For my last church visit whilst living on the Logos Hope, I had the pleasure of leading a fantastic group of people to share about the ship's ministry at the first Tamil-speaking church in Penang. Planted well over one hundred years ago by two American missionaries, a majority of the members come from Indian decent, although now Malaysian-born. After the warm greeting, worship in the Tamil language began. It was nice for them to spell out the confusing language for us with English letters via PowerPoint, but it was still quite hard to pronounce any of the words correctly (as shown above). When it was our turn to present, I introduced the team (from USA, Jamaica, Finland and South Africa) to speak one by one. Since most people, especially the young adults, were bilingual, it was the first church in recent memory where we needed no translation. Randy, who brought along his father from America, prepared a message and preached powerfully about missions with positive response from the church members.
Following the service, Randy and I were invited to lead the youth group meeting upstairs. Most of the people were between 15-20 yrs old which made for some fun connecting time. It was interesting for me to see how much alike the young adults half-way around the world were to the Americans I personally know! Their jokes, insight, mentality and general behavior and outlook on life would make you think they came from a Western country, but traditions such as clothing (at least for the ladies) were strongly Asian focused. Overall, the time was most enjoyable and I felt that my knowledge of Malay people greatly increased because of that hour we spent together.
Before arriving back home, in traditional Indian hospitality, the pastor and his family took us out to an area in Penang known as "Little India" for some chicken and rice curry. I tell you that some of best (albeit incredibly spicy) food I've had in the past two years has been Indian. They sure know how to cook a mean chicken that'll leave your lips tingling!
