Kean Svay: Week 4

Plan of Salvation

Becky: How has Joseph Smith and the story of the First Vision been received by your investigators or the people that you have baptized?

Wyatt: The First Vision is usually taken as a story here in Cambodia. There are hundreds of stories like this in Buddhism where people meet angels in the forest and the angel give them gifts and stuff. Nobody really believes it, and even when we tell them to believe it here, they don't quite understand what we mean when we say this actually happened. Haha. 

We have 4 or 5 investigators and none of them are really that great except for one: Bong Heem. This guy is looking for truth. One day Elder Bullough and I had nothing to do for 4 hours, so we set out on foot in a distant village near a wat called "hill" (a small distance south of the national road). I was in the process of telling Elder Bullough about how some people just look ready to receive the gospel, when I said, "like this guy," and we contacted him. We have since been back 4 times and brought several different members to help teach. He went to church yesterday and liked it. He is a very precocious Cambodian investigator in that he knew how to actually pray the second time we went back, he asks a ton of questions, and he has already read to 1 Nephi 12--very atypical of investigators without a future in the church. So I am very excited to see what sort of advances he can make in the near future. He has a baptismal date for the 8th of May. 

 Do the paws give it away?

[Editor's note: I have no idea what that is,

but YUCK!]

[Update: "Oh, by the way that was dog meat, 

if you actually didn't see the paws next to that meat.

Our branch presidents wife sells 'special meat'

out front of her house, and people know about it everywhere."]

We also spent the whole last two weeks practically begging for referrals from members, and it actually worked. We received 5 referrals from members last week, so we will see where this takes us. 

I'll end with this: We met two people who thought they were gods this week. I've contacted thousands of people on my mission and never even heard anything like this before. The first one was at a restaurant; this middle-aged, well-dressed woman called us over to her table to ask if we could speak Khmae. Then she said (my translation is supposed to point out the weird way she asked us this question) "did you two ride your auto vehicle to get here?'' We said no; we ride bikes. Then she just started speaking Pali, and when she was done with that, she said, "I am the daughter of Buddha. I own everything. I can say 'car' and a car will appear. If I want this road to be a river, I can make it a river." Then she pulled out a fake 100 dollar bill (they are everywhere since they use them to worship their ancestors, and it has a big stamp that says "COPY" on it--yes, money is accepted in their spirit world) and said, "See?" There were a ton of other weird things she told us, like when we said we teach about Jesus, she said no you don't, you're Buddhist. So then we just left her with a pamphlet and she biked away in her imaginary car. 

Our apartment

The other guy: I asked him, "How old is your oldest child?" and he said, "98", so I started laughing. He looked confused and told me he was 186 years old and was the 5th reincarnation of Buddha, so everyone around us started giving us hand signals to get away, so we left. 

That's all I got, have a good week!

This email is going to have to do for everyone in the family, I am going to play football.

Elder Hall