Mom!!
I happened! I am transferred!!! I leave for Miri in East Malaysia on Thursday!! It's so crazy because I am going to the straight up Jungle!! Besides my companion, there will not be any other missionaries around for hundreds of miles. The people that we will be working with are the indigenous jungle people from the Iban tribe. The Iban's speak their own Iban language which is kind of close to Malay but it has a different dialect so it sounds really crazy. No one in Miri speaks English; they only speak Malay and Iban, so soon my Malay will be amazing! (and my Iban will probably be a little bit below average.)
This week we had a couple of pretty cool things happen. One evening, we were knocking on doors for a solid three hours in the rain and all we got were people who laughed at us and made fun of us. So after a while, we decided to call it a night and head home. My companion jumped on his bike and out of nowhere he had a flat tire. I was thinking to myself, "Why is this happening?? We just worked our butts off for three hours in the rain and now we have to walk forever to get a tire changed." By the time we left the bike place, we were out about an hour later than we are supposed to be. We started riding home and we saw a recent convert--who has a little bit of a drinking problem--leaving his house. He was on his motto with his two kids on the back. We stopped them and when I went to shake his hand, he couldn't even keep his hand steady enough to shake mine. The guy couldn't even talk! Come to find out, he had taken some pain medication and he had been drinking. I grabbed the kids off the motto, put them on my back and started walking back to their house. My companion convinced the father to take his motto and go back home. I am convinced that if we hadn't been there to catch him, he would have crashed and his kids would have died. If it wasn't for that flat tire, we would have missed him entirely.
There was also another cool thing that happened this week. This kid in the branch was rushed to the hospital earlier in the week for dengue fever. People here die from dengue fever (comes from a certain mosquito bite) and if they don't die they end up spending quite a bit of time recovering in the hospital. The problem with this kid is that he supports his entire family all by himself; so, when he is not working that family is in trouble. When we went to see him in the hospital, he did not look very good and he was really, really weak. I was really scared because it didn't look like he was going to make it. We gave him a blessing, and.....two days later he walked out of the hospital. That is unheard of here!! It was so crazy--two miracles in one week!!
The cut on my foot looks pretty good. I never did get any antibiotics from the doctor, but the Sisters put some stuff on the cut that started fizzing up. It was pretty cool. The Sisters said that it didn't look too infected (very reassuring), so I am still going strong!
I'm glad to hear that dad has been in a really good mood. Tell him that I want a car when I get home from my mission (preferably not the white Civic and that I would love to have all my college tuition paid for!!)
Okay mom, I gotta run. I love you so much!
Elder Madsen
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