Thanksgiving in Kota Kinabalu

THANKSGIVING DINNER IN OUR APARTMENT 

WITH THE YOUNG ELDERS AND SISTER DOUGLAS

    Thanksgiving is a North American holiday but in talking to people here, they like the idea and are implementing it in small ways.  A gentleman we talked to in Kuching who is Anglican, was speaking in his church on gratitude last Sunday because 'it is such a good idea to set aside a time to be thankful' he told me.  We have so many things to be thankful for and our family and friends are right up there at the top of that list.  We are also very thankful to be here in East Malaysia AND serving a humanitarian mission.
      So today we had our district meeting this week at our place and I fixed a Thanksgiving dinner for the 8 of us---4 elders and 2 senior couples. I had quite the adventures fixing it.  First of all, it is hard to find a good turkey here.  Oh, they have them but they have been sitting in the freezer for a while and they are very expensive (like about 50 US dollars for a 10 lb. turkey).  And secondly, my oven is too small to get a turkey in it.  So we had chicken.  I also fixed dressing, cranberry sauce (from a can), mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, dinner rolls, apple pie and pumpkin pie.
      I am so out of practice with baking.  I used Christine's great crescent roll recipe because I knew they would be good.  So I was mixing up the rolls and had 3/4 of the flour mixed in and the dough was so stiff and 'dead' (you who make your own bread will know what I mean by that) and I still had a cup of flour to get mixed in.  So I went back to the recipe and checked all the ingredients.  Oops.  I had left out 2 eggs.  I sure didn't want to throw it out and start over so I just flattened out the dough and broke an egg on top and started mixing.  What a mess!  But I kept at it and then added the other egg and kept kneading.  Pretty soon it felt right.  They must have been OK because they disappeared fast at the dinner table.

KAMPONG SADIR WITH BAMBOO FLOOR

IN THE COMMUNITY AREA

ELLEN WALKING DOWN THE PATH AT THE KAMPUNG

KAMPONG MEETING

 Last week was another adventure.  We flew to Kuching, down on the southern tip of East Malaysia, which is the capitol of Sarawak.  We have been there several times and met with all four Rotary Clubs there in that fine city.  Our first day there we were taken by members of a Rotary Club and men who work for the Ministry of Health to visit some villages out in the jungle.  We drove south towards the Indonesian border to visit 2 different kampungs who have clean water problems.  Their current water systems are old and inadequate.  Both kampungs have been added in to our major water project.  We knew we would be doing them as well as the other sites when we submitted the project earlier this month so it was just a formality going to the villages.  At one of the kampungs we were told that most of the people are related to each other (there are about 575 of them in 80 houses) and they had lived in that place for about 600 years. They are members of the Bidayuh ethnic group and that means "walking by foot path" in their language.   At both kampungs I got a GPS reading and we were 1 degree north of the equator.  We were welcomed with speeches and food and treated very respectfully.

THEY ALWAYS WANT SPEECHES

KAMPUNG SADIR

ENTRANCE/EXIT TO THE KAMPUNG

  Another day we went to visit the Sarawak General Hospital which is a teaching hospital for Sarawak.  We met with the head nurse who is called the Matron and found that they have some needs as well.  They deliver over 100 babies EVERY DAY!! It is a very busy place serving a large area.
     We met a new senior couple in Kuching.  They are the Reidt's and have only been there a few weeks.  He went out to the kampungs with us and will be helping us by coordinating some church member help with working on the water systems.  We are grateful for their willingness to do that.  It saves us a lot of travel and the church some $$.
     Last Sunday I spoke in sacrament meeting on Family History and Temple Work.  That is something I really miss doing while we are here on our mission.  However, I have recently been able to help a sister get some family names ready for her to take when she goes to the Manila temple in a few weeks with her family to be sealed.

KATE (STANDING) INTRODUCED US TO THESE 3 WOMEN FROM 

PROVO, UTAH, VACATIONING IN KK

     At church we met 3 women who were visiting from America; Provo, Utah, specifically.  They are single women who take a trip together every year.  Some of their trips have been to help with humanitarian projects for various agencies so they were interested in what we are doing.  We also had FHE with them last night and had more chance to talk.  FHE was at a great seafood restaurant here in KK.  We enjoyed the food and the cultural program that went with it.  (Tough mission)

We spend much of our time in the sky and this is the common scene out the window. We can maneuver most airports here blindfolded. I think with a little help we could fly the plane to where we need to go.

VIEW FROM THE WINDOW OF THE PLANE

Our water project is now in Salt Lake to be approved by Presiding Bishop Burton. That will be Tuesday your time. So we are very hopeful that it will go through as we have spent a very large part of our mission working on this and getting the bugs worked out and preparing all parts of it. However we are obedient and if it is not approved we will move on. It has gone through 9 levels at this point and this is the final level.
If it is approved we will be on the road...or sky... to the three cities that the projects are located in to get papers signed and make arrangements for everything to move ahead. Part of this will be kick off ceremonies they like to have and the rest will be interviewing people to select the correct site monitors who will report to us each week on each of the projects. We then will be traveling each month to each location to monitor and work out problems. So we will be very busy. I am very hopeful we can get it done before next September when we go home. Next month is our half way point,,,,, it is so hard to believe that.

We celebrated our 42nd here on Borneo. We thought we would go somewhere for our celebration and then thought that is what we are doing all the time!! Well maybe we will go out to dinner? No we are doing that all the time too! SO I hired our local travel agent and dear member of the church to bring in a suprise dinner and flowers for Ellen. Afterwards we went to a church meeting!! Yep we are on a mission.

OUR 43RD WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

SUNSET IN BINTULU

...................till we meet again...................

 

Interesting things

GOING UP THE TRAIL OUT OF DATA KAKUS

I have heard from our son that there are followers of our blog who get concerned if we go too long without a posting.  So I will try to do better.  I certainly have interesting things to write about---it is just a matter of finding the time to do it.
So---
Questions we are asked ALL THE TIME
     How old are you?
     How much is your rent?
     How big is your apartment?
     Do you cook your own food?
     Do you clean your own house?
     How much did -----cost?

Why are we so private in USA?  I don't mind answering any of those questions and yet we wouldn't think of asking some of them.

When we were visiting the Humana schools in eastern Sabah a few weeks ago several of the schools we visited were on the huge Melangking plantations.  We had met the manager a few weeks before visiting again with Dave and Lena Frandsen and he (Mr. Chee) had insisted that we stay in their guest house and he wanted to provide a river trip for us.  That he did and you heard all about it.  He also wanted to take us to tour one of the palm oil mills and I didn't write about that.  So I will try to remember what we saw and relay it to you.  I do know that there is very high security at the mills so I hope I don't give away any trade secrets.

OIL PALMS

GETTING AROUND ON THE

OIL PALM PLANTATION

INSIDE THE MILL WHERE THE OIL 

IS PROCESSED

 It all starts with planting an oil palm tree which is about 1 to 2 feet tall when planted.  They grow on terraced hillsides that have been bulldozed to make a level spot for the trees to grow.  They are fertilized and coddled for about 15 years at which time they start to produce fruit which looks like a basketball size clump of red-brown berries or nuts about the size of a walnut.  The fruit is up in the crotch of the tree about 25 feet from the ground and is harvested by hand.  A worker uses a sharp blade on a long pole to cut through the 2 inch stalk and the fruit falls to the ground.  The next worker comes along with a 4 foot long sharp metal spike which he uses to pick up the fruit and tosses it onto a small sled or wagon.  Often the wagon is pulled by water buffalo.  These are hauled to the end of the row or to a collection point and put by hand, onto a larger trailer usually pulled by a small tractor (John Deere, Massy Ferguson) and taken to the mill.  Because a few or many of the little 'berries' fall off when the fruit falls to the ground at the base of the tree, there are women who follow along with large bags (usually a washed out fertilizer bag) to pick up the loose berries.  They don't waste any.  Often we could see where a tractor turned a corner sharply and lost a part of the load.  There we would see the women and children picking up the berries.

OIL PALM MILL---BERRIES BEING CLEANED

So at the mill the fruit is weighed and dumped into a collection car which is a railroad car on tracks that go right into the mill.  These cars dump the fruit into a steam chamber and it is steamed to loosed the berries from the fibrous part of the fruit.  I don't know all the steps but soon the berries are clean and shiny and look beautiful.  The oil is squeezed out and refined several times and shipped off in tanker trucks to the port to be shipped around the world.  Most of the oil is for eating but they are working on making bio-diesel fuel as well.  The fibrous part of the fruit is not wasted.  It is either composted and used to fertilize or it is burned to generate the steam and run the mill.  All very efficient.
The palm oil trees begin producing after about 3 years.  They must pick the fruit every 15 days and it produces fruit for 20 to 25 years.  Quite the oil 'machine'. Things grow fast here.  (I have been told that some of the people use the berries for food---they boil them and eat them.  They would be very satisfying and high calorie which is something they need.)  The plantations are huge.  They have replaced both the rubber and the cocoa plantations almost entirely with the oil palms.  From the sky the plantations go on and on for miles.

We are working with some of our branch members who were recently baptized.  We teach the follow-up lessons or the new member lessons.  There are 5 of them about the following subjects:

• Priesthood and auxiliaries
• Missionary work
• Eternal marriage
• Temples and family history 
• Service.  

J

JOHNNY AND ERVINA AND FAMILY

DAVID LIEW AND DAVID CHONG

It is difficult for us to go to the homes of the members---no car, no translator---so we frequently meet at the church after the block and other meetings and use David Liew or David Chong to translate.  We are teaching Johnny and Ervina who are a young  (26 or so) couple with a little boy.  He is a truck driver and she stays at home (they live with Johnny's father and family) to care for their son who is 3 or 4 years old.   We are also teaching Patricia Voo who is 22 years old and goes to school away from home.  She is home on the weekends but leaves to go back to school on Sunday evenings.  We are having a hard time meeting with her. She was just made the counselor in RS and conducted her first meeting last Sunday.  She did a great job.  We also teach Erna Junaidy who is 17 and was baptized last March.  We haven't seen her for weeks nor has anyone else.  Rumor says she has moved away but until it can be confirmed she is in our teaching pool.

We gave away a Book of Mormon to a neighbor here in our building.  He came over last Sunday evening for a few minutes and spent over 3 hours asking questions.  He seems sincerely interested but has a little problem that I can't write about here.  He came again last night and had more questions and we gave him a reading assignment.  I don't know if anything will come of this but we are planting seeds.  Nice gentleman.

Bill's turn.
I wish we could give all the details on some of these things we tell you about. We are excited to go see another school in the interior. That is what they call the jungle here. We want  to get a few more small projects going before the budget for 2009 ends this December. There are so many to help. I just submitted the water project today. It will be up for the Area's presidency approval this next week and then off to Salt Lake for the Presiding Bishopric's approval. We expect it will be approved from everything we hear. That project will serve 6800 people and more as the population grows. There are 21 different locations covering the length of East Malaysia. That is about the same distance as from Seattle to about St George Utah. We will be traveling to some those sites each month. We will also be working with a local opthamologist and one of the local Rotariesto get the vision project underway. That is a fairly large project encompassing several thousand US dollars of equipment and eye glasses. These will be used too care for the poor and needy in the interior,(jungles) that would not otherwise ever see such help.

ELIZABETH FROM DATA KAKUS 

ON THE WAY UP THE JUNGLE PATH TO THE DAM

VIEW OF KK FROM THE WATER

These eyeglass frames are valued at over $100,000 and are graciously donated by VSP, a large company based out of California.  The story behind this donation is heartwarming and is quickly generating press in Utah.  In a nutshell, the president of VSP (who is not LDS) was very impressed with the Collie family and learned that they were members of the LDS Church.  He decided to make a donation to support our vision projects and to honor this family.  (The Collie family has a son, Austin, who played football at BYU and now plays in the NFL.)  The Collie family had no idea that this donation was being made in their honor or any of the reasons behind it.  They have since been notified.    

   

Hornbills and snakes and elephants, Oh My!

HUMANA STUDENTS SINGING FOR US

A LARGE GROUP OF PYGMY ELEPHANTS 

ALONG THE KINABATANGAN RIVER

CHECKING OUT THE RAIN WATER COLLECTION SET-UP

BEHIND ONE OF THE HUMANA SCHOOLS ON THE 

MELANGKING OIL PALM PLANTATION

THOSE ELEPHANTS WERE VERY ENTERTAINING TO WATCH

To those of you who follow this blog regularly, I apologize for the lack of entries.  We have just been so busy.  We are currently back in Lahad Datu and this time with Dave and Lena Frandsen, the clean water specialists assigned to us to help us put this project together.  Nice choice--we have known Dave and Lena for over 30 years and it is partly because of their friendship that we are serving a humanitarian mission.

THE ALPHA MALE OF A FAMILY OF

CURLY TAIL MACAQUES

HOMES OF PLANTATION WORKERS

PROBOSCIS MONKEY

So for the title of this entry:  yes, in the last few days we have seen all three of those creatures and more in our travels.  One of the managers invited us to spend a night on one of the oil palm plantations AND take a boat ride up the Kinabatangan river AND tour one of the oil mills to see just how they do it.  All very interesting.  On the evening boat ride we came across a herd of pygmy elephants grazing alongside the river.  There were probably about 30 or more of them, mostly moms and babies.  We just beached the nose of the boat and watched them for quite a while and took a lot of photos.  Pretty exciting as it is quite unusual to see so many and many river tours don't see any. What is so cool about all these animals is that they are not in the zoo.These are all wild animals!!

We also have visited about 18 different schools that are in need of water---some have no water and others are using unclean water.  Most of the schools are 45 to 90 minutes apart over rough timber roads.  Most of the time I am glad we are in a 4 X 4 truck, like when the bridge is gone and we just drive across the river.  Good thing it is not yet the wet season.

At many of the schools the children and teachers had prepared a little program for us; either singing or recitation or just counting (in unison) to 100 in English.  In one school they recited multiplication tables in English.  Some students even danced for us.  Many of the teachers had refreshments for us which was very welcome.  All are very gracious and grateful to be getting some help.  Dave and Bill and Ismael, our engineer/contractor, have spent hours together making plans for this project.

Last week we rented a car and driver, our favorite taxi driver, Chong, and went to visit a children's home up near Mt, Kinabalu.  It is the Don Bosco Children's home run by the Catholic church.  It was founded in 1954 by Brother Ben, a lay brother from the Netherlands, when there was no more than a trail into the area.  He literally carried on his back the supplies to build the home and then built it.    He is 79 years old now and still running things.  He makes the 2-hour-one-way-trip to Kota Kinabalu twice a week for supplies.  There are about 80 children from age 5 to 19 who live at the home.  Most have some family in the area but that family are not able to care for the children.  They do have some needs so we are putting together a project to help them.  It was pleasant to be up at the school and learn about Brother Ben and his story.  He was originally sent to Malaysia to teach the people farming in the temperate climate they have at that elevation.  They have to terrace the hillsides in order to grow all kinds of vegetables.  He showed me a grapevine but said no grapes had ever reached maturity on it because there were too many little eyes that saw those grapes and picked them green to eat.  I'll try to get Bill to add a photo of Brother Ben.  he is a well-loved grandpa.

BROTHER BEN

Bro Ben is a book ready to be written. He has literally dedicated 50+ years to these children and this village. He has been there since the beginning of time for this community. The children just love him so much.
Today we attended sacrament meeting in the home of some members here in Lahad Datu.  There is no branch here and no missionaries; not even an official group.  It is basically one family who live here but they have not had any meetings for over four years.  One thinks he has the Aaronic priesthood but isn't sure.  With Frandsens there were 9 of us and assorted children.  We had permission from the mission president to have the sacrament so we did and then a testimony meeting.  Pretty cool "...where two or more are gathered in my name, there am I also."

This is the first time they have had the sacrament in 5 years. They are very anxious to have authorized meetings. We are so fortunate to have had a little part in the beginning of the church in this area. This all came about because the Lord prompted us to ask a few questions of the district presidency in KK and the we got permission from the Mission President to have the sacrament.

We will fly back to Kota Kinabalu in the morning and get all our clothes washed and packed to take off for BINTULU on Wednesday.  We are going back to Data Kakus to check out their water situation and they will be added to our water project.  I hope we will have some time to see some of our friends there.

Bill here,
Boy did we cover the miles!! I am not sure but probably 2000km or about 1,200 miles in the jungles of the interior of Borneo. We saw 17 schools some for the 2 or 3rd time for us. We will be doing about 19 schools. We will provide water and toilet facilities for 2400 Humana children that right now have no water at school and they use the jungle for a toilet and also do the teachers.Along with these children being helped we will a also be doing a project in the jungles outside of Bintulu where the Datae  Kakus village of 2000 will get water and two villages outside of Kuching of 1500 will get water for the first time. So a total of about 6000 people of Borneo who live in the interior jungles will have a better life thanks to LDSC. We are so thrilled to be a part of this great work.
I was so touched by the programs we were presented with at the schools. It is so hard to hold back the tears. These kids are living 3 hours back in the jungles and have so very little and live in such primitive conditions. And when they perform they are so passionate about what they do. I just love these kids. I have so much fun visiting with them. I think I could live back there and teach them. It is hard for me to leave them.

We can share our pictures and our thoughts and try to describe our feelings but I don't think it is possible to share with anyone what this experience really feels like. We love our mission and we are just so thankful that we are able to be here. We feel it is going so fast...7 months done already. Many are already asking if we will go again. We are so busy with what we are doing we just haven't the time to think much about that, however ......I will leave it there.
We leave for Bintulu this week and in a week or two we will be in Kuching again.

Thanks so much to all of you that leave us a note once in awhile. We love to hear about your lives.

Bill & Ellen