Medan!

Selamat siang dari kota Medan semuanya! (Good afternoon from the city of Medan, everyone!)

After a 1 hour taxi ride from Surabaya to the airport, a 1 hour plane ride to Jakarta to pick up Elder Marsudi, a 2 hour delay in Jakarta, a 2 hour plane flight to the Medan airport, and a 1 1/2 hour taxi ride home, I arrived in the beautifully powerless city of Medan! Powerless because the city's been having some problems with the distribution of electric power the last few weeks, so I'm writing this in constant fear of another power outage. Keep your fingers crossed.  The power goes out  2 or 3 times a day for about 3 hours every time. Makes planning at night quite the adventure and sleeping at night ridiculously sweaty. In Medan, it feels more wet than Surabaya. So I'm sweating about twice as much here and has made me grateful for you buying my "cooling towel". It really works!

My companion's name is Elder Broberg and he's from San Diego California and lives about 15 minutes away from the beach. He's pretty dang awesome. Elder Broberg is such an incredible missionary and an even better companion. He's super skinny though. I'm trying to help him out with that. :) I've only taught with him for about half a week, but I can already tell he truly cares about every person he meets and teaches. Right now, we have a few investigators to teach, one of them is really progressing and we're going to give him a baptismal commitment this week. His name is H. He's cool! He came to church last Sunday and was really outgoing and is pretty darn funny too. 

Okay. Every time I start feeling pretty awesome, there's an experience or two that humbles me like crazy. A few weeks ago, Elder Broberg got to baptize an older lady whose name was Ibu Ezra. (I know. Her name is a guy's name. In Medan, they sometimes like to be called by the their oldest son's name.) She is pretty incredible because about a year ago, she was living happily with a husband and 7 kids when one day her husband got up, left, and took the kids with him. Crazy!! She got really depressed and starting blaming God, when she ran into the Mormon missionaries. "Coincidences" are a funny thing. After about 6 months of learning from them, she was baptized, confirmed, and hasn't turned back since. She's awesome! Anyway, she gave us a referral to go teach a 19 year old guy named A. about the Word of Wisdom. It really went well and it ended with him, his mom, dad, and brother all committing to live the Word of Wisdom. Lots of potential there!

I play the piano here in Medan more than I ever did in Surabaya. They don't have anyone to play the piano for sacrament meeting, so either me or Sister Hutcheson will play. But we want to leave the Branch better than we found it so we all teach a piano lesson class to all the youth just right after church. It's fun! 

Man, for some reason, I'm feeling really scatterbrained and not organized right now. I think that's about it from last week that I thought was important. Here's one thought from President Monson before I sign off: "Those souls whom you help save may well be those whom you love the most."

Sampai minggu depan, (until next week)

Elder Barrus