We had a fun activity at our Johor Bahru Branch
this week.  It was advertised as a Relief Society

activity, but the Senior Couple and the Elders are always invited.  The funny thing though, was it ended up with anyone coming, including the husbands to most of the wives.  It was making "Chinese Dumplings".  Here is a picture of my first attempt to make this little dough filled dumpling.  Elder Wang, our newest elder to our district, made the little dough circles and then we put the stuffing inside.  There was three different types of stuffing used.  One was chives and pork, the other was vegetables and the third choice was

pork and prawns.  Here is my lovely wife, with her cute little apron on, supervising the project.  I dropped her off at 7 PM and decided to just go back to our apartment, only one block away.  I gave her my cell phone and told her that I would come back and get her when she called.  As I dropped her off, I ran into the elders and Brother Brian Che, our new Elder's Quorum President.
They begged me to stay, since they were going to be stuck in the foyer, waiting for the sisters to finish the activity.  I told them I couldn't stay and
left.  I stayed home for about an hour and returned.

 Here is our new E.Q. President, Brother Brian Che.  His real name is Miau Fung Che, but all our Chinese brothers and sisters give themselves an American name also.  He was the 1st Counselor, but the president needed to be released and Brother Brian was all that was left.
There is 19 Melchizedek Priesthood brethren here in the JB Branch and all of them are in a leadership position or less active.  It doesn't leave much choices for callings.  Right now, we are in the process of getting a new activated brother to gain the Mel. Pr., so he can become the 1st Counselor to President Che.

Here is Brother Brian's wife, Sister Melanie, which is our branch Relief Society President.  Her real name is Man Yee Pang.  She is a really great cook.  We have been over to her home twice now and she makes wonderful Chinese meals.  Her "spring rolls" are amazing and last time, she made some "cinnamon rolls", from scratch.  They were sooo good.  She said she found the recipe on line and thought she would try it for us, since we were Americans.  They were really great.

 This picture Linda told me take, since this was her job in preparing the Chinese Dumplings.  She had to pull off the heads and legs of all the prawns, then wash them off in the colander.  Who would think you would need to save them.
But, they ended up being the soup base inwhich the Chinese Dumplings were cooked in.  Gross!  I didn't drink any of the soup juice, fearful that I would be sucking up one of the eyeballs or something. 

This is the finish product.  A pot full of the cooked Chinese Dumplings in the prawn head soup and a plate of fried dumplings, which I preferred.  The bowl, behind the fried dumplings, is a mixture of black vinegar and ginger, which you pour over top of the dumplings.  It was quite delicious.  I really enjoyed the chive dumplings, but wasn't so sure of the prawn and pork dumplings.  Their idea of prawns, out here in Malaysia, are suppose to be similar to shrimp, but they don't come anything close to it.

As we visited a local mall called "Giant", we came across this beautiful colored rice painting, done on the mall tile floor.  It is celebrating "Deepavali", which is coming up Nov. 3rd.  This is one of the Hindu holidays.  I thought that the greatest place to teach school would be here in Malaysia.  It seems that they have a holiday almost every other week around here.  Many of them are around the various religions such as the different Muslim holidays, the Hindu holidays, the birthdays for the Sultans and the Presidents of Malaysia, their 4th of July and lots of others.


Each of the sections, of this beautiful peacock, are made of colored rice.  We watched the little children dropping the rice on the tile floor and arranging it.  We went into the store to buy some gifts and when we came out, half the picture was completed.  It thought how beautiful and creative to build this and just a few pushes of the broom and it's all cleaned up. 





Today, we had our 6th baptism.  It was Sister Vennesa's husband, Brother Mike.  His name is Mike Aleyster anak Kinchau.  He is standing along side of his wife, in the white tee shirt.  We couldn't find a white shirt that fit him and couldn't find a jump suit that fit him either.  So we improvised.  Elder Kavapalu had the privilege of baptizing Mike.  He will be a great addition to the Masai Branch.  Along side of Mike is Vennesa's brother, President Joe, who is the 2nd Counselor in the Branch Presidency.  Elder Adam's is on the end with the little monster child, Eddie. 
Eddie is the terror of the Masai Branch.  He runs wild through most of the sacrament meeting and both mom or dad do anything to stop him.  You just want to trip him as he runs by or grab him and give him a good swat on the bottom end.  I guess every ward and branch has an "Eddie" to put up with.  Brother Mike took quite a few weeks to overcome his problem with smoking, but finally did it.  Now, we need to keep him strong in the branch and get him a calling or responsibility.  He has great family support and will bless the branch with priesthood power.

 The amazing blessings, from the Lord, of technology.  On Saturday evening, we had the wonderful privilege to witness our grandson's baptism through Skype.  Unbelievable!  It was Parker Vincent Schollenberger turning 8 years old and his dad, Ben, baptizing and confirming him.  Saturday was October 12th, here in Malaysia, but really, we began at midnight, which would be October 13th.  The baptism, back in Utah, was at 10 AM Utah time, and 14 hours later our time.  We had just finished our first 2 sessions of General Conference over at our JB Branch, and then stayed awake till the

 baptism.  We receive our General Conference one week later, on Oct. 12 and 13.  We watched the Saturday sessions from 3 to 5 PM and 6 to 8 PM, with an hour inbetween for a quick supper.
We ate some KFC Chicken with the Elders.  We were blessed to have 6 people at these session, one of them an investigator.  Then, we went home and stayed busy, trying to keep awake until our midnight.  The baptism began about 7 minutes late and went to about 12:55 AM in Malaysia.  After Parker was baptized, I finally got the idea to get out our camera and take some pictures of our computer while we were Skyping our family.  The young man conducting the meeting announced that we
were joining them from Singapore.  That was fun to hear that.  The first two pictures are Karey Hanks giving a talk on the Holy Ghost.  This picture is just after Parker got confirmed by his dad and shaking everyone's hands.  The last picture is when Parker got up to bear his testimony.  Everything went so very well, with Jacob holding the IPad and getting everything just great.  Preston gave the opening prayer and Porter gave a wonderful talk.  This baptism was held up in Salt Lake somewhere, because Parker's cousin, Orion Xiao was also baptized at the same time.  Rachel lead the music and Whitt

played the piano for the service.  It was really amazing to sit here in Malaysia and see the entire baptismal service live.  Even serving our full time mission half way around the world, we still were blessed to see Parker get baptized and not miss any of our grandkid's special day.  We closed our Skype out and got ready for bed, finally getting to sleep around 1:30 in the morning.  It was so worth it.  We then got up on our Sunday and had the two Sunday sessions of General Conference, from 10 AM to 12 noon and 1 PM to 3 PM.  Linda made a nice pot of chili (which was a bit hot to the taste because of a different chili powder we used) for the luncheon.  Everyone lays out their food and shares together.  General Conference was great, as usual and we got lots of good talks to use for the next quarter's Relief Society and Priesthood meetings.  We are so grateful to the Lord for such technology in our day.  Skyping Parker's baptism was wonderful.

 Here are 4 pictures that were sent to us from Payson, Utah, just 5 blocks from our home back in America.  The church is putting on the Moroni statue onto the top of the Payson Temple.  Our daughter, Rebekah, sent them to us, showing her 4 kids on the bottom two pictures (Jacob, then Karey, then Kaley and Jared on the right).  I wanted to add these to our blog, so we would remember the date and the time, while on our mission in Malaysia.  We have been on the Payson Temple internet site, following the pictures since we arrived.
To think that this beautiful temple will be so close when we get home, and the best part, is it is right next to a Wal-Mart, about 5 blocks north.  Now, that will be the two places we will spend the most time at.
Our week has been very busy here in Malaysia.  We had a young man from the Philippines show up to church on Sunday and made the assumption that he could just stay with us before having a job interview.  We didn't know that the

 interview was on Wednesday and Thursday of this week and that we were allowing him to sleep in our apartment, feed him and drive him to all these appointments.  His "auntie" just assumed it would be alright.  He also needed RM 2,000 for the first interview, to begin paperwork on a "work visa" so he can stay in Malaysia.  By Thursday, we found out that this entire interview was a "scam" and some people were just trying to get RM 2,000 from him.  He was getting the money from fast offerings, but he didn't receive it yet and it was a good thing.  There is a lot of crime and dishonesty here, which is probably the same anywhere.  This young man, Alyzon, then had to get on a bus and return to his aunt's home about 2 hours north of us.  Sad situation.
Secondly, we took our dear friend, Brother Gema to the hospital for a CT scan.  They found a very large mass attached to his right kidney.  He will need surgery and they will find out if it is cancerous or not.  Brother Gema is a great

 leader, here in Johor Bahru.  Many Iban families follow him each week to church and everything revolves around Brother Gema and Sister Eta, his wife.  They are a super family.  The amazing thing here, in Malaysia, is their health care system.  If you want to go to a private "klinik" or to your own doctor or specialist, you have to pay quite a large amount.  But if you use the government doctors and hospitals, it cost very, very little.  A doctor's appointment to a specialist is RM 200.  Going to the hospital and seeing one of the government doctors is about RM 3.  Having a baby C-section cost Sister Madeline about RM 50, because she went to the government hospital.  The only problem is if you have an emergency or immediate need, you will have to wait you turn and follow an appointment schedule according to the governments plan.
Brother Gema needed an ultrasound first, scheduled in Aug.
Then his CT scan was scheduled Sept. 24 and the follow-up was Oct. 24.  He could have been dead by that time.

While all of this is going on with Alyzon at our house and taking Brother Gema to the hospital, we had another missionary transfer since Elder McCown went home to Idaho.  Elder Tan is getting a new "greenie" from China who doesn't speak English, only Chinese.  That should be fun.  Also, we are still working on the Manila Temple Trip in Dec.
It was all going well, then we had to cancel it because of passport concerns, then we worked that out and were on again, and now we had more problems with the records and schedules and temple patron housing.  What a mess.  I think we are back on, but I'm not sure.  With all this, we have to get the flash drives working for General Conference in 3 different languages, arrange for another special conference next week (Asia Area Stake Conf. Broadcast) and I'm writing, almost daily, to Elder Gong, the President of the Asia Area Presidency of the 70 for our District Conference, Nov. 9th and 10th.  It is crazy busy around here.  My new word, added to our list of 450 words now, is "gila gila".  It means "crazy".

No pictures today, just a great experience that we had with a sweet family here in Johor Bahru.  For the past 7 months, we have made many visits to Brother Rantai and Sister Sani.  They have 3 daughters, ages 16, 14 and 6.  They joined the church, here in JB, about 9 months ago.  After an interview with the branch president, I was privileged to interview Brother Rantai to receive the Melchizedek Priesthood and be ordained an Elder.  I read all the questions to Brother Rantai in "bahasa" and he actually understood me and answered everything very well.  The one difficulty that Brother Rantai has is he cannot read or write.
This humble family, the wife and two older daughters, read the scriptures to their dad.  They never miss church and even though he can't read the words of the hymns or read in a Sunday School class, Brother Rantai and his family come out every week.  So today, Brother Gema is going to confer the priesthood on Brother Rantai and ordain him to be an Elder.  It was very touching.  Brother Gema is just a member for one year and I needed to help him with the correct wording and procedures.
Right after Brother Rantai was ordained, he switched seats with his 14 year old daughter and he anointed her head to bless his little girl.  Brother Gema sealed the anointing and I just sat back and took all this in, trying to hold back the tears.  Brother Gema showed Brother Rantai how to drop one drop of oil on her head and then took Brother Rantai's hands and placed them on his daughter's head and then whispered in his ear what to say.  Then Brother Gema sealed the anointing and gave her a blessing in "bahasa".  Such faith and dedication and courage to see this humble man bless his daughter and his family with the priesthood of God.  I then handed a little booklet of all the ordinances in "bahasa" to his 16 year old daughter and also a sacrament card in "bahasa".  Brother Rantai and his wife and going to work together so he can memorize the prayers so he can bless the sacrament soon.  Wow!  It is an amazing honor and privilege for Linda and me to be here in Malaysia and witness, first hand, the great faith and commitment of these saints.  The Lord has blessed me to use my priesthood enough times to help these humble saints to do things according to His will and follow the church handbook and church procedures.  Today, I set apart a new Elder's Quorum President, taught the Branch President how to give a name and blessing to his own son, and assisted Brother Gema and Brother Rantai to use their priesthood and bless others.  A very fine Sabbath Day.