Missionaries!

I said I was going to give updates of “my missionaries” I forgot until today. I need to do something to keep my mind off my ensuing bad grade in Calligraphy. I’m going to get a B in Calligraphy I know it. How ridiculous is that? Very I think. And now I only have one more real final and a few bookbinding projects to do! Hooray! And I have four days to do it! Double hooray! Usually I’m doing this the night before! I suppose I should feel grateful then that my hardest finals were yesterday and today. They weren’t even that hard because it wasn’t like I was trying to salvage a grade or bring up a B+ to an A- by doing well. I’ll just do my thing and be happy with my B+ or B or B-. It’s not like I’m trying to get into Medical School or something. Nope, they will still give me a diploma even if I get a B in Impressionism and the Arts or in Southern Baroque Art or in Calligraphy for that matter (I just thought my countless hours in front of the TV practicing my letters would at least get me an A- no matter how bad my letter slope is). Ok! Back to the missionaries!

JESS has been transferred to Kuala Lumpur which is the capital of Malaysia. But she had a really dramatic experience in Miri last week. Here it is:

The biggest news of the week is concerning our most recent convert, Langu. We went to her house on Saturday night because we're starting to teach her 10 year old daughter who is so cute and loves church. it was a random stop in, because another appointment fell through. Well, we walk up to her ghetto house, her creepy husband is sitting by the door smoking and drinking and we ask if Langu is home and we look back, and she's sitting in the back room by candlelight just crying. So we go in and find out that they had a big fight about him drinking and she hates it that he's always drinking. So then both of us tried to have a go at him, try to get him to realize that his wife is good and beautiful and all this stuff. She said he threatened to kill her and all this stuff. He was just drunk though and everything we said he didn't care about it, and I was SO MAD at him, I had to hold myself back from just like yelling his head off. Eventually we just had to leave though even though we didn't want to, so we said a prayer with her and she ended up smiling when we left.

We found out Langu's husband had hit her after we left the night before, and we knew she didn't want to go home. So we told the RS president, then talked the branch president and tried to figure out what to do. Basically, we ended up taking her home to pack up all of her stuff and get her last kid. Elder Dean drove us over there with her. We walked into the kampung, her husband came out and started making ridiculous comments to us, and then their neighbor, this totally independent Iban woman came out and started yelling at him to get away from us. So he slunk back inside to drink more. Then Langu just packed up all her stuff, Sister Clark stood guarding the door so he couldn't get in. Once he found out that his wife was walking out on him, he came out and started asking her for all of her money, and Langu went ballistic. She started hitting the door and yelling at him in Iban, like, "I don't have any money! You have it all!" I asked her neighbor what goes on, and she said every single night they fight, he hits her, sometimes doesn’t let her eat, throws the kids around, spends all the money on alcohol and cigarettes, etc. I just couldn't even believe it. Here we didn’t' even know, because she won't ever talk, but all we knew was that she liked church, and kept coming and liked us and had the biggest smile when we came over. So before we knew it, every single woman in the kampung was sticking their heads through the windows and doors yelling at him to get away, telling us that the "orang putihs" (white people) where coming to take her away from her evil husband. It was the craziest thing. So we left with her 3 kids, her stuff in probably only like 4 little bags, and got into the Deans car and drove her away.”

CAMI has now been in the MTC for a month. Here’s what she has to say,

“It has been 3 weeks, and I still can hardly say anything in Finnish. ha ha. Ridiculous language. There’s a new sister from Finland who just came in last night and she's going to Croatia, and she looked at all the charts in our room and was like "I don't know how to read those, and I have no idea what they mean." English just doesn't translate to Finnish very well, but it's fun when we get the sentences completely right, which hardly ever happens. We watched "the testaments" in Finnish on Friday with English subtitles, and it sounds really cool. Like there's a lot of "l's" and "k's" and rolled "r's" and they say they're vowel sounds kind of in the back of the throat. It’s just cool. I’m excited to be able to really speak it. Right now it's fun to try and pronounce everything correctly. Oh, by the way, all of the eastern Europe country missionaries like hate the Spanish-speaking missionaries because they always walk by us and are like "holla, hermanas" and then they start trying to say sentences in Spanish that end up being like "voy a cafeteria" and we're like "hm, wonder what that means." ridiculous. Basically we're all like if I went Spanish-speaking, I would only have to be in the MTC for like a week it's so easy. And the mama Finns get offended when they're called "hermanas." (I remember feeling the exact same way. But people are needed to serve everywhere, and thanks to the Tower of Babel we have lots of languages to learn. Some easier than others.)