[B-Squad has a special talent of taking over places, like hostels.]
Anyways…
So… here's the scoop on Malaysia.
It's MANistry month.
Which means…
NO women.
Only we don't hate women.
🙂
The line up:
[(Clockwise) Jeremy (with the wheel barrow), Andrew, Me,
Wade, Brian, Ben, Paul, & Dan]
[They're awesome guys, check out their blogs too!]
Our team for Manistry or, Malanistry month (ya know, since we're in Malaysia),
consists of the men from 3 different teams.
[This mall had 6 levels, an indoor roller coaster, and archery place… ]
After a few days in Kuala Lampur…
We took an overnight traing to a little town called Gua Musang.
The terrain here is beautiful!
[Cliffs and caves everywhere]
Meet Papa Chua and Auntie Kim.
They are wonderful servants with hospitality like no other. They made us feel so loved and cared for everyday that we were with them. I miss them already. It was a pleasure to serve alongside them and bless them by helping out on the estate.
This is Guna. Without him, we couldn't have done most of the projects we did. Guna is the handiest handyman. He drove us around in the van, operated the tractor, fixed the generator, got us the tools we needed… Guna does it all!
For the two weeks that we stayed with them, we helped do various projects around their estate.
The estate has a bunch of palm trees that produce palm fruit.
It gets sent to a factory and gets pressed for palm oil.
They took us on a tour of the factory on the first day.
This is home for the month:
[Complete with bucket showers, 2-3 a day]
We weeded out a pond next to the house. We pulled out almost all of the plants you see in the picture.
We were asked to kill any snakes we found while weeding out the pond.
One was beheadded and a few minutes later a dozen baby snakes crawled out…
We filled in pot holes in the 'roads' and put up a few gates around the estate.
This is Prayer Mountain; we put down this concrete slab.
We did some prayer and worship on Prayer Mountain.
Branches were cut down, revealing this beautiful view.
We formed a band – The Ocho Gringos and sang at a few church services.
Once for the Indian community, and another time for the Chinese community.
Next to me is Eli. She is a missionary from Acapulco, Mexico and is learning the Malay language and spreading the Gospel in Gua Musang. She's awesome. I never thought I'd be using my Spanish in Malaysia. We hung out with Eli for just a few days, and all enjoyed getting to know her. We had the opportunity to bless her by painting the walls in her house. She made us home made salsa and chips one day, and fried quesadillas another. Good stuff.
While working on prayer mountain, Brian and I came across a few Malay boys who spoke very little english, and ditched school. We spent time with them and loved on them the best that we could. The language barrier made it difficult to build a better relationship with them.
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These two weeks were a lot of manual labor, perfect for… a group of men. While manual labor is not exactly my favorite type of work, it was good to start projects and see them to completion. I know that everything we did was greatly appreciated and a blessing to Papa Chua and Auntie Kim.
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Extra stuff:
[This one's a twin!]
There is a village of a bunch of cookie cutter houses near the estate that the government had built.
We went there one day to fly Dan's kite, and played with some kids there as well.
Malaysia has some beautiful clouds.
I love this picture. I think it looks like The Sound of Music…
After working on the various projects, we would go swimming in the river.
We found some kids swimming as well.
One day, we found a dead monitor lizard stuck under a bridge.
It was water logged and smelly, and so I pulled it out. I swear it was about to explode…
Yea, I touched it…
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After the first 2 weeks in Gua Musang,
we took a few days off and visited Singpore!
[We made our way to the 57th floor of the Marina Bay Hotel and caught a view of the city]
We went to the Night Safari.
We traveled to Sentosa and saw the Underwaterworld.
But nothing beats a good sunset…
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And that's just the first two weeks…
the following two weeks will be another blog.
Hopefully it gets written and posted before we go to Kenya in a few days.
I cannot believe the Asia leg of the Workd Race is over!
Stay tuned.
