Indonesia Trip

For the last few days of the trip, we had our intern retreat. The retreat consisted of time with the Lord, team activity time, and team processing & reflection time. We didn't really have a tight schedule to follow. Our team leader repeatedly emphasized that our main focus for the weekend was having good, extended time with the Lord. It was very good time, though it had it's difficult parts. I feel like the Lord spoke in some really clear ways. Since time with the Lord and team processing & reflection time were more private activities, I won't talk about them here. I will talk about the team activity time, though. More than any other time during the trip we were able to act somewhat like tourists and do some touristy things as a team. It felt weird that being a tourist was finally allowed. We were able to see a lot of God's creation, it was so cool.  Our first trip was going to Mount Bromo, which is one of the most famous active volcanoes in the area (this actua...

  I was asked for a detailed post about trying the impossible hot fried noodles... The levels of spice that Pak Han offered for his meals were none, a little, medium, normal, and a lot. The first time I ate his fried rice I ordered normal spice. I nearly died. For probably the next two weeks I either ordered no spice of a little spice. But soon I regained my courage and was ready to try more spice. So I ordered fried noodles with medium spice, and once again I couldn't handle it. I dropped back down to a little spice for another two weeks.  Then my taste buds started to toughen up. I tried fried noodles with medium spice again, and I could handle it. Then I tried them with normal spice, and I could also handle it. Finally, I tried them with a lot of spice, and surprisingly I could handle it. But it wasn't without cost. My mouth was on fire, I was crying, sweating, shaking, panting. It took minutes for the pain to start to subside. And then later that night the spice ...

We finally wrapped up our projects, and today was presentation day. For especially the past two and a half weeks (after language school finished), we have worked hard on research, experiments, and prototyping for our projects. We came in with high expectations for what we would be able to accomplish. Some were met, others not quite. But we trust that our work was honoring to the Lord and will help Java Bite / SunREI continue to help the people of Indonesia. The picture below is of all the presenting interns, both the American students and the Indonesian University students. All of us Americans are wearing what look like skirts (but they're not!); they're called sarongs, and they're a traditional piece of Indonesian clothing. Our Indonesian friends were so gracious to give them to us.  The microwave vacuum dehydration project was very successful. We were able to implement a 4 bar linkage design that provided ~130° of back-and-forth rotational motion. The video below shows th...

On Thursday, we were working in the cold room. The cold room is in between the preparation room and the walk-in freezer room. The flash freezing and the bagging of the mangos happens in the cold room. The cold room is cooled with a fairly standard home mini split AC unit. In order to get more cooling ability out of the AC, we used a CoolBot controller. It gets chilly. The AC is factory programmed to make the room no colder than 60 °F, but with the CoolBot we were able to get the room down to nearly 45 °F. We were running some tests with both the AC and the flash freezer, and everything was going well. The picture below shows me inside the cold room with AP standing outside in the preparation room. Also visible in the picture is the mini door (below the window) where peeled and sliced mangos can be passed into the cold room for freeze processing.   On Friday, we were working in the cold room again. The equipment testing was going very well until it wasn't. We were about to star...

This morning I took a drive with Bapak Willy to some of his family's farm land. Much of the farm land in Indonesia that I have seen is cut into hills using terraces. Valleys wander through the hills; often you find yourself surrounded by plants while being able to see thousands of plants on the hillside opposite the valley. Most of the land owned by Bapak Willy's family contains orange trees (as well as some banana trees and avocado trees). On the hillside we were on, it was literally orange trees as far as the eye could see. I took the first picture looking down the row of trees to try to capture how it felt like the orange trees went on forever. Another example of the beauty in creation.    A few thoughts jumped out at me. There are so many oranges. It's currently orange season. Who is going to pick them? We only passed one worker in the fields, and he was busy doing something besides picking oranges. The standard orange in Indonesia doesn't have to be colored bright ...

Today we took our first trip out to Java Bite's (the company run by REI in Indonesia) new facilities! They are located in Gadingkulon, which is about 20 minutes drive from the office in Malang. The picture below shows the 5 engineering interns standing in front of the facilities. The bigger facility up the hill (left in the picture) is for fruit dehydration, and the smaller facility down the hill (right in the picture) is for cold storage. The buildings are close to being completed, but there is still some construction happening. This post will be mostly pictures.  The bigger facility for fruit dehydration is for both production and training. Java Bite currently operates another production facility, but this new facility will be able to output significantly more product as well as train local workers about how to work in food production. The first picture below shows the front of the building where raw materials will be received. The second picture below shows the side of the ...