What's That Smell?

Note from Dad: Sorry about the late post, for those who check right away, as you will see the email system was down for quite a while. It's up and running now!

hello family!

wow, i almost didn't get to email today. we came here this morning and the website was down. we came back again after we went shopping and it was still down. we decided to give it one last try before we go to dinner and it worked! yippee skippee!

so this last while has been pretty rough. the last week and a half or so have been incredibly unsuccessful. we had to drop three of the people that had baptism dates because they won't keep commitments. we did our best to commit a lot of people to come to church, but only one showed. that was a bummer and a half. sunday is like the result day for the week, and when you only have one at church it either means you didn't work very hard or it's been a poopy week. it was a poopy week. we have a huge teaching pool and we find new people every day, but getting people to keep commitments is the hard part. elder daines (the new assistant) called us and suggested we do one of the exercises in preach my gospel to help us work on our commitment extensions. we did it along with some role play and the result has been amazing. we went out on monday and set three more baptism dates and everything has been really good since then. all three of the dates we set were with new investigators that are really solid. i hope they make it.

money has also been short. i wrote about this in my letter home, but you won't get that for about a week, so i'll write it again. they're re-doing the way that they give us support. they've given everybody debit cards and they'll just put it on those at the beginning of the month. the only problem is that we've been budgeting to get support money on the 26th, so we have to just grind it out until then. i've got about 35RM to last eight days. i've got faith though. as it says in 1 Nephi 7:12, the lord can to all things if we have faith. no worries.

WEEKLY REVELATION: there are pretty much 5 smells in malaysia: 1) feces- whether it's human or animal, it haunts you where ever you go. 2) urine- people thing it's so funny to pee in elevators and in stairwells. personally, i don't see the attraction. 3) BO- deodorant is the least purchased item in malaysia. 4) exhaust- this one is the best of the five, but it's still horrible how polluted it is here. 5) cigarettes- i don't know the exact percentage of smokers in malaysia, but it has to be right near 50%. moral of the story: I LOVE MALAYSIA! but not the smells.

i had a really cool experience yesterday. we spent most of the day trying to find this lady that was referred to us by church headquarters. we spent forever looking, with no luck. i suggested to elder palfreyman that we pray, and i asked that if we couldn't find the lady, that we would be able to find someone who would progress towards baptism. we didn't find the lady, so we walked back to the train station. as we came down the stairs, i noticed a guy looking at us, so i went and talked to him. to make a long story short, i talked to him the whole train ride home, gave him a tamil book of mormon, and he's coming to church on sunday. it was really cool. prayer answered.

Whitney, tell kahea to email me and give me his mailing address. have fun at prom! i hope you get the letter i sent to sometime this week. it's hilarious. take a ton of pictures for me.

i don't think i'm going to get the package, and i wept when you told me there was two packages of beef jerky in it. POOP! yeah, sending them to the mission office is probably best. although i did get a package from chelsie there. just hit and miss i suppose. in the next package, do you think you could send some high endurance red zone old spice? three or four. as i said, there isn't much selection as far as deodorant goes here.i love you all. stay safe. take pictures =)

elder troxel