Elder Ben Mullins: The Law of the Jungle

Hey Everyone!

I forgot my SD card reader today, soooo no pictures! I even had 6 I was going to send! I guess I'll just send a million next week. This week was a ton of fun! It went by super-fast! We had 12 appointments scheduled with new people, and guess how many showed up? ZEROOOOO. BUT. 6 of them rescheduled for early next week, and I'm fairly confident 2 will go through. I'll keep you updated on that! It's been crazy trying to schedule things, because we had so many things, but we weren't sure if they were actually going to go through. We would schedule 2 appointments on top of each other because we were pretty confident one would fall through. Then every single time, they both fell through, but it wasn't really a big deal. We had good backup plans, and we got a lot of new people to set appointments with! I forgot my planner too, sooooo this will be a pretty generic email.

Since I forgot my planner, I'll fill with some cultural stuff, like the law of the jungle! First off, Malaysia doesn't have forests; definitely jungles. In East Malaysia, there are a ton of tribes--Native tribes. The largest tribe is the Ibans--tons of them. There's a set of tribes that are under the classification of "Head hunters". Pretty epic name. Wanna know why they're called that? When the boys are old enough, in order to "become a man" (maybe a rite of passage?) they need to go to a neighboring tribe, and cut off the head of someone that's the same age as them, and bring it back to their village. THEN they can get married and all that stuff. Straight up. Not even joking. There are boys that go around and chop off the heads of other boys and bring them back to their village so they can get married. CRAZY RIGHT? They stopped doing that like 30-50 years ago I was told, so it's not a problem anymore. That's why they're called the headhunters! Another East Malaysian cultural thing--they still have slaves, but they enslave their own people. If you don't have very much money (like if you're in a lower caste kind of), a rich guy could enslave you and your family. They say that it's "The law of the jungle" that allows them to do that. Survival of the fittest. East Malaysia is pretty behind on the industrialization side of things. LUCKILY I'll be serving my mission in West Malaysia since I only speak English!

Monday, we went to Chinatown and wandered around for a while. then Elder Marsh and I went with Sister Stephanie and a former elder to a wholesale place for G Shock watches, because Elder Marsh wanted a cheap, real G Shock. He snagged a nice G Shock for a lot cheaper than you can find in the rest of Malaysia. He bought it for about the same price you can get one in the USA. The rest of the day, we just went contacting!

Tuesday, we just went contacting as far as I remember. We had a few appointments scheduled for Tuesday, but none of them answered their phones, so we just assumed they wouldn't show up. We were right!

Wednesday we had a meeting with Elder Evans of the 70. It was kind of a weird meeting. Normally those meetings with the 70's are meant to inspire you to do missionary work, but he basically told us that going out and talking with people was a waste of time and we needed to stop doing that and do other things. He made it seem like all of our efforts were in vain. It wasn't very inspiring, but there was a lot of good information and ideas in it as well! I'm just gonna push that negative part out of my mind so that I feel inspired to talk with everyone. BUT he did give us a lot of good ideas that I've been trying to use, and it seems to be working! Oh, and at night, we went and got dinner with Kok Cin and a member from Penang! That was cool.

Thursday, we did studies, then weekly planning, then traveled to the other side of our area so we could visit Caryn Roy, a less active member that's actually reactive now. She wants to go on a mission so that she "can preach the gospel." She really wants to preach the gospel. No idea why. She's been inactive for a year, but then we started sending her texts reminding her to read and stuff, then she started coming to church, and now she wants to go on a mission! Pretty crazy! We helped her fill out her mission papers! That took a lot longer than it should've so we traveled allllll the way back from her place, and it took FOREVER. By then the day was almost over, so we grabbed my old planners, and started calling through all my old PI's from the last 6 months. We actually set up 3 appointments with them! We'll see what happens with those!

Friday... I'm not really sure what happened. We met with Livia on one of the days and taught the 10 commandments... We had English Class too, but I can't remember anything else.

Saturday... hmmm. I can't remember. Kok Cin helped out all day Saturday! So that was cool! That night, we went over to a member's house and they taught us how to make curry. It was actually the best curry I've had! That was great! I know how to make curry now! There are a ton of spices and things that you need, so I don't know if it's even possible to make it in the USA... but it was super good!

Sunday was fun, because we had church, then we went advertising for English class. We went to the mall across the street to advertise, and then we ended up getting kicked out of the mall right after we got there. I knew we'd get kicked out. I said something right before we left, but they wanted to give it a shot, so I decided I'd just see. Maybe we wouldn't get kicked out. Nope. Literally 2 minutes in, we got kicked out. Haha! We might go advertising at a night market this week, so that'll be a lot more effective. After that, we went over to sister Saffron's house and had a dinner with her sister and her kids, plus Kok Cin and Bryant. It was a lot of fun, but the food was just ok. It was rice with a ton of veggies, and then MASSIVE meatballs. I didn't even know they made meatballs that big, but they do. It was definitely a lot of meat. It was pretty good though, but not my favorite. Then we shared a thought about the atonement. Now her sister and her kids are going to be new investigators! They only speak Chinese, so they'll be the Chinese Elders' investigators, but that's ok! We had a lot of translation in the lesson because they didn't understand.

That was my week! Elder Marsh had an SD card reader with him, so I used that! I actually WILL be sending pictures! I hope all of you have a great week! Happy birthday to my mom tomorrow! I think that's 2 days away for all of you though. Tell her happy birthday!

Love you all!

Elder Ben Mullins