Faulty Font Follies

Hey Everyone!

This week was preeeeetty crazy! Lots of pictures too! So that's good! Elder Johnson and I are having the success we've been looking for the entire transfer, so that's really good! I really like it here in Kota Kimbatu! It's seriously the prettiest area ever, and tons of fun. It’s nice and busy, but also has a bunch of quiet places.

Last Monday, we went to the beach, because there was a member that was leaving to the MTC the next day.  He wanted to hang out with all the missionaries before he left! It was fun! We had a lot of the branch there, so we got to strengthen member relations AND play at the beach! We buried some people in the sand, caught a few crabs (they could run super-fast), and rode our bikes through the ocean.  It was SUPER fun to ride through the ocean, but it gets sand in your gears. Luckily, it was dumping rain, so all the sand washed out right after we did it. Oh yeah, and some guys taught us how to find pearls. Pretty cool.

Tuesday was probably the most intense day this week. It was a normal day up until 6:00. We met with people, rescheduled a few appointments that fell through, and talked with a bunch of people.  However, at 6:00, Elder Howell and I met at the house, because we had to go catch a flight for exchanges in Sandakan.  The member that we had arranged with to pick us up thought that we meant 6 AM the next morning, not 6:00 at night... SO. We had to call another car to drive us to the airport, and it took about 20 minutes for it to get to our place, and then traffic was literally backed up from the airport all the way to our house--bumper to bumper.  Guess who missed their flight? Yeah, pretty bad. What made it even worse is that Elder Howell and his companion missed the exact same flight for the exact same place for the exchange with the same elders the transfer before. SO.  We were a little scared to call the AP's, but we did it, because we're accountable!  We called both AP's a million times and they didn't answer, we called President Simmons and his wife a million times and they didn't answer.  There weren't any more flights leaving to Sandakan until the next morning, so we just went home. Elder Johnson and Schellenberg were super confused when we got back, because we were supposed to be gone for another 2 days. Haha!  We explained what happened, and eventually the AP's called us back.  Then we called customer service for the airport, figured everything out, and got our flight scheduled for the next morning!

Wednesday, we woke up mega early (like 4 in the morning early), and made it to the airport with 2 hours to spare. Haha!  We took our time checking in, and sat around doing nothing for an hour and 50 minutes.  That was better than missing our flight!  We got to Sandakan at 6:30 or 6:45 (can't remember). Our taxi driver that the elders in Sandakan had called for us picked us up. The taxi driver's name was Muhammad. So. Definitely Muslim.  We were driving along, and he asked the classic where are you from, why are you here type stuff.  We told him we were here for church, and he said he used to be Christian, but when he moved from the Philippines, he converted to Islam. Pretty common story.  Then he started talking about how most Christians were ok, but there were 2 denominations he hated.  The one he most hated was... Mormons. Hahaha! It was super awkward when he said that he hated Mormons.  We asked why, and he just talked about how crazy the beliefs were.   We told him we were Mormons.  There was an awkward pause, then a few sorrys, then silence. Hahaha! Suuuuuuper awkward.  Elder Howell tried picking up the conversation, and Muhammad started talking about all of our beliefs, then started naming off Gordon B Hinckley and President Monson and prophets in the Book of Mormon.  I was thinking, "This guy has got to be a member. There's no way he could know this much without being a member.", so I asked, and he said he was Islam.  The conversation slowly turned to other things, and we arrived at the place the Sandakan elders live. They were waiting out front.  They said, "Glad to see you! You can just go in and we'll get your bags!" I thought it was a little weird that they were being so nice to us, but I just said ok.  We went up to the elevator and held the door, and one of them was talking to the taxi driver.  He closed the cab and started walking around the back, then Muhammad revved his engine, squeeled his tires, and took off with Elder Howell's luggage.  (I still had mine, because I just stuck everything in my backpack).  The Sandakan elders started running after the car, and Elder Howell and I just started laughing.  Pretty much the entire mission knows about how dangerous Sandakan can be.  We hear these kinds of stories all the time, so we were just laughing about it, but then we started talking, and we came to the conclusion that Muhammad actually wasn't Muhammad.  We were right! He came back about 5 minutes later, and he was a member. They were just trying to play a joke on us. It was super funny, but we kind of knew the whole time. Everything was just too weird. Haha! It was a good thought though. Great story.

After that, we started exchanges, and I went with Elder Bringhurst! He was Elder Forsyth's trainer, and Elder Forsyth finished my training! Sooooo I'm not really sure what that makes him to me, but there's a connection somewhere there!  They had just found a village that no missionaries had ever gone in, and our job was to go check out that entire village and see how many potential investigators we could get. We raided the village (we found 75% Christians. Sandakan is about 90% Muslim, so it was a great place to find), and had lots of people that were really excited to see us! I think they had some success later in the week out of all the potentials we got.  It was tons of fun to be the first missionaries in a village! Everyone loved us! Haha!

Thursday, we woke up super early (about 4:30) and went back to KK. Elder Johnson and Elder Schellenberg lost 2 new investigators due to miscommunication problems. They couldn't find the investigators because they couldn't speak Malay quite well enough. Hahaha!  It was ok. They must not have wanted to learn bad enough! We've been trying to call them back, so not everything is lost yet! They didn't set anything up for Thursday, so we just went around to inactive members' houses, and I got a little bit burnt! It was lots of fun though! We found some really cool people!

Friday morning, we called the entire zone, and challenged them. It got the entire zone super pumped to talk with literally everyone they saw, and the zone got to see some miracles from it.  We had lots of fun with that, and we met with Andrew! Andrew is great. He committed to church, and ended up coming on Sunday!  We met his older brother too!  We're hoping to be able to teach his older brother later! He's great at really thinking about what we're saying, so I'm pretty sure he'll get baptized! As long as he keeps reading the Book of Mormon, he'll get baptized for sure! After him, we were going to a less active, and he actually lived about a 2 minute walk from their house! So that was cool too! Now we know where he lives! Later that night, we went over to an active member's house, and shared the restoration. It was super good, and the father, who is not yet a member, agreed to retake all the discussions!  Hopefully we can see success with that! We had some super good fried rice too. Their son, Artobelly, went to school to be a chef, and he's really good at cooking.

Saturday was Lodelin's baptism! It was super good! BUT. We had some problems filling up the font. We filled it up, and came back an hour later to make sure that it was still full, and IT HAD DRAINED.  We filled it up again, and twisted the drain the other way, and guess what? IT DRAINED EVEN FASTER.  We tried a few different things before we decided to just stick a plastic bag over the drain, and it did the trick!  We had our baptism, and it was awesome! Her husband, Johnny, baptized her, and it was GREAT! We also met a new guy named Alvin, and our member who was present went a little ham with temples and all that good stuff.   I don't think we'll use him as a member-present anymore. BUT. The lesson went good! And also! On the way home, I was riding my bike, and I hit this HUUUUGE pothole, and flipped my bike.  It had just rained, so there were puddles everywhere, and I landed riiiiight in a puddle. Awesome. A car drove by right as I ate it, and I heard someone yell, "OH MY GOODNESS ARE YOU OK???" Pretty funny. I was fine, just super dirty.   I jumped back onto my bike, and got about half way home before my tire became too flat to ride on. I think the pothole popped it.  We walked the rest of the way home, and I fixed my tire when we made it home.

Yesterday was great! Andrew came to church, and he really enjoyed it! He had lots of really good questions, and I answered them all! Someone also gave a talk in English, so I translated it for Andrew since he doesn't speak any English! I was really surprised at how easy it was to translate, so that was good! After church, we took the sisters over to Ivy (an inactive member)'s house. The sisters were Chinese speaking, and we were told that Ivy and her entire family were better at speaking Chinese than Malay.  When we got there, it turned out she didn't know a single work in Mandarin. Only Hakka. So still Chinese... Buuuuut. Not Mandarin. Pretty awkward.  We just stayed and taught her, and we had an AWESOME lesson on the ministry of Christ in the America's!  The sisters left right after we realized she couldn't speak Mandarin. Haha!  That night, we went over to Sister Audrey and her family's house. She has 2 boys that are super cool. 16 and 13.  We had a super good lesson on the Plan of Salvation, and they literally gave us 10 referrals. Unbelievable.   I'm super excited to get those 10 referrals baptized! Haha! It sounded like 7 of them had been referred before, but they wanted to give it a second shot. SO. I can't wait to see what happens there! Oh yeah, and earlier, we met with a guy named Jainoh. I'm running out of time, so I can't really say anything about him.

This week was great! I really enjoyed it! Everything went by so fast! This morning, we woke up super early and went over to Mount Kinabalu! We didn't hike up it, but we did hike around it and get some super cool pictures! It was tons of fun.

Love,

Elder Ben Mullins

This means Hill Road

Elder Bringhurst

Filling the Font

Lodeline's baptism

Sketchy Bridge

Fresh coconut

The Malaysian Flag

KK Bay

Mount Kinabalu

This is good news for missionaries

Tree bridges

Knee Sweat Is Real!

Hey Everyone!

This week was craaaaazy fast! I can't believe it's Monday again! Lots of great stuff happened this week! We met with new people, we figured out we had a mega solid investigator that got mega prepared while we kind of pushed her to the side, and we had a lot of fun! I learned that Elder Johnson's knees sweat (super weird, but his grey pants had sweat spots on his knees from all his sweat), I lost my name tag (fell off while we were biking, so now I wear my English one), learned a lot of new Malay words, and remembered to tell everyone that I'm trilingual! I speak Indonesian, Malay, and English! Crazy, right? Missions bring blessings I guess! Anyway, lots of stuff this week. Let's see how much I can remember.

Monday, we went to the beach!  It was pretty fun! We played baseball, ran along the shore, and found sea shells and stuff. The water was mega warm too. Super weird, but it was fun! At night time, we went to Brother Artobelly's house. He's super cool. Huuuuuge dude, way cool family, and we might be teaching his dad soon. We'll see.  We had some really good fried rice and chicken too, and they invited us over again this Friday to eat some seggo worm. No idea how to spell that. Super excited for that though. We got home and called a bunch of PI's for the rest of the night.

Tuesday, we had district meeting, and the power went out. The water also stopped working because a pipe was broken. SO. That was pretty lame sauce. It was a super warm district meeting, but after that, we had some good lunch, and visited a ton of less active/inactive members!  That pretty much took up our entire day. So that was fun.  It was a less eventful day as far as crazy things happening. This was the day I realized how badly Elder Johnson sweats. We walked up this huge hill, and he was dripping sweat every step, and his knees were covered in sweat…and really everything was.  It was super weird, because there was a patch on his knees!

Wednesday... hmmm. We met with Andrew and put him on date! We taught the Plan of Salvation, and once we closed the lesson, Andrew had this funny smile on his face, so I asked him why he was smiling. He said he was super excited because he was finally looking for the truth! Haha!  He'll find it as long as he reads the Book of Mormon! After teaching him, we did some studies, because we had met with Lodeline before we could finish our studies. That reminds me! After Lodeline, Inday, a referral from them, walked in, and expressed her desire to learn more!  She was already an investigator, but we weren't quite sure how solid she was, because she kind of dodged out of a few lessons. But now she's super solid!

Later on Wednesday, we taught Binus. He's moving to another place nearby, so we'll still meet with him, but he expressed a lot of concerns on his faith.  So we're going strengthen his faith, and then he'll be mega solid!   We're excited for him still!  He's got some referrals for us too!  We’ve got to get those soon.

Thursday was a 'get organized' day. Tons of studies and planning. But it was Malaysia's independence day too! It was a pretty lame sauce Independence Day though. A small parade down the center of KK with a bunch of school kids walking through the street, but that was about it.  We did our studies (one of the first times we've been able to fit all of our studies in in one day since I got here), weekly planning, and then had some correlation meeting while we ate dinner. So. Super calm day. But really good too!

Friday, we met with Lodeline, went over the baptismal interview questions, and then taught Inday the Plan of Salvation! It was really good! She's pumped to get dunked!  I'm really excited for her! After that, we went advertising for English Class! It was pretty fun! Not as fun as Puchong was, but still pretty good! There were a lot of restrictions placed on advertising after we went viral in that video last December... so it's been a long time since I've advertised for English Class.  After that, we visited a bunch of inactives, and set up a ton of appointments.

Saturday, we met with two new people! Steve and Peter! I don't know how solid they really are, but we met with them! They wanted to speak English, so we taught in English, and it was actually really hard, because I've transformed my thinking in lessons so that I think in Malay before I think in English!  I kept accidentally using Malay words instead of English words! Super weird. That's been less of a problem until I taught that lesson. Every now and then I'll throw in an English word while I'm speaking Malay and not even realize it, but that's about it! Haha! Normally I try to mix as much Malay into my English as I can so that Elder Johnson learns faster, but I don't really accidentally mix Malay into my English. It's always on purpose. Anyway, cool guys, but I don't think they have tons of interest to change. After them, we biked super far out in our area and visited some inactives. One in particular was named Rina. She's craaazy. She calls everyone "wicked" that isn't a member. Pretty funny. She's hilarious.  We shared a nice scripture and left. There's this huge hill we had to bike up, and at the very top, there were about 6 dogs that were getting ready to fight us.  I pretended to pick up a rock and get ready to throw it at them, and they all froze.  I told Elder Johnson we were going to run on 3, and the dogs would chase after us. So I counted, then hopped on my bike super-fast, and the dogs started booking it after us. LUCKILY, we had a hill to drive down, so we flew ahead of the dogs.  If we didn't have that hill, we could've gotten a few ouchies from those dogs. Haha! It's a common thing everywhere else, but that was the first time it happened in KK for me.   Elder Johnson was freaking out, and I was yelling so that he thought that the dogs were super close behind us. It was chaos. Super funny. We also had the baptism of brother Ian's son, Hyrum, on Saturday! He was 8, so it wasn't a convert baptism, but it finally got done! The water started working Saturday morning, so we got the baptism going! It stopped working up until Saturday, but they got it fixed in time for the baptism! After that, we had a farewell party for Brother Derrett, because he's leaving on his mission tomorrow! He's super excited. His twin is serving in our mission right now! So that's pretty cool!

At the party, I was told that there's a new horror movie that came out named Annabel or something like that. ANYWAY. The family's name in the movie is the Mullins family! MULLINS. Like MY LAST NAME. Crazy. But suddenly it got easier for everyone here to remember my name! Because of the movie! Hahaha! So that was good.

Sunday was a struggle after church at first, but before that Lodeline had her interview (she passed and is getting baptized this next Saturday). That happened right after church. But at the same time, we had someone asking us to give them a blessing (found members to do that), had to teach a lesson, had to talk to President Simmons, had to get our phone back from Elder Weight, had to set up appointments with members throughout the week, reschedule Sandakan's baptismal interview, AND we were fasting. Haha! CRAAAAZY. But we did it all! It was definitely a miracle. So right after church, we were suuuuper busy. But then we went home, did a quick personal study and planned our lessons, and went over to Sister Ivy's house to check and see why she wasn't at church. It was kind of awkward, because she didn't have a reason that she wasn't there. BUT. We had a good lesson! Haha! So hopefully she comes next week! We had about 30 minutes left before we had dinner (remember this is fast Sunday), and we decided we'd take a leap of faith.  We stopped by Brother Ian's house. We were expecting to stop by and say hi super quick so that we could go home and eat mega quick, but they didn't think that was a good idea. They asked if we had anything later, and we told them all we had was dinner and reporting.  They made us stay and teach their kids for an hour, then eat this HUGE dinner that was suuuuuuper good. Spaghetti, fried rice, and chicken, and a super good cake. Sedapnya. It was a ton of fun though. They have 5 girls and a little boy. They were crazy! It was super fun to teach them though. We got creative when we taught them, and it made it really fun.

My week overall was great! I forgot to mention that on Sunday, Elder Johnson totally crashed his bike into a guy that was walking down the street (I don't know why Elder Johnson didn't just steer out into the road a bit). He tried contacting him, but it was just too awkward for him, so he just rode away. Haha! Also, Thursday, his pedal snapped off his bike (plastic pedals...) and his crank wrecked his leg, and we spent some time fixing that. Haha! Elder Johnson is hilarious. Definitely the best trainee ever. I'm going out to Sandakan this Wednesday to do exchanges, so I'm excited to be able to explore more of Sabah for a day! Oh, and we saw a cobra or something slithering down the sidewalk the other day. Not really sure. It had the little venom gland things. Pretty awesome.  The week was great, and I'm super excited for this next week too!

Have an awesome week!

Love,

Elder Ben Mullins

Elder Johnson and Me

Abandoned building

Biking with Elder Johnson

View from Ivy's house

At the beach

Me and Elder Johnson