Thanksgiving in Malaysia ! ! !

happy thanksgiving everyone, the day has finally arrived!

this year i am particularly excited, I'm not sure why, maybe it was all those praise and thanksgiving hymns. but it is turning into a pretty good thanksgiving. we live right above the senior couple here, and so me and sister lim and elder and sister reidt are cooking everything and all the elders are coming over and we are going to hang out all day and play games and stuff. and sister reidt already made apple and pumpkin pies yesterday, and lemon today, so basically, I'm so excited! so even though I'm far away from my real family (sniff sniff, i love you guys..) it sort of feels like a family here, and it is nice. it would be sweet to have Christmas here too. we almost didn't have thanksgiving though. first we were going to have it on Thursday, then the zone leaders were being all weird, so fine, we'll have it on pday, but there wasn't enough time to make all the stuff, and we tried switching pday and we weren't allowed, and then it ended up being me and sister lim going to the market for exercise yesterday morning to get all the stuff for pies, and now its today and it is going to be good. the funny thing is, the zone from miri is having their thanksgiving on Friday, because that is Thursday in America. weird. oh well i don't care, I'd rather hang out all day and not feel guilty about not working. ah, missionary life.

in other news, me and sister lim are excited because there is a baptism on Saturday! and for the first time my whole mission, a family is getting baptized, all together. cool, huh? sulin, simbut, and their son, david. they are such a cool family. they got interviewed for their baptism yesterday, and the wife, simbut, was nervous and it was so cute. she was telling us when she was in school, she would cheat all the time and write the answers on her hand and have signals with her friends during tests and stuff. oh yeah. when we went over the questions with them, they were trying to memorize all the steps of the gospel and everything, which is funny, because that's not even part of the questions. simbut is so funny, when we were teaching the ten commandments, she was telling her eight year old son, read this, honor thy father and thy mother, do you see that? she said. haha i really love that family. so they are getting baptized this Saturday along with this Chinese girl we've been teaching, Ah Mei, she is twenty-five. i really like her, she is so quiet, and her Malay is not that good, and her mandarin isn't that good either, she speaks hokkien Chinese. (i never knew languages were such a big barrier before i got here) but between our Malay and sister lim's Chinese we taught her (thank goodness she understands the Chinese book of Mormon) she is so quiet, and really shy, because her Malay is not good, and we were worried for her interview, because before when we asked her what repentance means, she would just say 'pray', and she would say it in Chinese. 'yeah', we'd say, 'that is definitely part of it...' but when we went over the questions with her on Monday, she did beautifully, we are really excited for her, too. her dad is coming to the baptism. sometimes he listens in on our lessons, and he told us he could come to church after Chinese new year, so we will see. (but he said that after he heard us teaching about tithing, so that's pretty good)

i have a lot more to tell you, but i will save some for the letter. things are going really good right now. our district leader is sort of on fire right now, and he is getting us excited about the work, its a really good feeling. we went out to lunch with our whole zone, and right there in the restaurant, he got us two new investigators. what?! but i know right as i feel like the work is going so good and things are coming together, i can feel a transfer or something coming on.. but whatever, i got to see sulin and simbut's baptism, so that is enough. and it has taken me so long to feel this way, to feel confident in the language, to feel more confident as a missionary that with our faith we can make miracles come about. but it was definitely worth it to slog through all the bad times and hard stuff to finally feel this way. sometimes i don't want to go to sleep because i want to enjoy the feeling a little longer.

anywho, family, i love you, enjoy your thanksgiving!

Sister Harrison