Mountain Climb

Last Saturday we hiked Mount Tonodake as a ward English class
activity.  It was a long, beautiful hike.  My legs are still sore.  At
the top of that mountain there's a lodge where hikers can stay
overnight and watch the sunrise the next day.  They also sell
delicious udon noodle soup.  We played some games on top of the
mountain and ate udon and took pictures of Mount Fuji.

It was good time spent with our English class students, too.  One of
the Atsugi ward members invited one of her calligraphy class students
to come to the hike, too, and Elder Parks and I made really good
friends with him.  It's really helpful when people have time like
this to warm up to us.  We now have someone who we're going to start
teaching soon, thanks to that hike.  ^^

Yesterday, we felt like it would be a good idea to call every phone
number we could find in our area book, even though the missionaries
who were here before us said they did that every week without success.
We actually got to talk to a few people and invite them to the ward's
Halloween party this week, and we found out which numbers were bad.
Then, that night, we got a call from Elder Soto, my MTC companion who
just got transferred to Yamato.  One of the people we talked to on the
phone earlier that day is a Spanish person (also speaks Japanese) who
was referred to our area by missionaries in Yamato.  We only talked
for a minute, but later that day he called the Yamato elders to tell
them that he got a call from missionaries in Atsugi and that he felt
bad because he was busy and couldn't talk much.  Elder Soto (who
speaks native Spanish) was the one who talked to him, and he felt like
he should talk to him about the Light of Christ.  From that
conversation the Spanish person decided he wants to take the
missionary lessons.  :D

[I attached a couple pictures from the top of Mount Tonodake.  You can
see Mount Fuji in the distance.  ^^]

Typhoon Stole My Helmet

There was a typhoon last weekend, from Sunday night to Monday morning.
The most intense part was while we were asleep, but on Sunday night
the rain and wind was still strong enough that all the books in my
waterproof bag got wet. >_< On Monday, after it cleared up, all of
the bikes had fallen over, and we couldn't find my helmet. The only
thing we could think of was that it probably blew away in the typhoon
during the night. o.0 We had to rearrange our plans for the day so
that I could buy a new helmet, and then that night after we'd done all
our shopping and emails the other pair of elders found my helmet.
Apparently I accidentally left it sitting on the umbrella rack at the
church. 0.o Fortunately I hadn't bought a new helmet yet. ^__^

I loved General Conference. :3 I was a little anxious last week
because it had happened and I hadn't seen it yet. Japan doesn't get
the broadcast until a week later.

There's another typhoon coming tonight, and I've got my helmet inside
the apartment this time. ^_^

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.