his sisters Abbe (left) and Dina (middle) had a warm meal awaiting us. Below, little Ranier had conked out and her daddy Tagor had to carry her. It had been a very long trip for the kids. They were great!

Road snack time - hot noodles, dried bananas and sweet tea or coffee. Toraja is coffee territory and is world famous for its Arabica coffee.

The view was magnificent, but because of the poor time we made on the road due to construction, we couldn't see how amazing it was in the dim light. We did enjoy it on the way home!
We stopped at another place to eat and use the bathroom way up in the mountains. All alongside the road were fruit stalls, and this place was the same. Note the sizes of the bananas! They grow wild here and they are delicious! we had them for dessert every day in Toraja.

Notice how straight her free-hand lines are - I guess if she's been drawing these designs since she was 10, she's pretty much got the skill mastered! What patience!

This hot, smoky, piney-wax odor permeates the area whereever batik is being made.

These are batik stamps. It is dipped into the hot molten wax and then it is pressed onto the fabric for making prints more speedily on larger areas. These are metal, and are works of art in themselves! I hope to bring one home with me if I can find one for sale!

Olivia took us to the Serena mall to see a woman making batik in the traditional method. Young girls, as young as 10 years old, sit and lay wax layers of design on fabric with a wax dipper which looks like a pipe with a spout, through which the molten wax runs. This woman has been doing this since she was 10, and is now about 35. She has the steadiest hand and can draw straight lines without a wiggle, and just inch-by-inch, creates her designs in wax. After one layer of wax, the cloth is dyed, and then new colors are blocked off with wax, the fabric is redyed, and so it continues until desired colors cover the fabric. The wax is finally soaked off or scraped off when the desired result is completed. The smoke from the wax is very strong smelling, and the women and young girls who do this usually are housed in dark, poorly ventilated rooms, sit on the floor, and make very little moneyfrom this painstaking labor. They are incredible artists. Batik is Indonesia's traditional dress/fabric/and each tribe has it's own design. There are just thousands of masterful designs to choose from. Silk batiks are the most expensive, but the coolest, the most delicate, and are truly exquisite.

The Indonesian President has decreed that on Fridays, the whole nation should wear batik to show solidarity. This is a fairly new law, but it has helped the batik industry to skyrocket and certainly does lend a feeling of "belonging" when all attempt to follow his rule.

BTW, there will be Presidential elections on July 8th. The current President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has been President since October 2004 and is widely expected to be reelected, but time will tell. Pray for a peaceful outcome!

This was taken outside the mall on Saturday night while waiting for our driver. The crowds at malls indicates that there is a very wealthy segment of this population despite the abysmal poverty in all directions.