the lady's name is bella

hey mom. sorry if you got confused, but that picture that i sent you is of all the missionaries in the entire singapore mission, every single elder and sister serving here. there are about 80 of us. it was taken in august so not too long ago. all of us went to singapore for a training, actually the same training that nyssa described having just been through. missionary work is actually undergoing a transformation, so every mission is having trainings like the one nyssa described to get missionaries used to teaching towards people's needs and not teaching lessons. next year, the mtc will also change the way missionaries are taught to be more in line with teaching towards investigators needs. our mission president told us something kind of funny. i'll try to describe briefly what he said. well, missionary work used to be done with memorized lessons, written by apostles. then they made the switch to preach my gospel so missionaries would teach by the spirit. after preach my gospel, success in the world went down. he said the problem was that the missionaries after preach my gospel came out were still using memorized lesson, but ones that they had come up with themselves. the comment i thought was funny was this "when i was a missionary, at least we memorized lessons that were written by apostles!" so they've really been working us hard to make specific lessons for each person so they are tailored fit to whomever we will be teaching. it's fairly tough. lot's and lot's of planning, but it's been good. it is a little frustrating when you spend a good amount of time preparing a lesson and then at the last minute the person cancels, but i guess that's part of being a missionary.
 
anyways, as for the missionarying this week, things have been really good. our baptism did go through. i'll attatch a pic. the lady's name is bella. she's indonesian and pretty awesome, but way shy. her husband was baptized a few months ago. it was awesome to hear her testimony. she seemed really happy to have joined the church. also, we've been tracting in various areas for the past few days. we contacted this german lady who speaks really good english and is married to a chinese malaysian. that was pretty unexpected. she seemed to be pretty happy to talk to another white person. she said we could come back and teach a little bit, so we'll see how that goes. it always surprises me to run into white people in malaysia. there's so many more in kuching than sibu. we also ran into this scottish guy. and as we were riding past the airport, we encountered an english man who wasn't very nice. what a stange week. but after we finished talking to the german lady, we saw this kid on a moto. he drove past us and then turned around and started driving back towards us. so we kind of flagged him down and started talking to him. we found out he works with one of our investigators. so he invited us to go to his house. just yesterday we met them, and the kids family seems awesome. they have trouble with work, so we'll see how things go, but the family is pretty cool.
 
we're still working with those people i talked about last week, but they're being bums right now. it's tough to get them to church. they seem good, but i guess we haven't done a good enough job at conveying the importance of church. i can see some of these families becoming big strengths to this area. we'll just have to keep working hard and see how things go. anyways i guess that's all for my week. i will add that i am pretty jealous to hear your plans to visit cold stone. malaysia just hasn't quite figured ice cream out yet.
 
thanks for the letter mom. i guess i'll be going. take care and have a good week.
love, zac


ok here are some pics. they are of the lady who got baptized, bella, then there's the 18 of us i told you about who played soccer last week, and then there's this crazy building that i saw while riding my bike one day. notice which side all the motos are on. you can think of it what you like.
 
anyways, that's all i have for this week. see ya