Unbirthday Pancakes

I was emailed a question about how often I have trainings with my district and zone, so, here's how that goes, plus a bit about how the mission is organized.

 - A "transfer" is a six-week period.

 - My district right now consists of the six missionaries in Tama (four elders and two sisters).  In Hodogaya, my district was the four missionaries there in Hodogaya (two elders and two sisters) and the two elders from Kamakura.  One of the elders in the district is assigned to be the district leader.

 - Every week (except for when there's a zone meeting or conference), we have a district meeting.  Most of the 90 minutes of district meeting are spent talking about our investigators; the remaining time is training.  Our zone leaders usually come to our district meetings.

 - Each zone right now consists of three or four areas, with 2-8 missionaries in each area.  There are currently eight zones in the mission--it used to be four, but all four of them were split over the past few transfers because the mission is growing fast.  Each zone has a companionship assigned to be zone leaders.

 - Every transfer, there is a zone meeting, which is conducted by the zone leaders.  It lasts a few hours and consists of announcements and training activities.

 - Two elders are assigned as assistants to the president.  There are also a few other elders assigned to the mission office~the commissarian, the recorder, the tech staff, etc.  

 - Every other transfer, the mission president and his assistants conduct a zone conference with each zone.  Zone conferences are all-day events.  Since the zones are still small, last transfer they had two zones at each zone conference (except for the one zone that hadn't split yet).

 - Every other transfer, when zone conferences aren't going on, President Wada interviews each missionary.  Elder Peters and I have our interviews with him this Thursday.

 - Training activities during district and zone meetings and conferences are usually 30-60 minutes long, and the leaders lead some of them and assign other missionaries to lead others.  Lately in district meetings, we've been doing the assigned follow-up trainings from when we received our iPads.  Usually the trainings cover skills and material from Preach My Gospel.

Yup.

Elder Peters made pancakes for himself and me for lunch today.  He made them big and thick, and he added grape and apricot jam to them while they were cooking.  They were all the way cooked in some places, not quite all the way cooked in others, and made of jam in the rest, and it tasted like a peculiar mix of pancake and birthday cake and fruit.  I felt like I was in Wonderland right along with Alice while I was eating it--until I added honey, and suddenly I was in the 100-Acre-Wood.  I've dubbed them Kingdom Hearts pancakes, after the video game series where you get to visit all the different Disney worlds.