Stormin' Sabbath

Hi all you loyal followers of our blog. It is Sunday afternoon here and we are home from our 2 hour block and 1 hour piano lessons/goin' visiting with the elders. We've had a tuna sandwich on the best bread with real lettuce for lunch. Actually that's nothing new, we have eaten a lot of tuna sandwiches since we've been here because it is familiar and comfort food for us.
We are having a very cloudy day---haven't seen a bit of blue sky and that is unusual, I've learned in the 10 days we've been here. It is muggy hot and the thunder is booming. One would think we would have some rain but it hasn't happened yet.
This afternoon we will be continuing with our training. The Asia welfare specialist is here in town from Hong Kong for about 3 days just to train us. They are staying at a nearby hotel and we pick them up there and bring them to our home for the training. We ate dinner with them at the hotel last night. I will be fixing dinner for the 4 of us this afternoon. Believe I'll fix chicken and rice, foot long beans, green salad, melon, and I bought a cake that looks kinda good.
Yes, the beans are really about 18 inches long. I sure hope they are good. I've never cooked them. I finally got a rice cooker as my little propane stove cooks quite hot with little adjustment. I don't even dare use the oven which has 3 settings. I don't know what the settings are so it is best if I don't get too adventurous or I'll be burning the place down.
Bill is getting pretty good at getting around. He actually is driving like he knows what he is doing. AND we didn't get lost going to church today. :)
When we go out at night there are lots of little gecko lizards out there on our tile entry and on the walls of the house. They are looking for bugs. I happened to disturb some lizards out back when I moved some old mops and stuff and now I know what is meant by 'leaping lizards'. They actually do jump and they do move fast. Kinda cute.
We are learning a lot and much of what we are learning goes back to "Your mission is what you make of it" and "DO WHAT WILL WORK!!" The last is really important. We can't expect anything to work like we are used to so we have to adapt and then things will happen.
I found a local craft store and have purchased a carved wooden mask and some of the hand woven fabric they are known for in this region. Those two items are decorating our walls in the dining room. I also found a little nursery about half a mile from here and plan to make a visit there to see if I can find some house and outside plants. I just have to have a little dirt to get my fingers into. There are no plants out in our yard. All our neighbors have beautiful flowering plants---next door he grows orchids on his patio---and we have squat. This next week I have to find someone to cut our grass and clean out the ditches that surround the house. I've been told that will help prevent an invasion of rodents of the rat kind. We don't have a very large lawn. In front it is about15 by 20 and about double that in back. I've seen my neighbor ladies out cutting their lawns with hand clippers and putting the clippings in a garbage sack. Don't think I will be doing that. It's too hot.
Bill is taking his Sunday nap but it is time to get Elder and Sister Smith to continue our training so I'll have to wake him.
No photos this posting. Lets hear from you. We check email every day.

OVERLOAD

We have just realized that we are changing: our culture, location, home, daily activities or job, driving habits, our ward, our diet, friends, climate, and our daily focus all at he SAME time and immediately. AND we are over 60!! Can we do this? Today after being lost for about and hour and a half, driving in circles and on the left side of the street most of the time, well I tried hard, we were beginning to wonder if we had it in us. We are so tired by 7 or 8 pm and we just don't feel like we have done that much.

BINTULU BRANCH PRIMARY CHILDREN

We do sleep very well. Don't wake up at all during the night. We are determined to do this and we will!! With your prayers we will for sure make it.

The pic above is the branch's primary and they sang a song and the Pres asked me to take this pic so I did. We were told today in District meeting by the young elders that the president was smiling for the first time in a long time because he finally had his own couple here to help. They really do rely heavily on the couples to help them run their branch. I have spent over 2 hours with him so far and only accomplished a few simple things. He does speak English but very limited and I think he gets about 50% of what I am saying and I probably get less. They are so strong. They had over 100 members come to meeting Sunday and it has been only in the 60 to 70's in attendance.

Only one set of elders know Iban. They are taught Indo in the MTC and come pretty well set for that and then have to learn Iban which is close but not Indo.

Short one tonight.

BINTULU IS WARM & BEAUTIFUL

SOUTH CHINA SEA SUNSET

We are here all the way!! Got in Wednesday night from Singapore. We will be making that trip again. We have nothing to say but good about this place. The people are very friendly and the skies are beautiful at night.
The people here are a mixture of Chinese, Muslim, and Malaysian (made up of all the above and local tribes). The Malaysians are small, brown skinned, black hair, beautiful brown eyes and friendly smiles.
At church today many of them left their shoes on the rack just outside the chapel door. The meeting was conducted in Iban---a tribal language we have not yet learned---but many of them, especially the younger ones, speak English.
We are living in a house. A very nice house at that. It is a twin home. Rather than using a garage door opener to access entry we use a remote to open the heavy steel gate to drive into the driveway. The house and yard are surrounded with a concrete wall topped off with a wicked looking steel fence with spikes. There is a deep porch on 3 sides (4^th side adjoins the twin) which covers the entry in front, the parking area on the side and my clothes drying rack in the back. Big wood double front doors open to the living area which includes a dining room. The ceilings are about 9 feet, walls are cement all painted white, and floors on the ground level are white tile. That’s a lot of white for me to keep clean.

The climate here is tropical. We feel fortunate to have AC here to come home to after we are out in the heat. I don’t know what the temp is---don’t think I want to know. But the humidity is high. It takes a while to dry clothes unless they are in the sun. Most days are a bit cloudy and that makes beautiful sunsets which occur at 6:30 pm year round. We spent Saturday evening with 2 other senior couples watching the sun set over the South China Sea and then went to dinner together. It is almost cheaper to eat out than to cook at home. However, we are on a budget. The food is great with lots of rice, vegetables and fruit, and little meat which is often chicken or unidentified seafood. I am pretty brave. Last night at dinner I ate something with tentacles that was not calamari. One dinner I fixed tenggihi which looked like a tuna steak. Pretty good. I have some young piano students who I will teach on Sunday between 2nd branch and 3rd branch meetings. They have keyboards at home to practice on if they will only do it. They have early or late shifts for school and need lots of time for playing, too.

We will be working on breathing the water I mean the air a little better than we have as we will be out in it alot this week. It can be a little sufficating at times. We are still depending on a taxi and are not quite sure if we need to buy or rent a car. That will take some figuring.
We have the area welfare managers coming down from Hong Kong this weekend and will be here for almost 4 days worth of training. I am so glad for that as we will get off to the right start. They have a budget for our country that involves two major projects, one with clean water and another for vision care and then money for several smaller projects they call local iniatives. So we are anxious to get the desks in and get internet and etc so we can get to work.

We are only the thrid welfare missionaries to serve in East Malaysia. However, their have been regular missionaries here for 9 years now and they have baptized over 10,000 in just Bintulu.  Where are they?  There aren't that many members

The men work 12 hour days 7 days a week. That is just a little longer than I was working. :). Then they do their church responsibilities on top of that.

We this was a long post. Sorry. Hope it was sort of interesting at times.
I can't get the caption option to work without loosing the photo so the last 3 photos are 1) our shopping area, those stores are called shop lots
2) our market or what you know as a grocery store
3)Bill and I at the beach waiting for the beautiful sunset.

ON OUR WAY TO BINTULU

We have left our home at the MTC. We spent 18 hours in the longest night ever. It was dark when we left Utah Friday night at 9:30 pm and it was never light again until we landed in Tiawan at 6 am on Sunday. It was a very nice ride. Large comfy seats, movies or music on demand and two full course meals. Everything went very smooth, made all connections and no problems with customs.

We did suffer a little jet lag. We went to bed Sunday night 8 pm Singapore time which was 6 am Saturday there and I woke up at what I thought was 10 am Monday thinking we missed our appointments with the mission office. Went downstairs and asked the missionaries who's apartments are all together only to find out it was really only 10 pm. We were messed up and still are having missed Saturday all together.

We are now here for two days waiting for our next flight to Bintulu on Wednesday pm. So the only thing to do is sight see, tough duty but someone has to do it.

ELLEN INSIDE THE SINGAPORE FLYER, LISTENING TO OUR 'GUIDE'

We went up in the world's highest observation ferris wheel, probably the only one. I think it is about 15 to 20 stories high. As you can see you ride inside of a glass tube. I will include more picutres latter of the sites.

SINGAPORE FLYER FROM THE GROUND

SINGAPORE STAKE CENTER

MISSION OFFICES RIGHT BEHIND THE STAKE CENTER

Very little parking as very few have cars? Why? Not because they're poor. One has to pay $10,000 to $12000 for the right to own and drive a car for 10 years plus another 40,000 for a small compact car. Then you can only keep the car for 10 years then submit it for salvage.

By the way the church is just taking off over here. In the last 10 years they have had 8000 baptisms. The reason i s that we are now allowed to speak Malay as we weren't because of the Muslim connection.

ANOTHER VIEW FROM THE FLYER.  THAT IS A FLOATING SOCCER FIELD.

The city has huge building projects going on all over. Lots of cranes across the city sky line.  Right beneath the flyer and encircling many hotels is a grand prix race track.  Unbelievable.

Well I need to hit the sack.

LAST NIGHT MTC

THIS IS THE GROUP OF SENIOR COUPLES AND MISSIONARIES
WHO WE HAVE SHARED TRAINING WITH FOR THE
PAST 2 WEEKS.

This is a bitter sweet time for us. We have been here two weeks and we have had just a wonderful time. We have had spiritual experiences every day and have grown to love the people we have been with in a very short time. This picture is the group we have been with. The Sister right in the middle in the grey suit is the mother of the famous wrestler from Wyoming that won the gold medal in the Olympics a few years ago. I think the name is Ruland.Gardner. She is a nurse and will serve a medical mission. The couple to the far left in front are going to the Philiphines as medical missionaries. Others are going to Russia, Napal, Texas, New Hamphsire, Ukraine, Africa, South Africa, and of course Maylasia. Usaully the group is twice this large each week.

We were trained this week by the people that head up the humanitarian arm of the church. We heard from those that actually orchestrate and manage the huge relief efforts of the church. Most of us have mostly forgotten the disasters that the church is still working on like sunami in Indonesia. We are still shipping supplies there and rebuilding schools and hospitals.

The church is still waiting to ship supplies to Italy 4 days after the quake. We were updated on that disaster by the very man that will push the buttons to make that relief effort start. He said that we were ready to ship within hours of the quake but we are waiting on the Italian government to allow us to ship and so is the US. Crazy?

We have been given very specific instructions on how to provide help. The main criterias that make us so different from all other charities are: sustainability, self reliance,opportunities for service and supporting the local economy and people. In other words we not only provide the cash or material goods and expertise but we look to train the trainers and receivers. This is so that they can help themselves the next time. We also found out today that lwe are not only the first in but usually the last out.

One of the initiatives is eye care. We send eye doctors in to the country to determine the needs. Once that has been done we bring the doctors back for a few weeks. Now like other charities we will have them provide some eye care. But that is not the major focus. We train the doctors to train the other doctors in their country. We will also provide all the medical equipment they need to do this and advance their level of their care.

I could go on and on. Just know that the reason most do not know all of this stuff is that the church doesn't make this info public. We are in the business of helping the Lord's work along and that is the only reason we are doing this. ALso the vast majority of the funds that are used for all of this come from the members in small donations each week. The law of the fast, foregoing two meals once per month and donating the equivalent cash once a month along with specific funds donated to the humanitarian fund is what sustains this world wide effort. You can be sure that 100% of those funds are used directly to benefit the poor and needy all around the globe. Thank you!!

We have been told to make solid connections with their emergency units so that if there is an emergency we will already be connected to the government and be ready to provide the assistance they need.

Tomorrow night Friday about 9pm we fly out to Tiawan and then down to SIngapore. We arrive in Singapore Sunday at noon. That will be about 10pm Saturday here. We will be spending a few days with the Mission President so he can get to know us. ALso we have learned that they have not found housing for us yet.

You probably will not hear from us now for awhile. Thanks for your prayers and concerns. We can feel your prayers in our behalf.

Bill & Ellen

FIRST DAY OF WELFARE TRAINING

I am sure we will not be able to keep this rate of posting up. We got off early tonight and are just relaxing after a day starting at 6:30 am to Welfare square and the Humanitarian Sort Center. We heard and saw so much of this living miracle and the best kept secret in the church. Well I am about to let some of the secret out. The statistics of the amount of money, goods and services delivered by the church to needy people world wide are huge and I will not divulge any but one. We produced a mixture the Africans use to sustain life call Atima. In is the pouches on the left. Africa population was dieing of hunger and asked us to produce this for them. They start from scratch with milk from our dairy of 300 cows in southern UTah. They delivered this to Africa with no cost to africa and over a short period of time they estimate that this effort has saved over 5 million people from just this mix.

Another story. A few years ago the church put together 7 train car loads of emergency supplies for Uraguay. It was ready to go but no way to get it there. A lady stopped in the center andasked if there was somehting she could do to help. The manager told her we just needed a way to dleiver the goods. She left and called back two hours latter and said that her husband, a Colonel in the USA, would have a C-1 cargo plane ready to go as soon as we could deliver the stuff to the base north of Salt Lake 1 hour. She had no idea that is what we needed she had just stopped in to offer her own service in the packaging of goods.

We learned allot about how to work with the needy and the poor. How to not judge them and were taught new perspectives on the idea of charity.

This grainairy is 178 feet tall and was poured as one continuous pour in 10 days by hand and wheelbarrow. It along with 148 others store over 8.5 million bushels of wheat. The church owns hundreds of other farms and ranches that are operated for profit that could and would be dedicated to humanitarian efforts in a natural disaster.


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The center also hires about 256 people to run the center. Mostly all non memebers and also mostly international. They put them through training and coaching to get them ready for the job market and then place about 2/3 of them each year in regular jobs.
These are the wheel chairs that are delivered world wide and which we will take delivery off when we get there.



We saw a 11 minute film that illustrates how our efforts are recieved around the world. In it is Lynn!! Showing him digging out bodies in El Salvador when he first got there. We were so ....humby grateful!!

I am using this format as one of the mission journals. So sorry if all these posts are a bother to you I really don't expect anyone to read any or all of it for sure. I am told once I am done it can be printed up in a real nice format.
Thanks for reading if you did. Let me know if you have any comments. I probably will not continue to let everyone know by email that there is a post so you might consider signing up to follow it if you want.
We are totally ready to get out there although we are sure having great experiences right now!! I just wish it was possible to tell you everything that happens. But it probably wouldn't mean quite the same to you as it does to us.

Love Bill & Ellen

FIRST WEEK @ MTC

BILL & ELLEN IN THE TRADITIONAL

MTC MAP PICTURE

We graduated from the first week's course! Now if we can get past the second week's course we will be on our way for real!
Of course we had to do the traditional "where we are going picture in front of the world map at the MTC. This is one of the things we have always pictured ourselves doing and it was surreal.
We have just thoroughly enjoyed ourselves but it was very hard. Up at 6:30 am to 8pm. We sit in classes 7 hours a day with no college credit :) We are amazed with 21 to 24 year olds that do at least half of the training of mostly 60+ year olds with 3x's the experience. They are so sure of themselves and do a very excellent job. Everything is very choregraphed and precisely timed,
The MTC houses 4000 mostly 19 year olds.
We start at 7:30 am class tomorrow for two hours and then genreal conference all weekend. What could be a better way to start yhour mission than with General Conference.

FAITH PROMOTING STORY

I have RLS. We failed to get the prescription refilled before we left and so I ran out Tuesday night. I couldn't sleep and neither could Ellen. Needless to say we were pretty tired. If slept Ellen would sleep on the cement floor in order for her to escape the shaking bed from my kicking. I took so many different sleep aids and other RLS meds that use to work that I was so wired I couldn't balance well and my speech was slurred. Tuesday I called to get a copy of the prescription faxed down here from our pharmacy in Castle Rock. They said they would take care of it and fax it right away. Then Jill Rodeback (her dad owns the pharmacy) called me and asked if it would be OK if she delivered the refill. I reminded her we were in Utah. Of course she knew that. She reported to me that on the spur of the moment they decided to go to Utah to visit family and they would be here any way! I had the pills the next day and we had a good night's sleep the first time in two days. Without this delivery we might have been another day or two before we got them down here. We probably would have been so worn out by then it might have taken another two days to get the meds to work right. I know the Lord knew we needed this help quickly. I am just sure that Jill must have been on the Lord's errand.






This one of our training groups. The couple on the left are going to Katmando, Nepal at the base of Mt Everest, also humanitarian. He was a well known baseball player for years.

Learn a little about the Missionary Training Center

At the Church's Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, Utah, young men and women as well as retired men and women from around the world come together to prepare to serve the Lord. The purpose of the MTC is to provide an atmosphere of peace, love, trust, confidence, and respect in which missionaries can prepare for missionary service.

Missionaries dedicate 18 months to two years to missionary service. Approximately 52,000 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are currently serving as full-time missionaries. They are called to serve in one of 334 missions in approximately 120 different countries around the world. Missionaries begin their service at a Missionary Training Center, where they prepare to become messengers of the Lord, bringing glad tidings to families around the world. As representatives of the Church, missionaries believe that people throughout the world can obtain life's greatest happiness from following the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Each Wednesday several hundred missionaries enter the Provo MTC. Families accompany them to an orientation, and then bid them farewell. The eager missionaries then enter an exciting world of learning. The MTC curriculum consists of up to 12 weeks of studying doctrine, learning to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively, and developing excellent communication skills. When missionaries are called to serve in foreign lands, their training also includes learning a new language. The Provo MTC is well known for its language teaching program. Approximately 50 languages are taught at the Provo MTC. The teaching staff is composed largely of former missionaries, who are well acquainted with missionary life. Using state-of-the-art language training technology, the Provo MTC fulfills the prophecy that "every man shall hear the fullness of the gospel in his own tongue . . . through those who are ordained unto this power" (D&C 90:10).

The Provo MTC is a beautiful campus designed to accommodate up to 4,000 missionaries. The facility includes a large gymnasium, cafeterias, a medical clinic, a bookstore, a mail center, laundry facilities, classrooms, meetinghouses, and residence halls. A day at the MTC can involve many different activities, including visiting the cafeteria, enjoying some exercise in the gym, and engaging in personal study. Missionaries spend much of their time in the classroom.

Although the MTC has excellent facilities and an outstanding training curriculum, missionaries feel that the spirit of the MTC is their best learning and teaching aid. The MTC experience is the fulfillment of a life-long dream for many missionaries, and yet they anxiously await the day when they will depart to their assigned missions. After weeks of training, missionaries leave prepared to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people around the world.

For more information about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or to request a visit from missionaries, visit the official Church "Learn More" site, or call toll-free at 1-888-LDS-7700 or 1-888-537-7700.

Here is a link if you would like to know more or see more about the MTC:

http://www.mtc.byu.edu/themtc-virtualtour.htm