Thanks for the update! I'm glad to hear about the football, choirs, and musicals. Sounds like you all are keeping pretty busy! I'll try to start off with a few answers to questions... The answer is yes. Just like that missionary that just got home from Brazil I think my english will be a bit of a struggle. Mostly just in the sense of my grammar will be horrendous, and the way I word everything will sound weird to you. Easiest way to put it is that Japanese and English are opposite languages, and they do not directly translate. Be excited for some funny times for you, and embarrasing times for me. It'll happen.
As far as the nativity sets go - I haven't seen any. I talked to a few members last Christmas, and they didn't know of any either. The only place they can think of is Costco, but it has American sets - go figure. Basically, living in a country where only 1% of the entire population is Christian makes it a little hard to find anything to do with Christ. But I will try to find one for ya mom!
And I am glad you had such a good birthday!
I just had a crazy thought. Logan has met some Japanese friends in Iowa - I met some Brazillians here - Devin sent his portugese testimony to me and totally helped our Brazillian investigators. I can send my Japanese testimony to Logan and he can give that to his friends. How cool is it that we can help each other out because of the places where we've served? I love missions!
We had a great week, but like always it was a little crazy. Last monday we booked it on over to HIroshima and had a fun pday with some of the hiroshima missionaries - played sports and did a scavenger hunt, ate food at costco (because yes, there is a costco in hiroshima - definitely had not had a hot dog for a long time before coming to hiroshima) which was fun - but one of the best things was getting to dendo (do missionary work) in Hiroshima for a few hours that night. We did mini-splits with Lane and cook shimai. We had 12 missionaries (the four of us shimai and the 8 elders) spread all around the train station (which is huge, by the way) contacting people, giving out book of mormons, and just talking to people. I was with cook shimai, and we had so much fun. We were able to talk to a lot of really cool people and got several pretty promising potential investigators.
We stayed the nigth in Hiroshima with lane and cook and it was hilarious. It's kind of weird though only having 4 sisters in our whole zone, but it's fun because we are all really good friends. We had zone conference the next day, and were able to learn a lot from President and the APs. It was fun - for about the past 10 months or so we've started having what we missionaries lovingly like to call "boot camp zone conferences." It's where after a few hours of training and after lunch, we have a few hours of drilling. President calls missionaries up to the front and has them dendo (do missionary work? contact?) him. He'll say pretend I'm tanaka san, and I want you to come up to me like you would someone on the street and tell me about family history and how my ancestors can help me. or "pretend you just met me and invite me to be baptized" or "pretend I am a chain smoker and a drinker and you are going to teach me the word of wisdom and why it will bless my life" or a bunch of different things like that. The first time we had a zone conference like this I was a little scared and pretty nervous about my Japanese but after I chilled out a little it became really fun. It is really fun to see the other missionaries that we're such great friends with teaching and hear their testimonies. President also had every person stand up (one transfer at a time - for example "all the first transfers stand up, 2nd transfers, etc" ) and he gave us a word in english that we had to say in japanese (and the japanese missionaries were vice versa). Fun stuff. But really I learned a lot from the conference - one thing that Gazdik and I have been trying to do every day is be a lot better with mogis (roleplays) for our lessons and it has definitely helped us become better teachers with our investigators.
We had a nother lesson with watanabesan and it went well - I am excited to teach her tonight. NAkayamasan has a baptismal date fore 12/21 and we are finally able to start teaching her twice a week - wednesdays and sundays. ever since we set this solid schedule with her things have been better. She is super nice and super quiet, but she's doing great!
We had a lesson with hasegawa (68 yr old) and our recent convert kishita shimai, and it went GREAT. We saw a ton of crazy miracles this week in our lessons - we really tried our hardest to get a lot of member present lessons and their testimonies helped our lessons so much. even though we don't have tons of people here in our little group, we are still able to do so much and I know it is through the Lord's help.
We had 4 investigators at church yesterday!!!super exciting. gazdik shimai gave an awesome talk in sacrament meeting about the atonement and I got to teach sunday school yesterday about repentance - it was a lot of fun. I love the gospel principles book. It really does explain things so so well. Oh and takeda shimai spoke in church yesterday and gave an awesome talk about her conversion!!! She was really scared but did really well. We were so proud of her. :D
One thing that was a bit of a disappointment was we had a restoration/review lesson with barbara and ruby, our favorite phillipinos. We challenged them to pray about the restoration and joseph smith, and they politely turned us down - basically established that they were completley happy with what they believed in and were glad that we were happy with our beliefs too.That was sad, but at least we know where that stands now.
And it's been raining off and on for the last year and a half. Lets just say I have perfected keeping my fliers and book of mormons that we hand out dry, even in the pouring rain. Ultimate win. :D
Well that is a bit about the week - gotta run! Love ya!
Ai shite imasu!!!!
Flake Shimai
ps we went to a high school festival with all sorts of super cool exhibits (our 16 yr old investigator's high school). they had an awesome band, super good taiko (japanese drum) group, learned cool origami, saw cool frogs - - anyway it was a good time.
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