Fourth Week in Melaka

Mom and Dad!

     Mom, I just cracked up at your stories about your middle schoolers. Ready for the Malay phrase that means "kids these days" - "Budak Budak ni". At least kids there can go to school.  The kids here have basically nothing; literally, they do not even have a bed to sleep on.  The amazing thing is that the kids don't care--that are all still so happy.  The parents here are unbelievable.  They let their kids just run wild in the street.   There are parents who just feed their kids cake and the kids teeth are rotting out.  Every Sunday, the branch all eats together in the church building.  My companion and I take all the kids and make sure that they eat their rice before their cake.  It makes me grateful that I grew up in a great home with great parents.  

     Today we are going to Singapore for a zone conference so I can’t send pictures this week.  Next week I will send some!

     This week has been pretty good though!   The Tammil (an Indian tribe—there are a lot of them living in Melaka) family with the auntie who had a dream is doing pretty well; except, they don’t have any money and they always ask us for money. They don’t understand that we only get 600RM a month which is like 200 bucks. We have tried to catch crabs and sell them to a market to help get money, but we weren’t too good at that, so it didn’t work out too well. I got to confirm Ganneson this week--it was pretty cool!  Also during the week, we had a crazy Chinese guy invite us to his house.  After we talked to him for a while, he figured out that we had different religious views; so, he basically said he was going to lock us up inside his house!  My companion and I decided that we would just end our discussion right there and we walked or rather we kinda ran out of his house.  We also got to watch Saturday’s sessions of Conference for our church this week. There were some really good talks! A lot of the morning session was about the Plan of Salvation and how we will be reunited with out loved ones after our earth life. The one Elder who told the story about the baby choking on the chalk gave a really good devotional at the MTC when I was there.  We had to watch the second session of Conference in Malay, so I only understood about fifty percent of it.

Durian Fruit - It smells like dirty feet!

     Let me see, what else happened this week...  Oh, I ate a century old egg.  It’s not really a century old, but they call it that. It’s just an egg that has sat in a jar for like 3 months that rots and pickles. It basically was terrible! I also had my first durian (a native fruit) this week.  It was pretty bad at first but then I got used to it and now I like it! I already have had two more durian this week.  They are amazing!

     Okay, you asked me for my Christmas list.  So far for Christmas can I have some CDs that are not the Tabernacle Choir?  I have a lot of them, but I would like some other good church music. I also want a CD player.  I can buy some cheap speakers here. They don’t have regular electricity, but I have a lot of converters, so electronics are cool.  Then maybe some different candy or something, idk, surprise me!! Maybe you could send me some more ties? Not red though, the locals always make fun of me because I have all red ties.  I would also like to buy a backpack here.  It has rained and poured all this week and my backpack is not doing very well.  They have backpacks here that are nice and water proof for 200RM which is about 65 bucks.  The rain is killing me.  It’s like someone is dumping water on my head over and over again—it rains non stop.  Oh and send some deodorant; they have weird kinds here.  Also, remember all those baseball hats that I have in my closet.  Can you send me those so that I can give them out to the kids?

      I gotta go.  Love you so so so much mom and dad.   Miss you!

Jumps
Elder Madsen