Great Things are Still Happening

1. We started our Myanmar school with eight students, four of which are Adventists and four of which are not. Already, after less than one week, these are showing significant growth.
2. We filled all our dorms. The Malaysian enrollment of our campuses east and west is now over 40 students, and until we build our new campus, we can’t take much more. We purchased bunk beds recently to make a little more room.
3. We made our down-payment on our property, finally! Tomorrow is closing, and later this month we will take possession of it legally and start making a little garden on earth, God willing. Wednesday, we meet with an architect about mentoring our youth in the business of construction while building the building.
4. We now have, in our western campus, students from Germany and Canada, and a precious ladies’ dean from Australia. And today she is guiding the students to gather topsoil from the jungle to use in our vegetable plot.
5. Max, one of our new students, canvassed during Chinese New Year, and the result has already led to new interest taking Bible studies and desiring to attend church.
6. We have hired Loud Voice Media to lay out and design for us the books Education, Early Writings, and Child Guidance. These will all be printed here in Malaysia this year, a country where Ellen White books have historically always been very difficult to find, and very hard to get.
7. Our students have sold so many books in December and January! About $20,000 collected in three different programs, and this will cover our operations for January and February. We canvass again in March, then again in June. This is why we raise funds only for expansion and extension of the work, and for help with students that legally can’t canvass. For normal operations with our Malaysian students, our canvassing is sufficient to cover expenses. This is why I say that we are truly a self-sustaining supporting ministry of Seventh-day Adventists.
8. Two weeks ago, we launched our plan to visit most of the churches in our mission to promote true education. As might have been expected, several of the attendees at our first meeting had no idea about this vital aspect of God’s work in the last days.
9. We have two persons this semester who joined us as a trial, to see how they like the program. Maybe this kind of testing will become a normal recruiting method as it gives persons a risk-free chance to really get an idea of what is happening here.
10. With the addition of both a male staff and male students, our school in Borneo has become co-educational. And this makes things seem safer for everyone since our all-ladies school was nestled deep in the jungle where phone service is random, and police are 35 minutes away if they come immediately after a call gets through.

News Regarding Individuals:

Needs:

1. Printing 2000 copies each of those three books (Ed, EW, CG) will cost about $18,000 for the first printing. Subsequent printings of other EGW books will not need to be subsidized. Why? Because we will plan not to reprint these (planting about a six-year supply), so will invest the COGS into printing new EGW books and will keep this up until we have printed about 18 titles. So you can fund 2000 copies of a yet-unavailable EGW book in south-east Asia for about $1,000 on average. We may sell Ed and CG door to door. And, we will make these books available in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, at low costs compared to current prices for those who import them from elsewhere.
2. Our Myanmar school, with its seven initial students, is SURE to grow as fast as we let it. Currently the students are living with us in our full-bursting dorms. But eventually (before the end of this year) we need to establish separate rooms and dorms for them. This increase to our campus will cost about $50,000 if we build for 16 students as we will share café and classroom space.
3. Fruit. Our cafeteria manager has succeeded in operating a plant-based cafeteria with healthy and taste food for about $1200/month (feeding 25 people). Malaysia is not a poor country, so that is quite a feat. But fruit costs are similar to western costs for fruit (because fruit is sold to western nations far more than it is consumed locally). And so the students eat very little fruit. I would like to encourage our cafeteria director by giving him and additional $400 monthly to spend on fruit (about 3 lbs per person per week). We won’t need this subsidy forever. We are planting Papaya and Banana and many longer-term fruit trees this spring. But I don’t want to wait a year to be eating a diet rich in tropical fruits. This week I am ordering $1,400 worth of high-quality fruit trees, cultivars known to do well in our clime and in our soil.
4. A fourth teacher is needed for our Sabah school that serves the Muslim Filipino community. You all have half-funded the third teacher. So that is one and one half teachers that yet need funding (because they serve a class of students that cannot canvass for their tuition). So 1.5 teachers costs $700/month including housing and food and salary.
5. The development of the Arabic-video Bible study site needs about $3,000 for video work and studio time.

Needs already met since our last update in December:

1. A generous gift paid for us to buy a needed 4x4 truck. We are talking to many persons looking for the best one to use on our new property.
2. In 2019 and in 2020 last week, we have received are first and only legacies (inheritance from someone’s will). The first of these ($1200) funded half of our first Myanmar Bible Youth Camp. The second ($11,000) funded a missionary here that will be visiting all churches in west Malaysia, and also (half of the amount) helped us with our major building project. (More about legacies and wills later.)
3. Our printing of our first four books in Sabah has been entirely funded and most of the stock of Steps to Christ in Indonesian has already been exhausted in the first three months since printing. Since we set aside money from each sale, we do not need more money to reprint this book this year.
4. Generous year-end gifts with no specified projects have (all six of them) been put into a major building project and will likely pay for the initial architect and legal fees and part of the slab. Other year-end gifts were specified for Bible-workers and Bible teachers, and we employ five such persons whose salaries are not covered by sales. So all those gifts highly valuable and relevant.
5. Another gift funded out Farsi video/web project to the tune of about $3,000.

Legacies and Wills

Closing