Merry Christmas from Malaysia!
I can now officially say that I have gotten to experience Christmas in another country! It has been amazing. Part of our outreach this month was going caroling at different houses and putting on a program at the local mall. These were a bit of work but also a huge blessing. The Malaysian constitution states it is illegal for a Malay citizen to be anything but Muslim. As a result, in Malaysia, it is illegal for us to share the News with Muslims, so we have to be careful with what we say. Christmas, however, provides a fantastic loophole. We learned to sing Christmas songs in 4 different languages and performed the Life House Skit (you can Google it and find the skit done by other people). For the caroling, we got to wear traditional Indian garb which was super fun! We did not physically see any fruit from what we did, but we believe that there was some planted!
We spent Christmas Eve at the church for their service, then spent Christmas Day with our host family at their house and also with the church body. We went to their house around 11 am. We had traditional Indian food and cake. Their cake was different. The frosting was actually straight butter smeared on the cake! It was a lot of fun just to hang out and talk to people and eat good food! It had more of a church celebration/summer picnic than Christmas feeling, but it was still good! After we were done there, we came home and shared gifts as a team, which was a sweet time!
As of now, we are finished teaching for the month. Teaching was good this month because the children are preschool-aged, so they don’t now much about any language. It also helped that there is almost no language barrier with the main teacher, so we knew what we were supposed to be doing. The children are really smart. We taught them a lot of basic English things but also manners. The school focuses on giving them good manners but also being self-sufficient. They pick up their own chairs, clean their own places, pick up their own toys, and so on. It was really cool to see this and be a part of it. It was also fun just to love on the kids and get to know them.
These next few days will be filled with sleeping, praying for the community and family we are in/with this month, cleaning the school, and preparing to move to the next country. We are excited to see what God has in store but also sorry to leave! On the 29th, we will take a bus to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, where we will meet the rest of our squad. On the 31st, we all fly to the Philippines for the month of January.
Merry Christmas!
Elise
