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Umbrellas are not just for rainApr 3, 2011
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A typical street vendor
Shophouses
Preaching with the Japanese
| After spending a month in Cambodia, I've landed in Malaysia. My last stop before heading home to Canada in May. Here I'm also visiting a friend from Calgary who moved here for a bit to help out in the Chinese field. Malaysia is the hottest I've even been. Being a tropical rainforest climate, it is hot and sticky. So we always carry umbrellas in service to protect us from the sun. I always find it interesting how we do the preaching in different countries. In Canada we're used to going in our car groups and either doing territory or RV's. But in Cambodia the arrangement is either at 8am or 4:30pm when it's not so hot. Then you go in groups of usually 6; 3 pairs on motorbikes to someone's territory to do just door to door. In the city the territory would consist of apartments called shophouses because there is stores down below and homes above. To go up, you have to find the staircase which looks like a long secret passageway that leads you to dark and grimy corridors. Most doors are closed and locked and you never know who might be around the corner but sometimes you might just find that person who will give you a hearing ear. In Miri, Malaysia where I'm staying you have to find out ahead of time where the group is. Noone has a personal territory so as a group they work a neighborhood at a time. So you have a big group by two's doing house about on both sides of the street with big umbrellas. RV's and studies are always done separately. Since my friend is in Chinese I follow along with her a lot. There's a lot of good calls to be found. And Chinese territory is mostly business territory since most of the stores are owned by them. I am joining the English congregation here and there is also a Malay language congregation which is made up of the Native tribes. Malaysia is interesting in that people can be a mixture of all three and can speak 2 if not 3 of these languages. So in service you can encounter all 3 languages. One Saturday I got to join a group to preach in a village by the jungle. Pretty much everyone speaks Bahasa Malay so my partner did all the speaking but the houses we went to everyone took the time to sit and open their Bible to read about God's name. So the growth in Malaysia will be coming from these people for sure. But one important thing to note here is that we are not allowed to preach to Muslims because it is a Muslim country and the government does not allow it. So we ask people if they are Christian and if they answer Muslim then we just move on. I thought to myself, I shouldn't take for granted that we can preach to everyone in Canada. |
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