“It Will Make Us Strong”

Loreen anak Bunya was an Iban living in Miri. She first learned of the Church when her sister Ranjerlin met an American couple on the bus and agreed to let them come visit their home. On the fourth visit, the couple began talking to Loreen about their church. “They were surprised at me because each time they came I always ask, ‘What Church?’” Loreen remembered. “The name was way too long and I always forget it.” She was interested in what the missionaries taught but wasn’t sure if she could take it seriously.

“I studied the gospel from the fall of 1996 until April 6, 1997, and that is when I got baptized because I learn it can change my life,” Loreen said.

Loreen saw the Lord’s hand in her life in the help she received in raising her children. Her son Kevin stopped going to school when he was 9 years old. For four years, he stayed home. When he was 12 years old, around the time they met the missionaries, “he didn’t know how to write or read or study.” After their baptism, a succession of senior missionary couples spent time with Kevin.

“He followed them where they go,” said Loreen. “One day Elder and Sister Folsom are shopping with Kevin, and they ask if he wanted to go back to school, and he says yes. They go to school after four years of him being gone and ask the secretary to find his papers to put him back in. I go before many times, and every time they tell me the papers are gone. But the white people go and they find them with no problem. Scared of the white people, I think. Kevin goes back to school and graduates. This is my miracle from this Church.”

After a year and a half, Loreen encountered difficulties in her marriage, and her sister stopped attending church. For two years, it was easier for Loreen to stay home or go out with friends. One night, Kevin asked her what she thought was right and what she wanted her children to do. “Sunday morning I woke up and decided to go to church again for first time in a long time,” she said. “After that I can know and feel the Spirit.”

Loreen’s daughter, Gloria Geramong, had also distanced herself from the Church for a period of time. But eventually, she said, “I made my decision to search and build my own testimony.” Difficult trials were “just like a test that we always took in school,” she thought. “We need to take and pass in the trial in order to move on in this life, and it will make us strong.” Gloria is among the first generation of Ibans to attend university, studying at the University of Kuala Lumpur.

“I am alone with my children and raised them by myself,” Loreen said proudly in 2011, then serving as Relief Society president of her Miri branch. “Now they are grown up.”