Here We Come A Carroling

For our P-Day activity, the missionary force spent the afternoon caroling.  We went first to an Orphan Home.  There are 46 children who live there from teens down to babies.  Their caregivers seemed so nice and were very grateful to us for coming.  The Elders make a great chorus.

These little ones were so darling.  They just stared up at us with their big eyes.  It is hard to think of them as orphans.  They seem very happy and secure and so well behaved.

Oh No!!  Not the Checkpoint....

This is where the day took a bad turn, or we did at least.  We were on our way to the next orphan  home and turned off the wrong exit and ended up at the checkpoint where you cross the border into Singapore.  You should see it, there are several lanes marked for buses, motorcycles, trucks and automobiles.We had no place to turn around so we had no choice but to go up to the checkpoint.  We had two elders in our car and the others were with Bro. Ben.  He knows his way around because he lives here, so he didn't take the turn with us.  Anyway after trying to explain to the agents at the window that we didn't really want to go into Singapore,  they made us all get out of the car and go into an office to talk to the agents inside.  We had to try to explain  why we didn't have our passports with us, because we really weren't headed for Singapore, we just got into the wrong exit.  They asked many questions about what we were doing in Malaysia, where we are staying, how long we are going to be here, etc.  Thank goodness we all carry laminated copies of our passports with us at all times, so they took those and asked us to wait.  This was quite a scary experience, because many of the missionaries are questioned as to why they are in Malaysia, and sometimes their passports are chopped with a black stamp so that they cannot stay in Malaysia.  After about 45 minutes, they finally decided to let us go back into Malaysia.  Now we didn't have time to go to both of the places we had planned to go.  Luckily, when we called the orphan home, we found out that the children had gone on an outing and were stuck in traffic and would not be home until 7pm, so they missed our caroling.

 

Our next stop was the Green Acres Elderly Care Center.  This is a place where some of the previous Elders had visited.  We stopped and sang in each room.  Some of them had only two people in and others were larger and had several beds.  Some of the people obviously didn't even realize that someone was there, but others really loved the singing.  This man even sang along with us.

These are some of the caregivers who came running after us and wanted to get a picture with us.

This beautiful lady remembers the Elders well. 

She even has a picture on her wall of her with one of the Elders who used to visit her. 

I told her that I would send him this picture, that he was now back in America. 

I think we were able to brighten the day for some of these people who probably don't get many visitors and certainly not ones who sing Christmas Carols to them.