Sister Wendy Got her Mission call and Thaipusam Festival

Thaipusam Festival...check out those hooks in his torso

and in his Mouth and Chest

Look at the guy in the left of the picture and look at the size of the hooks in his Back and then he is pulling something with the ropes that are attached to the hooks.

Well this week was pretty good. We went and saw a member named Ronnie who was baptized into the church in the UK and returned to Malaysia a year ago and didn’t know there was a church here. It went pretty well. This week Darshana and Movina’s mom accepted a baptism date in May and we’ll slowly slowly work her towards her date. But the most exciting thing to happen this week is Sister Wendy got her mission call... TO..... Salt Lake Temple Square Mission, craziness all over. She reports to the MTC for 3 weeks on July 6th 2010 so you guys will have to go see her when she gets up temple Square. It’s pretty exciting. I gave her your email and she can email you guys some question she has…I hope you don’t mind ha-ha.

We didn’t see Mohan this week because of Thaipusam which is a Tamil Holiday and its crazy they put hooks through their bodies and pull giant statues of their Hindu Gods and shave their heads etc. you'll have to look it up on Google or something. So Jerry and all those guys are off to France now... so hopefully they will find the church or the church will find them.

Well when we went to pick up Elder Herbst, Thomas, and Barlow from the airport Barlow and Herbst got detained because of Kitab Mormon (Book of Mormon in Indonesia) and they took all of our supplies they were packing in Tamil, Chinese, Indonesian, Tai, Burmese, and English.... they were back there for an hour or so. This is all because of the recent thing with the word Allah. But they said we could get them back. So they called us on Monday and said that we could come get them back or most of it.... they gave us it all back but the Indonesian, they are detaining them because they have the word Allah and they think they are in Malay and so it is a book that goes against the Al Quran..... So we might get them back we don’t know and it could take a couple months to find out.

Something else exciting is we found some Mexican food in Penang so we are going to go and eat there tonight :). Umm I finally sent out all the letters and packages by airmail so they should get there soon. I sent one package to Grandma and Grandpa Watkins just to mix up where I was sending everything.

Well we got some fun facts to send you guys about the area that we learned from Elder Watson when he was here. In the Southeast Asia area (me) Hong Kong to Middle East, Mongolia to Singapore. So it doesn’t cover the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Russia, or Australia all that over there is different. So we have 25 countries and 3.4 billion people in the Southeast Asia area. Over 1/2 the world’s population and only 200 million of them can be taught. This area has the greatest number of non-Christians in the world and more Muslim people than the Middle East. So it’s just crazy how many people here can’t be taught because of religion mainly. Well that’s all for this week.

Elder Watkins