Emergency Transfer

Well. On Thursday morning around 7:30-ish, I got a transfer call from President Wada. Around noon on Friday, I was in Atsugi with all my luggage. On Saturday, I was harvesting rice.

President Wada did hint at the Wednesday morning staff meeting that he might need another elder in Atsugi and that the new elder would probably come from the mission office, and somewhere in the back of my head I knew that I was the most likely pick. It was still a little bit of a surprise when it actually happened. I spent Thursday packing and saying bye to my district, ward members, and investigators, and then on Friday the assistants to the president drove me and my luggage down to Atsugi.

From having been in Atsugi for two days, it seems to be a fairly normal "countryside" city. There is a river that runs through it, with some awesome bridges. I'll have to see if I can get some pictures sometime.

On Saturday, we went out to another area to help harvest rice as a service project. About ten or so missionaries put on rubber boots, picked up little scythes, and tromped out in the muddy rice paddies. There were places where we'd sink down six or eight inches in the mud just by stepping on it. There were also so many spiders, beetles, little green frogs, praying mantises, crabs, crawdads.... Someone told me that there are fish that live there in the mud, too.  o.0   We didn't get bit by anything, though. One elder did the whole thing barefoot because there weren't boots big enough for him.

Rice grows on a plant looks kind of like wheat, but a bit shorter. We bent down and cut the stalks down at their base, bundled them up, and hung them from racks that were made of bamboo poles lashed together.  We might go back in a couple weeks to help with the next phase, where we actually remove the grains of rice from the plant.

Elder Parks is my new companion. He likes ninjas and samurai. A lot. He's also really good at reading & writing Japanese. I feel like we're going to get along very well.

For all I know, I might stay in Atsugi for a few transfers, or I might get called back to the mission office in three weeks when they have the normal transfer, or I might get transferred somewhere else. o.0 Elder Gammon is handling the tech staff work on his own right now (he's companions with the other office elders). In the meantime, I have this feeling that I want to work with the youth and YSA in Atsugi Ward.



Golden rice fields, all ready to be harvested

Rice stalks hanging in the sun to dry

Elder Bennion (barefoot with baseball cap) & Elder Parks (my new companion)

It's very muddy work.

Beginning of Autumn

I've had a relatively nasty cold since Friday.  Elder Gammon thinks that the new missionaries brought it from the MTC.  With so many people coming in and out of an isolated facility and living there for a few weeks, it makes sense that it would have a unique cold that's just evolved over the decades going around all the missionaries.  Because of that, a lot of elders get their first chance there to deliver priesthood blessings.

The big project that Elder Gammon and I have been working on is preparing the entire mission to take an online language speaking assessment that the MTC wants us to do as part of a three-year study they've started.  It doesn't work on our iPads yet, so missionaries need to get computer access, which actually isn't very easy in Tokyo.  Libraries don't have public computers, we're not allowed to use Internet cafes, and there aren't very many family history centers in the mission.  And all the missionaries need to take the assessment in the same week.

Hopefully they'll have it ready for the iPads before we have to do this again in December. :P

O-Mikoshi Parade

Summer Festival

We had a summer festival at the church the other evening.  They had booths out in the parking lot with various foods (tacos, banana bread, okonomiyaki, watermelon, etc.), games for the kids, a BB-gun shooting range set up in the gym, and a family history exhibit set up on the second floor.   At the end they gave sparklers to all the kids, like we do in America for the 4th of July.

The family history exhibit was really cool.  The other office elders made some awesome display boards, and we used some other display pictures that were already in the church, and we set up an adjacent room with a projector and a playlist of family history videos on repeat.  We had some really cool conversations about family history.  As much as I love stories, I hadn't thought much about how many cool stories we find just looking up our own ancestors.  :D

Tachikawa

We have three areas in our zone: Kichijoji, Kunitachi, and Fuchu.  My companion is one of the zone leaders, and we're in Kichijoji.  The other zone leader is the companion of the district leader in Kunitachi.  The zone leaders decided to do a companionship exchange with a companionship in Fuchu, which means that Elder Berube (my companion) brought one of the Fuchu elders to Kichijoji, the other zone leader went to Fuchu to work with the other elder, and I went to Kunitachi to work with the other zone leader's companion for a day.  It was good to get out of the office. 

We taught a lesson to a new member who hasn't been able to come to church, and it was awesome to see his hope grow as the Spirit spoke to him.  Afterwards we went around Tachikawa Station and talked to some people.  I was impressed by the city feel of that area.  In Kichijoji I was impressed with how densely packed everything was, but Tachikawa feels like it's built up a lot higher.

Transfer Week in the Mission Office

Well, transfer week is over.  That was a mixture of interesting feelings, seeing all the new missionaries come in and all the returning missionaries head home.

The new missionaries landed at Narita Airport on Tuesday last week, and arrived in Kichijoji by bus in the evening.  We helped them bring their luggage into the church, and then we went into the mission home for dinner.  They were all exhausted.  We had a bunch of rental futons delivered earlier that day for the new elders to sleep on.  The elders slept on the second floor of the church and the sisters slept on the top floor of the mission home.  

On Wednesday, there was lots of training.  We got to eat Sister Wada's delicious cooking for breakfast and lunch, and then for most of the day Elder Berube and I were in the mission office setting up the new missionaries' iPads and preparing for the iPad training.  In the afternoon, all of the missionaries in Kichijoji paired up with the new missionaries and took them out to give them their first experience with street contacting.  And then they had some more training at the mission home, and then we took them out to eat, and then they got to help teach English class.

On Thursday, the trainers came to the mission home for breakfast, and then there was more training.  After lunch, Elder Berube and I delivered the iPad training and handed out the iPads to the new missionaries, and then they all went off to their respective areas.  And then all of the departing missionaries came to the mission home and slept there that night.  The next day, we all had breakfast together (the parents of three of the missionaries came to pick them up, so we had breakfast with them, too), and then Elder Berube and I went back to work while the departing missionaries went to the airport.

And that evening, everything went ske-wompous.

A couple of website domain names were suddenly suspended, which caused our mission website to become inaccessible.  The departing missionaries' flight was canceled because the airplane's sewage system broke.  And a missionary out in the furthest area of the mission broke his arm very badly.  

The mission office became rather noisy.

For a while the people at Narita Airport weren't entirely sure if they were actually going to cancel the flight or if they'd be able to fix the sewage, but they ended up putting the departing missionaries in a hotel for the night, and they managed to get out the next day and make it home safely.

We got involved in a massive email chain between a bunch of people in the Area Office and the ICS department in Salt Lake City about getting the websites back up.  We managed to get all the important stuff fixed by about two o' clock in the afternoon, and there was much rejoicing.

Elder Pesce (the one who broke his arm out in the countryside) ended up taking an ambulance to the hospital on Friday, and they patched his arm up, put it in a sling, and told him he was going have to go back to America and get surgery because it was so bad.  He showed up at the mission home on Saturday.  I got to be his companion and spend the night up in the mission home on Saturday and Sunday nights.  On Sunday he gave his testimony in church and helped us teach a lesson afterwards, and today he got on an airplane.  He had a great attitude about it, and he's hoping to come back into the field if the surgery goes well.

Now things have calmed down quite a bit, even though Elder Berube has a bunch of zone leader responsibilities now.  It looks like I'm going to be going with him to three different district meetings every week, and going on splits with people all over the zone.  

Lightning

Our church got struck by lightning last week during sports night.  It didn't actually damage anything except that it blew out a couple fuses in the fire alarm system, which made the fire alarms all go off.  We had to grab the master key and go into the room with the fire alarm control panel and figure out how to reset it.  Of course, the control panel was all in Japanese.  It was an adventure.  x3

In other news, they had transfer calls today.  President Wada made some huge changes.  All of the zone leaders have been split up.  Normally, each zone has two zone leaders, and those zone leaders are companions with each other.  Now, each zone leader is in a different area, and in most cases each zone leader is companions with their local district leader.  (There are still two zone leaders per zone.)

I'm still in the mission office, working as tech staff, and Elder Berube is still my companion, but Elder Berube is now a zone leader (and still tech staff).  This is going to be an interesting transfer.  ^__^

A Week in the Life

Sunday: We got word that a typhoon would be coming later in the week.

Monday: We went out to a Thai restaurant.  My food was literally boiling when the waitress put in on the table.  I naively assumed that the bowl's handle was okay to touch, and burned my little finger.  The waitress kindly brought me a bag of ice, almost as if she were expecting that to happen.  Silly gaijin, right? xP  Also, that evening, a 19-year-old young man named Yuki waltzed into the mission office, wanting to know about English class.  Elder Yagui, our wonderful commissarian, offered to introduce him to the gospel.  Elder Yagui and Elder Etchu taught him about Joseph Smith and they gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon.

Tuesday: Zone conference.  We all received emergency 72-hour kits and get emergency preparedness training.  We also learned about teaching the first missionary lesson.  They tell us that Typhoon Neoguri is going to arrive on Thursday or Friday.

Wednesday: Yuki came to English class for the first time.  He was really nervous about it at first, but he had a good time.

Thursday: Between the wind, the gathering clouds, the atmospheric pressure, and the news of Typhoon Neoguri, it felt really ominous.  Sports night went well, though.  Yuki came to sports night and made friends with everyone.  He wasn't nervous anymore by the end of the night.  ^___^  Sister Wada told us that Typhoon Neoguri was supposed to arrive around midnight, so we made sure everything outside was secure before we went to bed.

Friday:  In the morning when we woke up, there was a little puddle outside our door and everything else was dry.  The sky was the bluest it's been in weeks.  And it was hot.  And the air was thick.  Apparently Typhoon Neoguri hit Okinawa pretty hard, but it died out before it reached us, and we got a heat wave instead.  I also started doing video editing.  We've been making training videos lately.

Saturday: This was an eventful day.

Around 4:22 in the morning, all six of us were sleeping peacefully, and then the earthquake warning alarm went off on all five cell phones at exactly the same time.  Everyone just kind of rolled over and groaned and waited for it to stop.  I felt my bed shake a little bit.  When we got up in the morning and checked the weather website, it turned out that the reason we got that alert was because there had been a 6.8 magnitude earthquake up by Fukushima...

...but the epicenter was a ways out in the ocean, so it didn't actually damage much of anything.  Which is good, because probably the last thing those nuclear power plants need is another natural disaster.

 Elder Berube, Elder Etchu, and Elder Yagui drove out to the countryside to look at apartments for missionaries, and I went and worked with the full-time proselyting elders for the day.  We spent most of the day in the park.  Since it was the weekend, there were a bunch of craftspeople with booths set up in the park, and a number of musicians hanging out, too.  We talked to an old man in a Batman & Robin tank top who said he'd been playing blues for 45 years.  He was selling CDs out of his guitar case.  He had a belt with an amp on it, an awesome steampunk-looking guitar, and a contraption with a built-in microphone that went around his neck and held a harmonica.  We asked him if he would play, and he put all that gear on for us and totally rocked out in that park with his steampunk guitar and harmonica, singing and playing old American blues songs.  He was way good at it, too.  It was awesome.  x3

Elder Yagui and Elder Etchu had another appointment with Yuki.  Turns out, he read the entire Book of Mormon in four days, and compared it side-by-side with the Bible (which he's read before) and drew some pretty awesome connections.  And he's not even Christian.