hey

holy moley i can't believe richard is home already. congrats richard.

i guess i'll try to shoot him off an email and see how.

anyways, my week has been going well. i've got a good amount of pictures to send even, but the elder in our zone that has the memory card reader is in another part of bintulu today, so we didnt get to meet up with him. woops. i guess there's always next week. we got some good pictures from making dinner for some of our investigators. we made enchiladas. pretty delicious too. our investigators seemed to have fun, and we even had a pretty good turn out at church, even with the rain. well, the members didnt show up really, but our investigators did. i'm pretty sure i've told you about the people we're working with already. rabong's family and jeffery's family. they are both doing well, and hopefully next month can be baptized. unfortunately, next week is a holiday called gawai, the iban harvest festival, so everyone pretty much is going back to kampung, or their home town basically, which is pretty tough for missionary work. we'll see how it goes. but the work keeps going.

i dont know, i dont really have much else to say. life is good and going well. anyways, love you guys. talk to you next week.

love, zac
- Show quoted text -

love you

hey mom. yeah i got pictures of sara. pretty crazy how much she looks like nate. poor thing. hopefully she grows out of it. heehee. anyways, hopefully everything keeps going well. i'm glad you guys are having a cold front. i hope it lasts until i get home. not to be trunky or anything. speaking of the word trunky, i never heard it before the mission, but now that i'm out, it seems everyone else has heard it. dad used it in an email to me. maybe i was sleeping under a rock. anyways...

the area is doing really well,. i'm so pumped for missionary work. we just had an awesome zone conference in miri. that was fun. got to see the town a bit. this last sunday, we had rabong and lenny, kenny and jenny come to church. (i sent some pics to dad) they seemed to enjoy it and they seem really good as investigators. they invited us over for dinner tonight and we are cooking for them on saturday. rabong also volunteered to help me teach a dance for the branch party in june. pretty sweet. we have lots of fun when we go over there, and it's seems like they are making good progress. hopefully we'll put them on date for baptism tonight and maybe next month they will be baptized.

we found another family through referral. the man is named jeffery. i think i talked about him last time. they didnt come to church this sunday because they were visiting a relative in the hospital, but they seem way good. the man really wants his family to learn about the churhc, and he told us this sunday he will definitely bring his family to church.

on monday we went around looking for some less actives with the senior couple. that was pretty fun. hopefully we will get some new investigators out of it and bring some less actives back too. that's where the album came from that i forwarded to you guys, entitled 'teaching in hock peng.'

we've got a few other straggling investigators here and there. i'll tell you more about them when they progress more. i'm having a blast here in bintulu, even tho it's pretty darn hot all the time. the people here are awesome. the food is delicious. and we're teaching a lot of people about jesus christ, so that's enough for me. anyways, i think i'm gonna make a move. talk to you guys later. have a good week.

love, zac

1. former kuching zone members, reunited again at miri zone conference!
2. me and my mtc companion, finishing our missions together in the bintulu zone
3. more of my family tree. elder jefferies my uncle, elder mccormies my brother, elder ang my nephew, and me. now all of us except mccormies live in the same house in bintulu
4. the former johor elders. we were hard core.
5. me in kuching back in the day admiring a well cared for orchard
6. a really cute girl from the branch and her mom

1. we found a cotton candy stand! wee!
2. i guess as part of the process of purifying palm oil, they have to have the huge smoke stacks with even bigger flames shooting out of the top.
3. the fire lights up the night sky!
4. the miri chapel
5. me working hard during language study, courtesy of elder ang
6. us celebrating the departure of one of the branch's youth for malaysia's national service. don't worry, she'll be back in 3 months
7. ritchie (a recent convert of the previous elders) and rabong and kenny, his sons in law. we finally got them to come to church last week!

more pix

1. me thomas and peterson in from of the "more singapore city" section
2. across one of those sound bowl thingies. we intercepted a conversation between two chinese women, and the reception was crystal clear!
3. me and the plaque for america
4. andrew's baptism my first week in bintulu! he's a stud, and the guy baptizing him, wong, is also a stud.
5. who said you couldn't build the roof first?
6. those poor cats have no idea what they're in for. life in malaysia is rough.

mor pics

1. me cutting my own birthday cake (courtesy of a woman we just call "mom")
2. my impressive story telling skills captivates my audience
3. so much pizza, only one short lunch hour (my birthday lunch)
4. "Excuse me, miss. There seems to be a mistake. I believe I ordered the 'large'. Hello!"
5. the beautiful ocean of bintulu. i've never lived so close to the ocean in me life!
6. the murky pond filled with giant catfish in our back yard. maybe someday we'll feast..

à la recherche du temps skypé

hey dad this is zac
i should be skyping you guys around 6pm on mother's day your time. give or take some time. not exactly sure on the schedule. if for some reason i never skype you and you still want to get ahold of me, you could shoot an email or try calling at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. if i typed in the international codes wrong, i apologize. the actual number is xxxxxxxxxx, and you can figure out the internation codes from there., take care, have fun at work and talk to you on sunday.

love, zac

hey mom. thanks so much for the easter package. it was awesome. although.. unfortunately it didnt last me very long. i am still just as big of a candy fiend as i was when i left. but yeah, can you beliebe i'm 21? how fast time flies. thanks for the birthday wishes and money. you're the best mom.

anyways, bintulu is pretty sweet. i love being in sarawak so much. it's pretty crazy because everyone here is iban. i guess it took a 2 month stint in west malaysia to help me appreciate the east. we've been having fun this week just trying to meet the members and get some new investigators. the area was pretty rough when i got there. they had had a good amount of success before i came, but they kind of rode the wave of success until there was nothing left, and that's kind of the point we were at on my first day. but things are looking up quite a bit after the first week. we have some good new investigators. the area is all just kampung houses, or basically old rotting wooden houses. the roads are mud and rock soup, which makes travel interesting. the area has had missionaries living close by, so it seems like there are a lot of people who are kind of closed off, but we've been finding some good new people too. i'm having so much fun. this is exactly what i loved about sarawak. i feel like at this point of my mission, my ability to communicate has never been better, so i'm having lots of fun joking around and getting to know the members and investigators. the only thing i feels sad about is only having 3 more months to be in such an awesome area. people seem to like me for the most part. one of my favorite things about ibans is how ridiculously easy it is to make them laugh.

so for investigators, there is a dude named rabong, his wife, the wife's sister, and the wife's sister's husband. so two couples living in one house. they seem pretty good. the women's parents are baptized already, so it makes things easy. last lesson, we talked to them about their beliefs and got to know them. they seem pretty open and accepting of what we taught.

there is another house with two more couples that have member relatives. they live pretty far, so they've had lots of excuses not to come to church, but we're working with them still. the desire seems to be there, we just need to work to build it into action and progression.

there's also this family that we met. there's a 27 year old dude named loui. he's nice enough and seems good, but we learned last night, he is a little crazy. he told us about how he has healing powers and spirits enter his body to help people and all kinds of strange stuff. his brother is really good. wants to learn, promised to go to church, has been keeping commitments and genuinely wants to join.. but he's going back to kampung in a few weeks, to a place where the church has not gone yet. so we're going to load him up on church materials and lessons, and hope and pray the day will come when he can join the church. we're just hoping that if we get loui coming to church, we can sort out all of this "spirit" business.

there's a recent convert, andrew, whose baptism i was here for. andrew's family has not yet taken an interest. we committed a cousin to go to church, and we're still hoping to be able to spark interest in his mom and siblings.

on top of that, nothing much else. trying to get referrals from the members, so hopefuly that goes well. the members here are way cool. there's some in a different branch even that are making me food for my birthday. i'm excited. next week we'll be going to miri for a zone conference, so that should be way awesome. i've never served there, just visited, and i love it. maybe sometime in the future for a pday we'll be able to go to a place called niah caves. you should look it up on wikipedia. it's a cool place. hopefully i'll make it before i go home.

so.. i believe i have skype confirmed with the senior couple here. i believe i should be able to skype you around 6pm your time on mother's day. it will be 9am my time on monday. if i calculated the time difference wrong, i apologize. i'm excited to talk to you guys. anyways, that's all i have for the week. i love it here in bintulu. so much fun. talk to you on mother's day!

love, zac