• Recent

• News Archive

• Newsletters

Indonesia is the fourth largest country with approximately 220 million people. Jakarta is the Capitol City with approximately 12 million people. Elder and Sister Morris arrived in Indonesia on March 14, 2000. They are from Flagstaff, Arizona. Their primary area of assignment is to teach English language and oral health skills in the Dental School at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. The emphasis is on training faculty and graduate students. In addition to their primary assignment, Elder Morris is the Country Director for Humanitarian Services and responsible for developing new programs for additional missionary couples. Along with teaching at the university, they have two major projects approved for implementation at the school. The first project involves replacement and upgrading some of the "ancient" and nonfunctional equipment in the pediatric and operative clinics. This is necessary in order to provide appropriate clinical instruction. The second project is designed to implement an infection control and disease prevention program in the clinics. While there are many modern buildings, services and commodities available in Indonesia, the dental and medical programs are definitely third world in nature. It is even worse in the villages and poor areas of the cities. At the dental school, they could use new or used instruments, non-expired supplies and equipment--everything needs to be in new or very good condition. We have decided that used dental chairs and units are not worth sending to the dental schools far away. The educational part of the training has been completed, but better facilities are needed in order to implement the clinical training phase.

Currently, Elder and Sister Morris are the only missionary couple in Indonesia. However, there are three other couples on the way and approved positions for three additional couples in other locations. Dr. Morris is currently the only dentist. There are seven humanitarian projects underway in Indonesia. They include a model renewable vegetable garden, greenhouse, rabbit and fish production micro-farm, knitting vocational training program, horticultural plant production, village chicken raising micro-credit type project, culinary village water system in addition to the health promotion projects.