Yes, it’s been a while…

Hello there everyone!  We know, we’ve been slacking on the blog and we apologize profusely for that.  Since you last heard from us, we spent a week in Bali, Sarah took a trip to the US to visit family, and Ben continues to work way too much. 

Bali was beautiful, amazing, and so much fun!  We stayed in a gorgeous hotel and got certified as scuba divers–most of our vacation was spent doing this and it was a blast.  One of our dives was of the USS Liberty which was sunk just off the coast of Bali during WWII.  Bali was such a nice break from our lives here in Lampung.  Hearing people actually speak English took a bit of getting used to and the fact that Ben had more than one day off in a row was a huge shock!  Also, it was nice to not see any cockroaches or scorpions in our living space for one week.  Here are some pics:

Ben is back to working 12 -13 hour shifts, sometimes for weeks straight with no days off.  The positive side of this is that he really enjoys what he’s doing and likes working with the Indonesians.  Slowly he’s learning to speak more and more of the language.  I, however, have learned just enough to get by at the market and such.  It’s good to know the basics of please, thank you, good morning, excuse me (great one to know for when people try to cut you in line–happens a lot!), and numbers.  Ben works very hard and is quite tired when he comes home.  Here he is asleep at the computer! 

 

When Ben does have a day off, we usually spend our time out on a boat for snorkeling.  We really wish we could find scuba diving equipment here since we both agree that what we see snorkeling here in Lampung is way better than what we saw in Bali.  Plus there are no tourists to get in our way!  Here’s some scenery from snorkeling:

Hope you’ve enjoyed our latest entry.  We always like to hear from you and what everyone is up to–don’t forget to send pics too! 

Love and miss you all very much,

Sarah and Ben

Fish Market

Saturday morning Ben left for work at 6:20 and I left at 6:30 to head over to the fish market.  It’s good to get there early for a couple of reasons.  First, you get the best selection.  Second, it’s good to get there before the sun is overhead and it stinks to high heaven.  I went with a few others to get prawns for a barbeque saturday night.  In all we got 6 kilos for 450,000Rp–about 13 lbs for $50.  Not a bad deal!  Here’s what the market looks like:

Also this weekend, Ben tried out the salon I go to for a haircut.  Here’s a little glimpse as to what was going on there:

Love, Sarah

Boat ride

Sunday we took a boat ride to an island.  As you can see, it’s not your typical boat!  Notice all the trash floating in the water…

This is the beach we left from. 

On the beach there are a bunch of shacks that sell water and snacks.  This little girl was just hanging there sleeping!  She’s the daughter of the owners of one of the shacks.  When we got back from the ride, she was awake and sitting on her mom’s lap.  I made her cry when I tried to talk to her and tickle her–I guess I have that effect on small children!  While I was making small children cry, Ben was surrounded by 5 Indonesian girls in their early 20’s.  They took turns getting pictures with him with their cell phones. 

While en route to the island, we passed several of these traditional fishing rigs.

This is the island we visited.  It has monkeys on it but you can’t get close enough (I guess that’s a good thing) to take decent photos of them.

From the boat, you can kind of see the plant Ben works at.

Here is a photo of a baby monkey that one of the people on the island had.  We’re pretty sure it was taken from its mom.  This guy tried to sell it to us for 250,000 Rp–about $30.  We declined!

Here are some pictures from the island.  The guy on the right is Bambang, one of our drivers. 

–Sarah

Hello Spencer!!

It’s been a very exciting week for the Henks.  First of all, my sister Jennifer had her baby!  Spencer Philip was born on 3/24 and weighed in at 7lbs 13 oz.  Ben and I are so happy for Jen and Russ and cannot wait to meet Spencer!  It’s times like these that make it difficult to be so far from home.  It’s great living on the other side of the world and experiencing new things, but being away from family at important moments like this is so hard.  I just hope to hold Spencer before he enters preschool!  Congrats to Jen and Russ!  Be sure to send us lots of pictures.  Good luck!

 There is a saying we have here to explain things that seem so illogical and beyond understanding:  TII.  This Is Indonesia.  Our power goes out but the neighbors 2 houses away have it?  TII.  The gardener prefers scissors to a lawn mower to cut the grass??  TII.  Keep that in mind as you keep reading:

 The other exciting news is that we had some packages arrive from the states!  You have to understand that we NEVER get mail here.  We don’t even have a mailbox.  This story will hopefully help you to understand how things run in Indonesia.  So when we were told at the end of February that both sets of parents had mailed off boxes to us, we were thrilled and could hardly wait.  Both were sent through the post office with an estimated arrival date of 5-10 days.  Great!  Well, 2 weeks passed and nothing.  No problem, maybe it takes a few days to get through customs.  3 weeks go by, and nothing.  Having never received mail in Indonesia, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I at least thought that if something did arrive, I would get a notice or something.  After about 3 1/2 weeks, I was out shopping with a few other wives.  (By the way, when I say shopping, I mean out shopping for necessities for the house.  One cannot just go shopping to the mall or Kohl’s to look for something to put around the house or new clothes.  It really is a full day process since you cannot just get everything you need in one store.  Matahari has ziplock bags and a good selection of snack food.  Galael has cheese, olive oil, tomato paste, and pickles.  Chandra has the best selection of meat but you must go in the morning because they run out of the good chicken [good chicken is the kind that does not have the head, neck, and feet attached] and they have the best produce section.  No one stop shopping!)  Sorry for the side note.   Where was I?  Oh right, out shopping with 2 other wives and I brought up the subject of the packages we are waiting for.  Gail, who has been here nearly 2 years, suggested we just drop by the PO to let them know I’m waiting and see if they know anything.  The driver (who can translate for me) and I go to the package area and the PO workers, upon finding out my name, know exactly who I am!  My packages are there!  I was kind of thinking to myself that I lucked out by going to the PO on the day they arrived.  Come to find out, they had been there since March 7th–I went to the PO on the 21st.  So, what’s the problem?  I still don’t know.  I also don’t know why I had to pay 14,000 Rp to take the packages with me (about $1.50).  These things aren’t explained because when asked about why they were not delivered, the workers said that if another week had gone by then they would have sent a notice.  Question not answered. 

Doesn’t really make sense, but whatever, we got our packages!  TII.

This occurred on a Wednesday.  Two days later on Friday, I got the notices that the packages arrived and I should come pick them up.  TII. 

 Anyways, it was very exciting to get the packages and open them–thanks so much to both families for taking the time to put the stuff together and mail them off.  One complaint though–both packages came at the same time!  Let’s try and coordinate a timetable of some sort to space these things out!  I’m kidding of course!  If anyone ever wants to send us things like Doritos or a pizza, that would be great!

 I’ll leave now with a few photos of Ben since I’m sure you’ve come to expect silly photos of him on every post!  These were taken at Indonesia’s version of a buffet.  Instead of you going to the buffet with a plate, the buffet comes to you.  One minute after sitting down, five people began bringing bowls and bowls of various foods.  One dish was a fish that Ben took a liking to. 

–Sarah

Another Post from Ben…

Hello all of you fellow blog followers, I thought it was about time for me to write a bit given Sarah has been doing all the writing and doesn’t write about some of the experiences I have at work and so forth.  First of all, some of you may be wondering if we’ve been affected by any of the things you might have seen in the news.  It appears that this area is quite the hotbed for activity.  Since we’ve been here there has been airplane crashes in fairly close proximity to us, a 6.3 earthquake about 200 or so miles away from us, a couple of fires on ferries which were close to here also near Jakarta in the strait that separates Sumatra and Java, and the long since old news of a flood that had several hundred thousand people without their homes in Jakarta.  All I have to say about all of this is that it is good that we are not in Jakarta, but we are close enough to keep us on our toes.  All in all we have not been affected by any of these above items thank goodness!  During one of our first weeks here it rained very hard all day and we had about 12-14″ of water on all of the streets here, cars just barreling through the water, motorcycles doing the same, bogging down and so forth.  The local people do not keep the drain system clear of debris therefore it cannot drain as fast as it needs to when the rain comes down hard, this is what Jakarta suffered from.  Anyhow, enough of the doom and gloom here, we have been doing very well despite what it may seem on the news! Other than the occasional 3″ roach in the house, there isn’t much new at the house.  I guess I did notice that I suspect a rat has burrowed a hole in my front yard.  I’m guessing he staked it out due to the location of the trash we put out each day.  Speaking of rats there are quite a few around however they only come out at night, they are very large rats.  There are no problem of rats in the house because there is no way for them to live inside, with everything being concrete and some sort of stone in the house, it isn’t possible for them to be in the walls or foundation, this is a good thing!

I guess I could tell you about the interesting drive to work I had a week or so ago, I saw my first accident here and it was quite interesting.  All of you know from previous posts that driving is pretty much nuts here, no holds barred no rules type of driving, this is why none of us working here drives and we have a driver, too high of a liability if we were to get in an accident.  Anyways, the accident I saw involved a motorbike and a car, the car bumped over into the bike.  The car I was in was stopped at one of the only intersections in town that has a traffic light that people actually obey, it is the busiest intersection in the area.  Anyhow, we were at the front stopped waiting for the light when this happened.  The bike had two people on it, a guy driving and a woman on the back.  After the car hit the bike, I’m not sure who was at fault, it looked like they both were, but evidently the car crushed the lady’s ankle because she was screaming in pain.  The guy then jumped off of the bike, put the kickstand down, didn’t even attend to the woman, ran over to the car which had stopped, and started pounding the driver of the car!  While he was punching feverishly the woman fell off the bike to the ground, a couple of other people came over to help her, she couldn’t put any weight on her ankle.  All this while, there was police at this intersection who were watching, they didn’t come over and help or anything, just were sitting there watching it all play out.  About that time the light turned green and we cut off the oncoming traffic to make our turn to get to work.  Anyhow, it was quite the experience, they obviously take the law into their own hands here…

 In case any of you are wondering, work is going well for me.  We are staying on schedule for the time being having hit a major milestone getting the refractory cured in the boiler and now are looking to get our start-up burners fired for the first time in April, this is a big step to getting coal into the Unit.  Long ways from done but we’re doing well.  I can’t remember if I have mentioned in the previous blog, but at work the Unit is about 150 ft tall, no elevator, hence I get a good workout each day in the sweltering heat, it is never below about 83 degrees with higher humidity.  I’m hoping by the time we get around to commissioning the second Unit that the elevator will be done!  Other interesting items at work are less than quality scaffolding and a workforce that would rather do nothing than work so I fight this daily also.  A couple of weeks ago I noticed some newcomers to the plant site, a pack or gander or pride or whatever you call it of goats!  I’ve never seen goats allowed onto a power plant site so it was new to me.  I watched them a bit only to see one of the little ones jump into where the oil pumps are and so I followed it and found it nibbling on some of the wiring!  I promptly threw a rock and hit it in the butt and off it went, but this might give you an idea of the craziness for what is allowed here.  The guys onsite who are walking the beams sometimes are not tied off at all, and when they are the type of fall restraint they have is a simple rope that attaches to a belt around their waist, if they fell it would snap them in half and probably leave them paralyzed!  With all of this being said, I double check all scaffolding and try to stay aware as possible for an oddity that I am not prepared for, what is next, maybe water buffalo on the premises?  You might laugh but that is not out of the question!

 Yes, I need to go to bed and get this long blog wrapped up but there are a couple of other items I wanted to mention, first is the interesting guys Sarah saw walking down our street the other day, it was two guys with cows/bulls (look like a type of Brahma type with the hump on their back) walking past our house.  Not something you see everyday I guess unless you are here.  I am going to attempt to attach some pictures at the end here when I finish so you can see.

Well, the only other interesting happenings is that Sarah finally went to the pool with the ladies the other day, quite a nice pool but it rained on them, I will attempt to attach those pictures as well…  Also, Sarah and I went out to eat last night with a couple of the guys I work with as well as the fan vendor, his wife and his wife’s brother.  We ate at a Japanese restaurant and it was the best food we’ve had since we arrived, it was similar to like a Kanki type place in the states if you are familiar where they cook it in front of you and so forth.

 

Today Sarah, myself and Chris M. from work went out golfing, Sarah did awesome!  She parred a par 3 that was about 175 yards long!  She hit her tee shot about 7-8 feet from the pin and two putted!  I was pretty impressed with her play!  We are going to try to play a little more, she has the knack for it!  I’ll let her fill you in more in her next blog, this one is too long and needs to end finally…

I hope not to make it so long between the times of my writing as I did this time, I know I am leaving out many oddities that you might be interested such as how they make sand here on the island, or the mysterious naked man on the way to work, just so many that I’m probably missing…  I hope this all reaches you well and please comment on what you’d like us to write more about or to take more pictures of!  (and no I have no pictures of the naked man!)

Take care all….

Ben

Our weekend

Hello Everyone,

We had a very eventful weekend and were able to get out quite a bit.  Friday night we went out to dinner to a local place for Indonesian food, then we went out again Saturday night!  Saturday we went to a hotel in town called the Indra Puri that does have some “western” food on the menu.  They’ve got steaks and chicken, but they smother that stuff with a mushroom sauce, so it’s not really like steaks back home!  After dinner we went out to play some pool with some friends.  A new couple arrived the weekend before, so we’ve got some more people to hang out with now!  On Sunday (Ben’s first day off in 13 days!) we went out to do a little shopping and to look for a new fridge.  The fridge we have already is small, which wouldn’t usually be a big deal since it’s just the two of us.  But we keep lots of cold drinks in the fridge so those take up a lot of room.  Also, I can’t count on finding quality meat at the market every week, so I stock up on that and other things which makes the freezer very crowded!  We found an inexpensive fridge that we think will work out quite well!  They even delivered it to us.  Here are some new photos.  Click on them to get all the info!

             

Hope you’ve enjoyed the pics of our exciting weekend.  I’m sure you don’t get to read many blogs about buying a new fridge!  Love you and miss you all!

Sarah and Ben

Ben’s New Look

Ben has been a little lax in the shaving department since being in Indonesia.  He finally decided to get a little creative the other night so here are the before and after photos!

Pictures

Hello everyone,

Finally we have internet!  We are quite excited about that!  Well, I am at least.  Ben can keep in touch with Skype and e-mail from work, so it’s probably not as exciting for him!  First thing I am going to do is post some photos for you all to see.  I’m sure you’re very curious what our house and new country look like.  I think if you click on the photos, they will come up bigger in a new window.  Enjoy!

This lovely photo was my dinner!  Our first night in the new country and this is what I got for dinner!  That’s chili sauce on it.  Indonesians serve it with everything–they like things spicy!

 Here are a  bunch of picutes of our house.  The first is the outside.  That’s Darmy, our maid, washing the windows.  She is very sweet and a great cleaner but speaks no English.  We’re both slowly learning to communicate with each other.  Labor is very cheap here.  Darmy is paid 350, 000 Rupiah a month–that’s about 40 US dollars.  What’s sad is that she is happy to work for this amount because if she worked for a non-white couple, they would pay her less.  The white westerners here are called boules.  There are about 15 of us in Bandar Lampung–a city of over a million people.  We get stared at everywhere we go.  I’ve even seen small children flee to their mothers just from the sight of me!  They’ve never seen a white person in their life! 

The ladder is for the repairmen to get to the roof to repair the leaks.  To the right is a fountain.  It’s lovely but leaks water or something because we always have to fill it!

 

Our kitchen.  Notice no dishwasher or standard oven.  The oven is the grey thing in the corner next to the sink–we had to buy it!

       

 Living Room:                             Dining Area:

                  

Our bedroom–no closets  

Here’s the washing machine.  You must hook up the hose to the sink to fill the left bin with water.  Put in detergent and turn on for desired length of time.  Place drain hose in hole in floor, and drain water.  Fill up bin again so that you can rinse the detergent and add fabric softener.  Drain again to hole in floor when done.  Next, take out clothes and carefully place in right bin for the spin cycle to get out excess water.  Careful of how you put in the clothes!  The spinner gets off balance easily and the machine will travel across the room!  To dry, carry clothes up the stairs to the roof to the drying rack.  Watch out for that wind though!  Clothes are easily knocked off and may need to be washed again if they land in dirty spots on roof!

 Here are some views from our house:

This is across the street from us.  They are building a fine looking home and I get to hear every bit of the hammering and sawing during the day.  Notice the fine scaffolding!

A view of our street:

View from roof when hanging up laundry on drying rack:

Here’s a view from our house when looking out the front window from the second story.  Hope that’s not a volcano ready to bust!

We have 4 bathrooms in our house.  We only use 2 and hopefully you can understand why!  The people here think western toiles are weird.  Apparently they enjoy squatting to pee and poop.  The “sink” on the right is how they bathe.  They use the red cup to poor water over themselves.  Don’t worry, there’s a drain in the floor!  Just be sure to spray with Vape (like Raid) so the roaches don’t come crawling out of the drain–that goes for every drain in the house!

We have many creatures in our home and this here is one of them.  We also have roaches, geckos, ants and a critter of some sort that likes to nibble on my potatos while I’m sleeping.  Hope it’s not those rats the size of cats that we see running around at night!

This is our driver Bambang.  We share him with another couple.  He is very nice and speaks English fairly well.  Ben is lucky and gets to leave the house everyday.  I go out once a week to do the grocery shopping and sometimes get lucky if we go out to dinner on a Friday or Saturday night.  You’ll notice they drive on the opposite side of the road from us.  We don’t dare drive around the city and we quickly found out why on the drive from the airport to the hotel–there are no rules here!  Yes, you SHOULD drive in a lane single file and pass only if you have enough passing room on a straight road.  Well, that doesn’t happen here.  People pull out of streets, even though there is oncoming traffic–and the other person just slows for them.  There is no road rage, which is good!  The cars share the roads with motorbikes (with 4 people on them at times:  toddler in front holding on the handle bars, dad behind driving, other toddler behind dad, and mom is on the back, to make sure the kids don’t fall off??) and baceks:  bicycles with carts in the front that serve as a cheaper form of a taxi.

     

 Here are a few shots from around town.  It is not a city like you’ve ever seen before, unless you’ve been to a third world country. 

        

 On one of our first days here, we had the luxury of having the driver drive us around town and show us around.  We even went to a “beach.”  It really is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen, but it’s so dirty!  Garbage was strewn all around and I’m pretty sure the water is used for bathing (humans and cattle), restroom, and who knows what is draining in to it!  Aren’t these kids great!  I couldn’t speak to them but they understood what to do when I held up my camera to take their picture! 

            

Finally, here’s a picture of Ben doing what he does best:  playing Tiger Woods on his Play Station!

 We hope you’ve enjoyed these photos.  If there’s anything you’d like us to take a picture of, let us know.  Otherwise we’ll update the site with new info every so often to tell some stories and share more pictures.  Being in a place like this makes you realize how good we’ve got it back in the US and we appreciate things so much more.  Like water and electricity!  If we want water any time of day, we need to make sure we kick on the water pump to fill the water tank–it doesn’t do it on it’s own!  Also, there are continual power outages here.  Power can go out any time of day or night, for 5 minutes or 5 hours!  Good thing Ben is here to build a power plant!

We appreciate any e-mails and photos from you too.  We miss you all very much and love to hear about things going on in your lives too.  Though I’ll be jealous to hear that you drive your car to the mall,  I’ll live vicariously through you!  So please, send those e-mails and photos! 

 Love,

Sarah and Ben

A Post from Ben! :)

Hello there all of you blog followers!  After hours of research by Sarah she has decided this is evidently the site we’re going to use for our blog!  I thought I’d write an entry to give the “man’s” perspective of everything here thus far so here I go…

 First topic, safety:  I know some of you (mom) are worried about our safety, while there are definitely reasons to worry slightly, mostly the crazy traffic, (we wear seatbelts, drive slowly and brace when we are about the nail a pedestrian or motorbike), we both feel that we are very safe.  All of the people are very nice and go out of their way to help us.  I don’t feel as if we’re in a place of chaos and crime, I thought that I would feel unsafe somewhat but I really don’t (granted I’m twice the size of everyone, they just seem to stare, laugh at me and ask my shoe size).  Anyhow, to describe the traffic, which by the way is so unbelieveable that you’d have to experience it to begin to understand, it is what I’d consider to be called controlled confusion.  Families of 4 on a small motorcycle (I thought they were kidding when they told me this) and they are cutting in and out of traffic.  It is simply routine to drive on the wrong side of the road to pass someone only to cut in just before head-on-ing oncoming traffic.  Again, I do feel quite safe still as we aren’t going very fast, we rarely get above 20 mph, but still it is quite the sight.  The roads are about 60% motorcycles and the rest trucks and cars.  All of the cars here look about the same with a few others in the mix.  Most are a van type unusually tall type vehicle that is either a Toyota or Honda it seems.  It is funny that the most popular vehicles here are not even on the market in the states.  Most vehicles seem to be fairly new also, including the motorbikes but I have spotted a few vintage ’60’s Land Cruisers and even the less popular Chevy LUV pick-ups loaded with about 10,000 more lbs in the back than it should have in it.  I’m going to try to get a video clip of the traffic to give you all a taste of what we endure, I’m sure it will help your view of our safety mom… 

 Next, what is going on with our living conditions.  Tonight is our last night at the hotel, we checked out our house yesterday and again today and went shopping at the local mall called Matahari.  We spent $1,615,000 Rupiah, not much when it is ~$9,000 RPH to 1 USD also no biggie when the company picks it up!  So tomorrow is the big move, we’re looking forward to it after having lived in a hotel the past 3 months now.  Our house is quite large and is very nice.  Just the doors on the place are very high quality, solid wood, teak I think and all of the floors are a stone of some sort, maybe marble or granite.  There is no carpet in the entire house.  I’d say the house is around 1,700 sq feet.  The house came with a nice wraparound leather couch (which is so fortunate because when you sweat you stick to it and just sweat more!) as well as a large new TV, ~40″ or more.  A welcome sight to me was the excessive amount of AC units in the house, every room has one, they aren’t window units but some sort of unit I haven’t seen before, very quiet and cold though.  A breeze goes through the house nicely too if we don’t want to run the AC or more importantly for those times when the electricity goes off!  I have been told that the electricity goes off from time to time as demand comes and goes, quite annoying but what do you do, hence the reason we’re building a new two unit power plant, they need the power!  We have several things left to do in the house, get internet hooked up, satellite TV hooked up and most importantly for Sarah, get a MAID!  I didn’t know that we’d need one, but for $50 a month, why not?  We are also looking into getting some pay by the minute cell phones that work in the area so Sarah and I have a line to talk to one another in case the need arises.

 Ok, I’ve just noticed that my first blog is quite long winded!  I hope you all made it this far!  After we get set up with internet at the house we will hopefully be able to be online continuously so that when one of you gets some time you can SKYPE Sarah or myself.  Our name is ben.henk if you’d like to download SKYPE for free and then chat or talk over the internet PC to PC for free, it works quite well.  Here at the hotel the internet is unreliable (as Sarah mentioned in blog #1), hence us not being online much or writing much yet.  We are also hoping to get some photos online, maybe of the geckos which frequent everywhere, or of the tail-less cats which are walking around (our driver told us they have short tails because people cut them off for the heck of it!).  The country is very picturesque so I’m sure photos will follow.

 One last note is that I start work on Wednesday, our work permits are done and so we’re cleared to start finally.  Today we went through the rigamaroll of getting our fingerprints done in two different locations and signing a bunch of papers at the local immigration office.  Supposedly we will be working Monday thru Saturday at this juncture.

 Thanks for bearing with me during my inaugural blog!  Let us know what you’d like to know about or what experience you’d like more detail on and we’ll be happy to write about it!  Also please write as many comments and so forth, we love the feedback and to hear from you all!  Most of all don’t forget how much we love all of you and miss being back there!

 With love…

Ben

Our First Post!

Hello everyone and welcome to our blog site!  We know that you all are interested in reading about our lives over here in Indonesia, so we decided the best way to relay all the info and pictures is to write in this blog.  Neither of us has done it before, so we hope it turns out OK.

First of all, the internet here is not reliable.  I’ve tried to upload photos we’ve taken, and the internet is very slow and I get booted off before the photos are posted.  Hopefully when we get to our house, the internet will be better!  We promise photos as soon as we can!

Right now we are staying at the Sheraton in Bandarlampung.  The inside of our room is your average hotel room, but the outside is a tropical paradise.  Lots of palm trees and beautiful plants.  The lobby, pool, and dining area are all gorgeous.  Sadly though, everything just outside the hotel is not so nice.  We are definately in a third world country. 

The whole jet lag thing as been really weird.  One minute you think you’re OK, the next minute you’re passed out asleep at 4 pm and wide awake 12 hours later!  I’m hoping to get in a normal sleeping routine very soon!

Today we are waiting for the driver to pick us up and take us to our new house.  Hopefully we’ll be moved in by the end of the week.  Tomorrow we go to the immigration office to register there and then to the local police station to get fingerprinted–guess that’s just part of being visitors in the country.

Love,

Sarah and Ben