Email - 3/18/09

It’s been a great week in Cambodia. Not nearly as many meetings as last week.

Eating dog meat really wasn’t that big of a deal, I just didn’t think about how I was eating a dog while I was doing it. I’m sure I’ve gotten plenty of weird meats from people who say they’re giving me “pork” or “beef”.

Tolaa’s family is having an especially rough time right now. Operation Smile was in Phnom Penh last Friday and they took their boy to see if he qualified for surgery. Operation Smile is a group that comes here and works in the hospitals doing surgeries for cleft palates and stuff, which is what their son has. A bunch of missionaries were there translating all day and we had a few looking out for Tolaa and his family and told them to let us know what happens. We got the call that night that their son is too small, he doesn’t weigh enough to do the procedure safely so they turned him away. That was their last foreseeable hope at this point, but they are in the Lord’s hands. He has a greater plan for them that we can’t see. Their neighbor has also started coming over and learning, which is awesome.

Oh did I tell you they’re building us a chapel here? Right now we’re in a rented building that we use for our church. Ta Khmau is getting a church! It’s pretty exciting. It will probably be a year or so before it’s done though.
It’s also right next to a couple homes of recent converts, which is good for them.

Speaking of converts, Marin was baptized on Sunday! It was a good experience for us. Elder Moore baptized him. A little about him... He’s about twenty eight and used to work as an English translator at the police station. For some reason he stopped. He’s really awkward around people he doesn’t know. We hope he can make some friends at church. He has some kind of condition with the upper part of his nose that makes his eyes hurt and gives him migraines so he never stays for all of church. We took that excuse away by giving him a big pack of Excedrin Migraine! Anyway, He’s doing great. He’s single by the way, no family.

Our new approach of finding through the members was moving slowly, but it paid off in an unforeseen way. We hadn’t been getting many member referrals and we were kind of down, but we were trying really hard. We go to FHE at the church (it’s a once a month thing), and like 4 members had brought friends. Since then we have had people bringing friends to stuff like crazy! One member had two friends who wanted to learn and when we went to teach them at her house, there was another! That’s three from one member. We also had several come to English class which was so cool! We have really been blessed with people to teach.
I have had several embarrassing experiences so far of swearing at people on accident lol. One is the difference between to bite (Kam) and sexual desire, the root word being (gam). Well, needless to say I was talking to some investigators who were going to the beginner English class which the other two elders teach and they were nervous, so I tried to say don’t worry they don’t bite. But I ended up mispronouncing and saying ‘Don’t worry; they don’t have any sexual desire”. It took some quick explaining on my companion’s part. At the time I had no idea what I had just said. A very embarrassing experience!

By the way, we have Tolaa’s baptism scheduled for this Sunday and also had another investigator commit to be baptized on the 19th of April. AWESOME.

Final story for this email: We went to meet a less active who was not home, so we went over and started up a conversation with their neighbor. To make a long story short, he wanted to learn about the gospel. He has been progressing really quickly, he read the whole restoration pamphlet we gave him (never happens), and agreed to have his family start learning with him. A lot can happen with this family if we’re listening for the promptings of the spirit. Teaching him is a great experience. He is reading and praying about the Book of Mormon and we are also praying really hard that he’ll receive an answer.

Ok, well that’s it fort this week! The work is progressing and the Lord is providing us with an abundance of people to teach!

Elder Donnelson