Week 17

Hey guys!

So this has been probably the craziest/worst week of my mission. It started out with my accident on Monday, so I will explain that.  Right after I emailed and ate, I was riding back home and I was in the bike lane. And as I was riding, a motorcycle was in the bike lane and just rammed me off of my bike. I landed on my knee and arm, so I had some scrapes but not a lot of bleeding. I was pretty lucky. The back rim of my bike was completely destroyed, so I couldn't ride it home. The motorcyclist got hurt a lot worse than I did but his motorcycle also got pretty damaged. Anyway, theres' nothing here that you can do. So I walk home, which is only about 5 minutes away. I didn't do anything else for the day. I cleaned up the wounds. One of them on my arm looked pretty awful but it's healing up pretty quickly, and almost gone.

Tuesday was just another part of a really hard week. Because we go have a meeting with the other missionaries.  We had to go into town, but Jeffery didn't take us because he was in the Philippines to go to the temple there, so we took a bus in. But after the meeting, there are absolutely no buses to go back to our house. So we walked, and walked and walked for at least 2 hours, until one of our investigators saw us and took us home. (Did I mention that I couldn't bend my knee much or else my wound would start bleeding again?)

Wednesday, I did have some fun though. We got a biawak! you need to look it up. We are going to cook it for dinner Monday evening.  I went to the bike shop to see what I could do about my broken bike. It took a little doing, but we found a rim from another missionary that matched with my bike (So I don't have to buy a completely new bike).  They put it on and it only cost me about 15 dollars. Yes!!

Thursday and Friday were just sort of rest days. We didn't go out at all except for lunch.  But Friday night, I started to get sick with a fever. It wasn't until Saturday that I got a UTI, which just made everything worse. Since everyone was still in the Philippines, I couldn't get to the hospital until Sunday.  I went to a Kuching specialist after church (the longest 3 hours of my life) and he prescribed some pills for me. The senior missionaries took care of everything so I didn't have to use my personal money.  So after I started taking them, I started to feel a lot better

I went to the KDC to pick up any mail. 3 packages for me!!! 2 from mom and 1 from Ellie. :D :D It was great. I love everything so much, it made my week a lot better.

Monday morning I got up about 2:30am and then started to have diarrhea, and I've been going to the bathroom for the last several hours. To make it worse, I was at the caves again, but I couldn't go into them cuz I was in a lot of pain.

And here I am! I still don't feel 100% but I feel better than I was this morning. Sorry to worry you guys out! I shouldn't have sent you a text telling you anything. But now you know I'm okay! :) and I don't need money for my bike.

I love you guys!

Elder Vincent

Biawak (Monitor Lizard)

Week 16

So I am really really bad at timing these. Technically it's my 9th week in Malaysia, but it's my 15th week away from home, so I'm going to try being better at that.

So....more about my week.

Let's see...

This was actually a slower week than normal. Our dead time Wednesday through Friday is between 1 and 6, because everyone works, so really that's the slowest time of the day. I try to find things to fill up my time during that time.

I am just going to jump around my week a bit. On Friday, we went out to dinner with Jeffery (the member that has driven us around a lot lately) and his family. The kids just graduated from school so its a big deal to them now.

At the dinner, I picked up a soup, and I was about to eat it, and Sister Caroline asked me "Do you know what that is?" and of course I don't know what it is, so she tells me that it is fish lips. And so I'm like.... "Ou, so I am kissing a fish!" It was funny to them, but I just imagine a ton of fish kissing me and it grossed me out a little. So I think that's the most interesting thing I've eaten here so far. :) but hey, soon we will be eating Biawak, which is like a komoto dragon. You'll have to look it up. :)

Also on Friday, we went to a couple lessons. One of them was to a family with a bunch of small kids. And during our lesson, we were trying to talk about prophets, but then the mom lifts up her shirt to a kid that's like 4 years old, and then I totally lost focus about what I was teaching, because they show everything here. Culture shock for me!

As I said, I went to a market on Saturday. I bought a few things there like a shirt, a G-shock watch, which seems to be a pretty expensive watch in the States but I've never heard of them before,  and I also bought something called a Tikai. A Tikai is usually a bamboo mat that people lay on (You can see it in the Mormon movie called The Other side of heaven, it's a great movie) but I bought a softer mat. I tried it Saturday night, and its really hard. I woke up extremely sore because the floor is just too hard. maybe it would be better on carpet, but that is almost non-existent in Malaysia. After that we took a short visit to some caves. I'll send a couple pictures of it :)

Sunday, I woke up and one of the elders, Elder Poppleton, got extremely sick. He is a disaster right now. We think he got sick from some of the food we ate the night before, which was a birthday party for Jackson, a member in our church branch. He has only been out for 3 weeks though so he still isn't used to the food. I am so glad that didn't happen to me. His companion and I gave him a Priesthood blessing that night. It was a really cool experience for me because I've never given a blessing with oil before.

But that night, Elder Hirschi and I went over to a Budayuh family's house. They were baptized into the church a few months ago, and they are really cool. I was having a rough time understanding his Malay, but he was making me laugh nonstop. It was great. :D :D 

Anyway, I can't think of anything else for this week. Those are the highlights. :D :D 

Love you guys! Can you guys send me more pictures of what it looks like outside?  Then I"ll send you more pictures of what it looks like here. :D :D

-Elder Vincent

Week 15 - Back From Zone Conference in Singapore

Okay so!!!!! Hello everyone, I am back from the lovely place of Singapore.

I have to say this, because I was asked this maybe three times already. The weather is fine, we are not affected at all by what's going on in the Philippines.
But Indonesia is a perfect shield against all sorts of weather like that. We really don't get hit like ever. We still get rain, but it's not really that bad.

So I guess I should talk about my week a little bit. Since that's why I'm on here, right?

Tuesday we had our "district meeting", but it really just ended up being a visit with our district at Mcdonalds, and we were about to go back to our area, but then it starts raining like crazy. So we stayed inside for quite some time. I had my camera and I had no plastic bags to put them in, so I really couldn't go outside without getting soaked. That took up a lot of our day.

Then on Wednesday we got up pretty early to get to the airport. We have to wear our casual clothes because of immigration stuff. It was super fun to see all of my friends from the MTC there. Sister Wynn, Elder Capener, and the whole likes of them. We almost had the whole MTC group together except a couple in Singapore and West Malaysia (but I saw Elder Lambert in Singapore later on).

Got on the plane and all I brought with me is my backpack (which is really really big), with only 8 kg worth of luggage. I brought it so I could bring some more razers and batteries from Singapore (batteries for my laser pointer!)

So after we got to Singapore, we basically just got to do whatever we wanted until 7 that night. We could go see the Marina bay, which is where all the pictures of Singapore are taken like of the Ferris wheel, etc, or go shopping. I chose to go shopping with some other elders.

Basically it was just a great adventure.

Our goal was to get to the top of a building without getting in trouble. We were going up this really really tall building, we got in the elevator and there was a person in the elevator to manage it. He asked us which floor we want to go to and we're like uhhhhhhh, we were looking at the elevator numbers. He got suspicious, so we just told him to go to floor 15, which is about half way to the top. We got off and it was just offices, so we decided to go down the stair well instead of going down the elevator again.

Funny thing though, we checked every door going down, and they were all locked. There must have been some laughing gas in the stair well, because we were about dying of laughter, literally on the floor. We finally got to the ground floor and it was luckily open. Phew!!

Then we just went to get some food at Subway, which is super super expensive. 6 inch for like.... 10 American dollars.  I lost a lot of money off Singapore.

Then I went to the tie shop, which has really awesome ties. I bought 5 for 10 sing.

After that we went back to the church, and I read my letters from Ellie, you, and Brother Tolman. Really made me happy to get them all. :D :D

I got to our hotel about 12, but didn't go to bed until about 1. It's so awesome, there is hot showers there!!

Thursday we had a lot of meetings. I can't really remember anything specific from it, but it was just basically training anyway. They gave us pizza and there was a lot, and I knew I had no money for the rest of the conference, so I just ate tons. that lasted me until Friday until I got back from Singapore.

Singapore was really cool. I will have plenty of more chances to go there. I will go there in about 3 months.

Afterwards we just got home. Brother Jeffery took us home, and on Saturday he took us to a fruit market. It had fruit for super super cheap. I got enough fruit for 2 weeks for only 4 USD.

There are other things that happened this week but I don't want to spend too much time just writing this. Hope you guys have a great week!

love you guys!
Elder Vincent

 East Malaysia Missionaries - Zone Conference in Singapore

 Zone Conference - MTC Group Reunion -East Malaysia Missionaries

Week 14

So it's really week 14 or something, but its week 8 in Malaysia.

So....let's see, what should I talk about...

This week went by so quickly that I just have no idea where to start.

Monday, we went to do some shopping and I bought a 4 foot sumpit, which is a blow dart gun. I have had a lot of fun with that. I have been shooting pillows with it. :D :D

Tuesday we had our district meeting, which ended up just being a social meeting for the rest of the day.

Wednesday, we just went to a few members houses, got to know them. One of the members poisoned me. He gave me this bitter seed to try and it made my mouth more bitter than ive ever felt before. it's crazy. it just gets worse and worse too. The members just stuff us full of food. I want to stop eating but they just tell us "don't be shy!" and then you have to eat it.

The rest of the week, it was just raining really really hard so we couldn't do a whole lot outside.

Elder Poppleton and Elder Griffin, the other elders in our house, don't have bikes, so its been a little difficult figuring out what we can do together, and what we just do on our bikes and leave them. We try to include them, but some times peoples houses are just too far to walk around.

Today, we are celebrating Deepavali! it's an Indian holiday which is a ton of fun! we are at our president's house who is Indian so he is celebrating it. Deepa means lights in Hindi, I think. Its kind of like a holiday where you eat and eat and eat from morning until night. It's a holiday to ward off the evil spirits. 

I bought another sarung which is really nice. It's the Muslim skirt that they use to pray. It's really comfortable to sleep in. I'll take a picture next week. :D :D