Project, Presidents and the Pox

Great News.  Our project for the Indonesian School Children has been approved.  We are so thrilled.  If you remember from a past blog, the Indonesian children are not allowed to attend schools here in Malay.  A sweet lady named Kathryn Rivai has started some schools for them on the plantations and lumber yards where there fathers work.  She receives no funding from the government and relies entirely on donations.  We will be helping 3 schools with a total of 275 children.  The largest is the school at Keningau which we visited about two months ago.  I blogged some pictures of our visit.  Keningau is 2 hours outside of KK.  The school there helps Indonesian children whose fathers work in the lumber factory.  Now we will have to buy all the school supplies and the supplies for the hygiene kits.  The branches are going to help us put the kits together.  Hong Kong was asking a lot of questions about our project and we didn't have all the answers they were looking for so we asked Elder Subandriyo, the area authority 70, if he would help us with the questions Hong Kong had.  In less than an hour Hong Kong had emailed us and said that Elder Subandriyo told them the project would be ok so Hong Kong said if it is good enough for Elder Subandriyo, it is good enough for us.  Bang -- it was ok'd in nothing flat.  Funny how getting an area authority 70 involved can help you out.  Thank you Elder Subandriyo.  Oh, did I mention that Elder Subandriyo is Indonesian.  Maybe that also helped.

Some of the Indonesian children.  The parents are able to pick up Indonesian School Uniforms when they go back to Indonesia for a visit.

Kindergarten class.  These children are just so sweet.  They are so happy to go to school that there is never a discipline problem in any grade

Today we got new branch presidents for both our branches.  Hooray.  Pres. Ng was sustained as the new branch president in KK1, replacing Pres. Francis who died.  Pres. Ng was the 1st counselor.  He has only been a member for 2 years.  He was Buddhist.  He is a great man and will do a good job we think.  In KK2 the new branch President is Pres. Sebastian.  He actually lives in the KK1 branch but they had to pull someone from KK1 to be branch president for KK2 because there isn't much priesthood in KK2.  He is a young man of about 30ish and has been a branch president before.  He is the taxi driver for all the members coming in and out of KK.  He has 2 adorable kids ages 3 and 2.

On Monday night at 6 pm we got a call to help one of the sisters, a recent convert, take her 11 year old son to the hospital.  He had just fallen and broken his arm.  We were in the emergency waiting room for about 2 hours before the 11 year old came out and told us his arm wasn't broken.  We said good, we'll just take you home then.  The boy went back and we didn't see or hear from him again.  After 45 minutes of waiting we had the Elders call the mother's cell phone to see what was going on.  Well his arm was broken and they had put one cast on but it was too tight so they were in the process of removing that cast and putting another one on. After three and half hours, we finally left the hospital.  It took forever. The next day we had an appointment with this same sister and her other children to teach her a follow-up lesson from her baptism.  We went to their apartment (in a really poor area with rats running everywhere) and we shook hands with all the kids and the mom.  Just as we were sitting on the floor the mother said, "Oh, the kids all have the chicken-pox".  AAAGH.  One of the kids was just breaking out and was running a fever and was so sick.  The others, 5 of them, were in various stages of the pox.  Ben and I have both had chicken pox but the elders with us weren't sure they had.  By now, we had all been exposed.  We gave our lesson and then left without shaking hands this time.  Outside we drenched ourselves in all the portable hand sanitizer we could find.  I think the incubation period for Chicken Pox is 2 weeks.  I think we'll be okay once I get rid of this rash and itch.  I don't think it's anything, do you?

We spent a good deal of time last week working on new apartments for all the new missionaries.  We need two more apartments. One for the sisters who are living with us and one for one set of missionaries who will be working in a new area a little farther out of downtown KK.  The sisters apartment will be in the same complex that the other Elders are living in now.  This is what we found for the Elders in the new area:

It is a brand new 4 bedroom house is a new "sub-division" area.  It is furnished.  This is the living room and that is elder Gottfriedson from Las Vegas enjoying the living room.  It is much bigger than the elders need but it is in a very safe area and is close to where they will be working.  It is also about 1/2 of the rent the Elders in KK are paying for their apartment.  They will use one of the bedrooms as a study.  Another member lives in the next block so that will be good too.  They are excited to move in.  Just need to get all the paper work completed.  More pictures:

A bedroom.

A bathroom.  Don't you just love the pink plastic mirror?  The elders are so tall they will have to kneel down to see in the mirror.  Wish us luck in getting all the missionaries moved into their own apartments this week.
Love ya all  E/S Read