On Friday at about noon, Tobi and I hooked up our trusty GPS, fired up the CRV, and headed north to Taiping to spend the Easter weekend with a work friend of ours, Tryphena Mathius, and her family. Tryphena is about Jennie's age and is a very friendly and happy girl with a big smile. She came on in the Public Affairs office about 3 months after I did and she kind of adopted me as a surrogate father I think, someone she could go to with questions about work and other problems. She is a very devoted evangelical Christian, belonging to the Assemblies of Christ denomination, and when she found out I was a Christian as well, she would ask me to pray for her whenever she had a big project, etc. to work on. She also offered, very kindly I thought, to pray for our family, Tobi's sister Candy in particular, when she found out about her diagnosis. Anyway, she's a very sweet girl. Jennie and Julia met her when they were here.It was a very nice 3-hour drive up the peninsula. Malaysia has had more than its share of rain for the past few months, and its share is quite a lot anyway, so the vistas were all very green. Around Ipoh the land starts to get more hilly and there is a bit of a climb after Ipoh going to Taiping, about 45 minutes away.
We stayed in a hotel called the Flemington which is located right next to what we would call a park. They call it Lake Garden. It is beautiful, with small lakes which I later discovered used to be tin mine pits. The whole park is surrounded by these beautiful stately trees that I thought looked like Live Oaks in the southern U.S.A. Turns out they are called Rain Trees (Albizia Saman), which, although they are 50 to 80 feet high and 100 to 150 feet across, are actually related to the pea. Whenever I see something that I like or is interesting, I like to check it out on the internet. They call them Rain Trees because when it rains the leaves close up. They also close up when it starts to get dark in the evening and that's why the Malays call them "Pokok Pukul Lima," or the 5 o'clock tree.
Friday evening we attended a Good Friday service at Tryphena's church. Her father, Philip Mathius, is the Pastor and her younger brother, Phinehas, is the youth pastor and will take over for his father one day. Lots of singing, swaying back and forth, hands up in the air (we kept ours down). Phinehas was the main performer of the hymns and he had 4 girls as back up singers. Tryphena played the synthesizer and they had about 8 little kids up in front swinging flags around in time to the music....sort of. I found their hymns to be quite repetitive and LONG, usually about 7-10 minutes each. It took me back to one of our Sanders Family reunions at Newport Beach when we were subjected to numerous lengthy renditions of "Our God is an Awesome God." Pastor Philip gave a very nice sermon, followed by a tamborine dance in which Tryphena and her sisters, Theophile and Parmena (or was it Tryphosa?) and several other girls played colorful tamborines and danced to some music.
On Saturday morning we went for a walk in the park and between the small lakes, separated by grassy stretches, Tobi saw some movement and pointed. There was a 4-5 foot water monitor
(lizard) ambling towards the water, which he (she?) then swam across to the other side. Tobi seems to be adept at sighting the big lizards. The little geckos are everywhere. Phinehas and Tryphena and another couple, the Chins, came to pick us up for lunch. We went to a Chinese cafe for lunch (very good) and then drove up to the old British club, built in the 1880s. It's called the New Club because it replaced an ever older version, but the building is still essentially the same. It was fun to look around and imagine sitting on the veranda and watching a Cricket match on the field below. "That Harrington fellow is a jolly good bowler don't you think Marshmont?" I actually took pictures of some century-old urinals in the men's WC. (That's water closet for you non-Anglophiles).
Taiping is the wettest spot in all of Malaysia; some say all of SE Asia with about 190 inches of rain per year. And, indeed, it did rain each day we were there, sometimes quite hard. We found Taiping to be a very nice place. It's population is only about 200,000, which is quite small as Malaysian cities go. They say a lot of people come here to retire and I can see the draw.
We got together with the Mathius family that evening for dinner at yet another Chinese restaurant and enjoyed a couple of hours of conversation. Pastor Mathius told us his story, trying to build a small Christian congregation in a Muslim dominated country where the government fights them at every turn. They are not allowed to buy land or property for a church and have been renting a hall in a strip mall for many years. I admire this man's devotion very much. He has worked tirelessly for over 30 years for a congregation of perhaps 100. And he delivers a mean sermon too, which we witnessed on Sunday at the Easter morning services. More Newport hymns,more flag waving, more dancing and tamborine playing. They had a drummer about 10 years old who was really quite good. I had to mention that for Dave's sake. Then Pastor Philip delivered a sermon of about 90 minutes length but which held my attention as he spoke about that Easter morning nearly 2000 years ago, when the faithful women went to the tomb with spices and were told by the angel, "He is not here, but He is risen."
On our way back to KL we experienced some of the hardest rainfall I have ever seen while driving. (There was that one storm in KC though in 1975, which I recall like it was yesterday) The wipers at full speed couldn't keep up with it. We went from one squall to the next, nearly all the way home and had our hazard lights on, as did many of the other cars and trucks, for much of the 4-hour trip.
Another Malaysia memory that will last us the rest of our days. Rain Trees and rain storms on the trip to Taiping.
Love to you all,
Scott
