ups and downs...

Please pray for some sleep for me!! I managed to scrape together about an hour (maybe two maximum) last night and its really beginning to drain me, i've been feeling a little under the weather today due to a lack of sleep (I've only had one night of more than 3 or 4 hours and I got here nearly a week ago)... so that is the down, when you're tired it's hard to be really enthusiastic about things, and its been making me feel a little homesick today

On a more positive note we did a spontaneous bible study with a couple of the guys in our house today (Kelvin and Cheun Hoe). Which was really cool as they'd seen us reading our Bibles and asked if they could join in with us... so we did a study on the first 18 verses of John's Gospel, they asked plenty of questions and it was really good... Kelvin went away and wrote down everything that he had learnt once we were done and said (despite coming from a Christian background) no-one had told him before that you could know and experience God personally, as well as knowing about Him intellectually... we're starting an alpha course next week and they're both going to come :-) and hopefully bring some friends :-) please pray especially for these two guys.

I have managed to learn a few Malay words. By asking the guys what street signs and other things say (For example Jalan means "street" and Selamat Detang means "welcome"), but that's about it... also the guys we are living with are chinese-malays and spend most oftheir time speaking to each other in mandarin... which is pretty hard to pick up... they all speak at least four languages (mandarin, cantonese, malay and english), which is pretty impressive... sometimes they speak them all at once, which would make it impossible for us to follow, even if we spoke a bit of each...

We went for a drive around the campus last night and it was absolutely HUGE! There are 11 colleges (halls of residence) inside the campus (and one outside) each housing about 900 students... also every subject has its own faculty area, each with many buildings, there are also sports facilities and many other things... we might have a little trouble getting into the campus as two months ago some people walked in and stole $2m worth of equipment, so they are really tight on security right now, please pray that God will find a way in for us. The SPICE club is really taking place, and we will have a fairly busy weekly schedule starting next week:

• Monday - sports night - maybe badminton, ping pong, swimming or football
• Tuesday - English class - Todd and I will be teaching a conversational English class to help improve confidence
• Wednesday - night off to spend with our friends
• Thursday - Alpha course (if you're not sure what it is, click here)
• Friday - another sports night

We are also planning two weekend trips, one on the weekend of the 5th August - to a Rice Plantation in Kuala Selangor (click here). And another on the weekend of the 12th August - to a Tea Plantation in the cameron highlands (click here) hopefully the Navigators Singapore team will be joining us for this trip... This afternoon Todd, Cheun Hoe and myself made a brochure for the SPICE club showing all the activities, so that we can give them to our friends to invite them along, hopefully i'll get a picture of the the guys on here