On Saturday evening, Oct. 18th, 2014, we had these two dear Indian sisters baptized into the church.  Sis. Regima is the mother and her daughter, Sis. Patmah only speak Malay and Tamal.  The daughter understands some English and then interprets for her mother.  We also had Sister Jess baptized, one of our Chinese sisters.  Her picture is at the bottom of these 6 pictures.  It's amazing to have all these different languages and cultures in our two little branches here in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.  These 3 sisters give us 17 baptisms this year.  Our district goal is 20.

On our last P-day, we went with our eight elders to a candy factory.  It was awesome.  Each of us got a free sample of "Barbie microphones" with little star shaped candies inside.  They were "sedap". (delicious)  We walked from one area to another, watching the workers make suckers from giant blobs of hot molded candy, then into the room where they stamp out the little stars, then into another room where hard candy circles come out of these loud machines.  After that, we walked into another 3 rooms, where different candies were produced.  As we walked up to the workers and watched them making these candies and filling the machines with sucker sticks or wrappers, etc, we would get a sample of that particular candy being made.  Such fun!

Each of us had to wear a hair net before we could enter the plant and we were not allowed to take any pictures of the inside.  At the end of the tour, we had the owner take one group picture of us with our hair nets on.  The elder to the far right of the picture, Elder Lee, is the son of the candy factory owner.  Elder Lee is a Singaporean and his parents live in Singapore and have two candy factories in Johor Bahru.  The elders are not suppose to visit with their parents while serving a mission, so we kept Elder Lee far from his dad as he gave us the "royal tour".  We are each holding up our Barbie microphone.  The whole tour only took about 30 minutes, but it was a fun P-day activity together.

One of the most prized things you can receive here in Malaysia, from our wonderful Malay and Iban members, is a hand made Iban tie.  It has only taken me 20 months to finally get accepted, and I was so surprised when Sis. Minang gave this to me today at church.  You can see, from the picture below, that it is made of thousands of tiny beads that are strung together on string and made into this intricate design.  The top of the tie, around the neck, has some pearl sized beads and, at the end of the beads, another tiny set of beads that form a button hole.  On the other end of the neck fastener is a small red button, so you place the tie around your neck and button it in place.  Then you pull your collar back over the larger beads and the tie is ready to go.  They made an extra long tie for me that goes down below my belt.  Sis. Minang's sister made the tie for me and had it shipped over from East Malaysia.  The women also wear these beaded necklaces and beaded bracelets.  It must have taken this good sister hours upon hours to make this tie for me.  We offered Sis. Minang money to give to her sister, but she wouldn't take any.  I was greatly honored and grateful for this beautiful gift of love and labor.