Happy December everyone! Are the Christmas decorations coming up, are there toys in every store, a tree in the grand hotel, one in the park as well, (you know, the sturdy kind that doesn't mind the snow)? Hiroshima is getting all ready for Christmas! All around the Train station (eki 駅) we have a ton of Christmas lights and a cool little waterfall effect down the side of the Sheraton! It's nice to have lights from something other than the Pachinko parlors.
So, I think my theme for this week's e-mail is Miracles Happen, once in a while.... and it turns out that it's usually on Junkais (companionship exchanges).
So Tuesday we had missionaries from Hamada come over to work in Yasufuruichi. (Normally for a Junkai you split up and have 2 work in each area but Hamada is about 2.5 hours away by bus so we kinda had to improvise) I stayed with Bagley 長老 (from Utah) and Okada 長老 stayed with Thayne 長老 (He says he's from America but lived in Japan for 17 years and speaks Japanese better than most Japanese; English.... it's coming) Elder Bagley and I had a list of Less active members that we wanted to visit that day. The plan was to go to their house and see if we could meet them then try to contact the rest of the block, or at least most of the neighborhood. So, in true Yasufuruichi fashion every Less Active member we went to visit either wasn't there or claimed that they had never even heard of the church. So that was interesting, but in the act of finding them (Hiroshima is essentially a maze of streets (all of which have no names) and you have to kind of guess if you are in the right area) we ended up teaching 2 other lessons and finding a new investigator. That hasn't happened here this entire transfer. We go 3.5 weeks without really being able to find anybody, and then on this one day the first house we went to we taught a lesson, the second one found a new investigator, and really, just set up Yasufuruichi to really start rolling!
That was Tuesday; Wednesday became P-day because Monday we had Zone Conference. It kind of just became Letter writing and eating (maybe some grocery shopping thrown in there too). Which, I'm pretty fine with that type of day (maybe minus the letter writing, that's still probably my worst skill). Later we had Eikaiwa which was a little bit smaller that day, but had several return students that I was pleasantly surprised to see there! We now have at least one family coming regularly that aren't even members at all! Speaking of Eikaiwa, this week we may have found at least 3 more Eikaiwa students (but I'll explain those later!)
Thursday was our planning day (as per every week) which kind of got pushed back due to some other various necessitated apartment woes that came up: namely the need for an Aircon (air conditioners in Japan do heating and cooling all together). Mainly because it's cold here! I've recently come to very much appreciate vests (even if they do seem a little silly "I'm cold, but only my torso") and gloves and nice big ol' jackets! To purchase an Aircon we received about $1000 or 10000円 which, may have been a little risky to give to two 20-year-olds in the middle of Japan... :) Whatever, I'd much rather have warm nights and mornings than whatever else we could conceivably get. That night we went out with the Branch President to visit less active members again, and again nobody was home. So we just left some message cards from the previous conference and an invitation to our Branch Christmas party (which I really hope I get to go to... it's the week after transfers come so I still have no idea whether I'll actually be here or not to celebrate it with this awesome branch) We did get to meet with one of our part-member families and invited their son to the Basketball activity we had this past Saturday (!!!) I very much endorse basketball activity missionary work!
Friday came around and we spent the morning making cookies with the Sister missionaries in our ward for all of the members and less active members. Surprisingly, the Sisters didn't have any cookie recipes so it kind of fell on the Elders to provide the recipe. Essentially we made sugar cookies, but they kind of turned out more like vanilla wafers (no problem there). That afternoon we had a junkai with Takasu. This one we actually got to do the 'normal' way. I ended up staying here with Mitton 長老 and Okada went to Takasu's area with Newman 長老. That night we had one meeting with a less active at McDonalds (that was about the only place we could meet her) which is a rather weird setting for a lesson. She seemed to enjoy it though (and she said she'd come to the Christmas Party!)
Then on Saturday we had our basketball activity! It's a good thing we had Mitton 長老 there because he is about 6'4" and that's quite the advantage in Japan. We had 2 people come from the branch, 2 non-members come from families in the ward, and we met like 15 other new people at the gym! When we got there, there were two Japanese kids playing Basketball, just practicing with one another. Mitton and I go to get changed and come back and the two kids are talking in English to each other. Over on the other side were a group of 5 or so Chinese men, and they were also all speaking English to each other (every once in a while, mainly Chinese) I was not expecting to be in a room full of English speakers for the Basketball activity! We ended up playing with all of them full court. The two kids go to an American school here in Hiroshima and prefer English to Japanese, and the Chinese guys all live around here and are on local basketball circuit as a team. So we had a blast playing with all of them, just chatting like normal and getting them all way interested in coming to Eikaiwa!
One of the kids, Shin, is essentially a native speaker and lives very close to the church! He said that he's look at coming to Eikaiwa whenever he can and that he would definitely give us a call whenever he wanted to learn some Basketball or just hang out with the Gaijijns (foreigners). He's probably about one of the coolest kids I've met here, and his friend was awesome too. Shoot, if we can set up a good relationship with those two, maybe get their families in, this would be one awesome contact! I'm a fan of Basketball Dendo (mission work).
Well, time is kind of expiring, so I'll close with my list of things I'm grateful for so far this Month:
December 1: Having people to plan for finally in our Planning Session
December 2: The opportunity to make Cookies and listen to Christmas Music
December 3: Basketball!
December 4: Japanese/English Dictionaries that let me know what's happening in Sunday School
December 5: E-mails!
I hope your lists are growing and that you all can see just a little bit more how good life really is!
20 Days til Christmas … do you know where you family is?
Elder Everett
エベレット長老
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