Elder Ben Mullins: I'm Famous!

Hey Everyone!

This week was CRAZY. So many things happened that I could hardly believe, and the days went by super fast! First off, Elder Forsyth is staying for a 6th transfer in Puchong! Which is pretty much unheard of! 6 transfers is 9 months! That's a REALLY long time to stay in one area. And I'm staying in Puchong too, so hopefully we can find even more stuff to do!

Monday... Let's see. I got a haircut, then we went shopping for everything that we didn't get over the last five million weeks. So it was pretty much just a long day in the mall, plus a nap at the end. It was fun though! I don't mind naps! After that, we just went out and contacted for a couple hours, then went home and set up appointments for the week!

Tuesday, we visited a referral that lived a million miles away. It took us like 45 minutes to walk to their house, then they ended up not being interested. But it was a really fun walk, because we had never been over there before. So we saw lots of fun, new stuff! We found a huge gutter that was nearly empty, and took some pictures in it. I'll send those.

At night, we taught Wei Xuan. We separated her from Harshaa so we could get her to talk more. When we have lessons with both of them, Wei Xuan tends to just sit back and watch, so we couldn't really tell if she had a desire to learn or not. But we split them up, and went out to dinner with Sister Saffron and Wei Xuan and Bryant. She opened up a ton, so it worked perfectly! After dinner, we went to choir practice since we had Christmas caroling on Friday later in the week.

Wednesday, we met with Harshaa, and she's totally gonna be baptized. I'm super excited about that. She told us that she feels like she's ready to be baptized, but doesn't know if she knows everything she needs to yet. So we just have to teach her a few more times, and BOOM. Baptized! I'm way excited.

After we taught Harshaa, we went and advertised for our free English class. Little did we realize what would happen. So Elder Tennant and I were walking down the road like we normally do when we advertise, and there was a lady filming us advertising. People film us and take pictures of us all the time, so we didn't even think anything of it. We finished advertising, went to our appointments, and two hours later, we get a call from the Chinese Elders. They said someone showed them a video of us advertising English and wanted to know if it was us. So someone recognized them from a video that some lady took of us advertising. Not really a big deal. So we hung up the phone, get on the train, and someone we tried talking to showed us the same video the other Elders saw, and asked if it was us, and we said yes. So we were pretty excited that two people had seen the video! Once we got off the train, we got a call from a branch member asking us if we knew about a video that was going around of us advertising, and we told him that we had just met someone that had seen it. We asked him how many views it had, and he said, "Four hundred... Thousand." We were pretty surprised, and got really excited! We went home that night and talked with the other Elders. Their phone literally rang nonstop from 8 to 12. They just gave up on answering calls and responding to texts. That first night, they probably got 400 texts and 500 calls. It was insane. The video had 400,000 views by that night.

Thursday, we called President Simmons in the morning. He had scheduled a Christmas Devotional for all of the missionaries in the KL zone for Friday, but we teach English Fridays. So we talked with him, and said we had something really important come up and we were wondering if the meeting was mandatory. He said it was mandatory, and he expected us to be there. Right before we hung up, he asked us what could possibly be so important that we thought he would let us not come to a meeting he scheduled a month in advance. So we told him about the video and that English Class was exploding. There was silence on the phone for a minute, then he said, "You know, I think you better actually go to English class." We thanked him, told him we were sorry for not being able to go to the devotional tomorrow, and that we were still planning on coming over to KL for interviews on Friday. We went through the day pretty normal, except people were constantly asking if they could take pictures with us. We decided it'd be RUDE if we didn't take pictures with them, so we had a blast taking pictures with them! Then we'd talk about the gospel with them. Not many were interested, but it was still a lot of fun! We were at Ariz's fruit shop just talking with him, when a lady walked in and asked if we could take a picture with her, so we did. She told us she had seen our video and wanted to show her friends she met us. Ariz got really excited and laughed a lot that someone wanted a picture with us. 3 minutes later, two other people walked in, started staring at us and whispering to each other, then walked up to us and showed us their phones and asked if it was really us in the video. So we said yes, took pictures, and then they left. At this point, Ariz is freaking out, and keeps yelling, "You're FAMOUS! I'm so lucky to know you because you're FAMOUS!" It was hilarious. We just had a blast on Thursday. By 5, it had hit 1,000,000 views, and pretty much everyone wanted a picture with us.

Friday, we went to our interviews with President Simmons, and started talking about the English class video. Some things came up, and he had decided it would be best to not hold English class this week. One of the reasons was that our church can't hold more than 150 people. Anyway, we ended up having to go to the Christmas devotional, and President told us we weren't allowed to go outside of the house unless we were traveling to an appointment, and we weren't allowed to go contacting if we did leave the house! Haha! He just wanted us to lie low so that the video stopped spreading as much. So we just hung out in the house until night, and went to the Christmas Devotional, which was super good! I loved it. We had a white elephant gift exchange, and I got some poptarts! Which don't exist in Malaysia! So that was great! Elder Forsyth got a pokemon go wallet. We hit 2,600,000 views at the end of the day, and articles were being published about us advertising English class. The Chinese Elder's phone was still ringing nonstop.

Saturday, President Simmons approved us to go caroling with the branch in the mall across the street. It was a lot of fun, and tons of people listened to us carol. After, a million people took pictures with us, which was a lot of fun! Malaysians really like the missionaries right now! Haha! The rest of the day, we were stuck inside! But we played some Scrabble and had fun!

Sunday, we had church! I was glad to get out and have some human interaction! We also went caroling again! Lots of people took pictures with us again too! I actually really enjoy being famous here. It makes it SO easy to talk with people! And President Simmons decided we could go outside again, so we went contacting after we finished caroling! It was nice to be doing some missionary work again!

This week went by super fast! I can't believe it's Monday again! Already into week 2 of the transfer! And tomorrow, I've been a missionary for 5 months! I can't believe it has been that long already! It goes by SO FAST! I love you all! Hope you have a great week! I'm sending some pictures from last week AND this week, so there'll be a few more emails!

Love,

Elder Mullins