April 6, 2010

yo yo my peeps

I forgot it was Spring Break time, I always loved that time in the school year. Sounds like you all were busy. That's awesome.
And Happy Easter to you all! I am jealous, you got Conference and Easter on the same weekend. That rocks. We will be watching conference this weekend. I am amazed how fast they can get it to KL. Tech is awesome. Easter Sunday was great, it was also fast sunday so the branch choir did one musical number to start and then the rest of the meeting was testimonies, which i love. Brother Kong got up and bore his testimony about how he threw out all his liquor the other day. He talked about how he lined the bottles up in a row by his sink and dumped them, he also talked about how when they mixed in the sink they made all sorts of colorful swirls...?? It was a sweet testimony. We have been trying to get him to dump them for awhile. He doesn't drink it, but he couldn't bring himself to chuck them because it was worth so much money. Im glad he finally did.

The Elders had a memorable baptism on Sunday. They planned the baptism to occur right after church. Now, something you should know is our baptismal font takes about 12 hours to fill, a baptism can occur in about 10 hours though easy. We usually start the font the night before and let it fill all night. Saturday night there was a district Easter Musical in Petaling Jaya and we got back late and we all forgot about the font. Sunday morning came and the Elders were feaking out. We had three hours to fill a 10 hour font. It wasn't going to happen. During Gospel Principles class, Elder Madu taught while Elder Pulver brought in bucket after bucket of water, to aid the slow trickle of a faucet we have. They didn't want to interrupt Relief Society so while the women were in class, they had all the young men help fill every single trash can in the buiding with water from the outside spicket. When RS ended the young men carried in and dumped about 10 trash cans of water. Would you believe it we still only had about a foot of water in the font; about mid calf. There wasn't much else we could do so the Elders explained very carefully to John, the guy getting baptized (from Myanmar), that his entire body had to be submerged and we went on with the show. Elder Pulver kneeled down in the water and they had john sit with his legs out in front of him. After the prayer they had him lay down and there was just enough water to cover him. It was awesome. We do the best we can with what we got.

After church the Branch mission leader invited us over to have dinner with their family. They are from texas but he is working here for Exon Mobile; they have 5 blonde kids who are crazy. They invited the Elders, Bro Kong, and Kelly, another recent convert, as well as a new ex-pat couple that just moved here from China. What a life these ex-pats live, I don't know if I could do it. We always are excited when another ex-pat moves into the branch, it is like we are getting a new set of couple missionaries, they help so much because they know how the church is supposed to run.
Sunday night we spent with our neighbors from Korea. We watched the Finding Faith in Christ DVD (in korean) and then we colored easter eggs! They have two kids a boy and a girl. Everytime we come over the girl runs around yelling "this is the best day of my life!" she is crazy. The easter eggs didn't turn out half bad. Rachel's, the girl's, looked like poop, but that is because she put them in every single color. These kids had never colored eggs before and didn't really know that you can't mix colors too much. We had fun though. Thanks macsen! They fed us Milo and Moche. Milo is a famous chocolate drink here and Moche is a japanese treat, maybe you know it dad? it is the wierdest slimy-est tasting thing, pretty good though. Im impressed with Sister lim, she knows quite a bit of Japanese and Korean, all from watching Korean and Japanese drama. haha she loves the soaps. She speaks Hokkein and Mandarin form her mom and dad, and learned Cantonese fluently just by watching the drama shows from Hong Kong. Impressive.

I have to tell you about something hilarious that happened yesterday. There is this old Chinese man in our branch named Anthony. He called us up and told us he had a friend he wanted us to meet named Jimmy. We met them both yesterday for lunch. I thought it would be a good idea to see what jimmy already knew about our church, if anything. Like everyone always does, he mentioned the Osmonds but before he could say much Anthony piped in "Do you know about the word of wisdom? we can't drink tea, we can't drink coffee..." I thought to myself, why, WHY do members always bring this up when we first start meeting with investigators, save it for a later lesson once they have a testimony! But he didn't stop there, he went on to say, "what about Polygamy? have you heard of that? where one man can have more than one wife? what do you think of that?" haha oh man I thought, WHAT IS HE DOING! I tried to talk over him, I tried to change the subject. How could he have thought that bringing those things up was a good idea. Members are crazy, I love them. Once we got the lesson headed in the direction I wanted it went pretty well. But what a rough beginning haha.

As we were leaving to come email Sister Lim got me laughing really hard. We pray every time we leave the house you know, and sometimes we just don't know what to say. Sister lim is praying and she asks for safety as we email, which i thought was pretty funny, but apparently she had nothing else to say and just stood there silently for a while. Then she speaks, asking me "what else aah?" i couldn't keep it in, I died laughing. And she was laughing too. We got composure and she said, "start again". She tried to pray again but it was no use, we were laughing too hard. I hope we are forgiven for our irreverence.

Yesterday Tina, a member invited us over to her place for lunch. We went with the Elder Madu and Kiwi. Elder Kiwi usually serves in PJ but they were on splits. The curry she made was fabulous and we had a good time spending the afternoon with her and shirley, a recent convert of ours. When we left we got stuck in the elevator though. This has never happened to me and it was slightly scary. The elevator just stopped and Elder Madu and Kiwi started freaking out. Elder madu was pulling on the doors with both hands trying to pry it open and Elder Kiwi just kept saying, "aw frick man....frick man" over and over again in his adorable New Zealand accent. Sister Lim and I were laughing pretty hard. In all we were only stuck for a few moments but still, it was scary. In the apartment buildings here the elevators are always questionable, they usually smell like a bathroom and on occasion I have seen them acctually used as a bathroom. you never know if you will make it out of one.

Ah, good times.
love you all, I pray for you everyday. I mean we pray about 20 times a day so I'm bound to mention you guys at least once. :-)

sister viehweg