Fifth Week in Melaka - Plus free puppy give away!

Hey Pops,

     Things have been going good! We just got back from our zone conference in Singapore. It was nice to see all my old friends from the MTC and we had a night to just mess around together. It was good to see President Mains again--I really like him. On the way back to Malaysia, I had some trouble getting across the border.  The Malaysian border control started questioning me and yelling at me.  I was really nervous because I thought that they were not going to let me back in.  But, thankfully they did!  The last missionaries that got arrested had to strip down to their underwear and then they were thrown in jail; so, of course people asked them questions and the missionaries taught the people in the jail--haha!  Speaking of which, the office missionaries never gave me money for the subway; so, I had to drain the last of my money on my card for the tickets and stuff.

     You asked me if we do much tracting.  We usually don’t door knock too much because everyone works during the day and everyone has gates around their house to keep out robbers. We also don’t knock on doors because we aren’t allowed to talk to Muslims about the church—it’s against the law. Some missionaries recently knocked on a Muslim’s door and he called the police.  The missionaries were stripped down and thrown in jail for a night. When we want to do some contacting, we find people walking around or go to the super, super poor sections where people aren’t at work.  The majority of the poor people are Tammils. (Cousin Steve Hilton would probably know about them.) They are a tribe from India and they speak Tammil; it’s the weirdest language ever. Most of the actual Malaysians (the people who grew up in Malaysia their whole life) are Muslim. People don’t call themselves Muslims, they call themselves Malayues which means they are Muslim.  The Malayues will never be poor because the government just gives them money.  Sometimes we will tract at 7 p.m. when the Muslims have their call to prayer.  The horn starts playing and it is so loud that everyone hears it.  When all the Muslims go to pray, we go out and knock on doors because everyone at home is not Muslim. We also thought of a new tracting strategy today.  We are only going to knock on doors of houses that have dogs.  Muslims can't even touch dogs--so we know that a house with dogs is okay to go to.  The branch in Melaka has about 30 active members and the branch president is a new convert; so, basically my companion, Elder Sroufe, kinda of runs the branch. But, the members are all really nice, I love the members here. I just wish they would feed us some more—haha!  They are really good at getting us referrals though. We led the zone this week in number of referrals and Melaka is known for having some really poor numbers. We have about five more people that we are teaching; so, hopefully things will work out.

     Do you want any puppies?  We found a homeless dog that just had puppies that one of the locals delivered.  So now everyday we check up on the puppies to make sure they are doing alright and everything. Now we are looking for people who would want them in the next couple weeks when they are old enough to leave their mother.  Maybe we could airmail one home!  Or, not.

Okay, I gotta go.  Love ya, Pops!
Elder Madsen