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