Teaching in Tokyo

We're waiting on current photos from Emily, but here's an older photo of her with her first companion, Sister McMurtrey, and young adults in the Kanagawa Ward.

4-22-09

It rained yesterday, but it was warm rain. It poured actually. I was glad we had our kappas. It rained in the evening and night.

Today is Pday but we have an appointment at 12 and 3:30, dinner at 5:30 and Eikaiwa at 7. We are having to spead our P-day over today, Thursday, and Friday. It isn't an ideal situation, but we are busy with appointments and things.

The baptism went well for Kanzaki-san! She called Swasey Shimai after she was baptized.

We made onigiri (I think I am spelling that right) every Monday for service. This Monday we found out the history. It has been going on since 1986 and since then only two groups have been doing it every week; the LDS church and some other group. There are volunteers that do it every day and the people in charge want to get teh community and various faiths involved. It gets delivered at 5:30 am to the homeless. Now, apparently, some of the men even have part time jobs but they can not afford to live in apartments. I don't remember how many people the lady in charge says comes to get food. The woman in charge is from California, living here with her husband in Japan for work. She belongs to no church, but just wants to do service and help people.

On the 18th, I got to do splits with a sister attending the JTMC. There is a threesome of sisters at the MTC. I guess they had time to proselyte in teh area (something we didn't do at PMTC) and found an elderly woman. They wanted to visit her. So Sister Swasey visited the woman with one sister, I splitted with one sister, and Sister Eddington splitted with the other. It was a fun experience. I realized how I had learned over these 3 transfers how to contact people, what worked and what didn't. It was fun to see how much dendo fire the JTMC sisters had.

I had a funny experience. Me and my companions were on our bikes stopping people, and I Was leading. I stopped a lady by coming up from behind. Turns out she spoke english and had been to the East Coast. We came to a light. It didn't seem like she wanted to talk and when the light turned green she walked fast to the other side and kept walking fast, as if not wanting to talk. I pulled up besides her again and asked where in the east coast she was going to. Then she said she was going to her church, and pointed to it; the International Tokyo Baptist Church. We pass it most every day. It was a few buildings down. She said that maybe I should come to her church some time. I don't remember if I ever got to saying the name of our church in the conversation. I just smiled and was polite and thought it kinda funny she was only a few doors down from the church she was going to.

So. I came up with an incentive to help my companions speak more Japanese. I said if we really do it and try hard this last week, we can get cheesecake our last P-day. It worked well for the first day and I felt so cheery and good. Today it kinda dwindled. I feel myself getting sucked into speaking English and the scary part it is, it is feeling more and more okay. At first it was a total shock and I really didn't like it. I dunno what is going to happen next transfer. Part of me would like to go to a remote part of the mission. We have dinner with the gaijin ward members so often here that it gets hard to focus on the Japanese ward too.

Every time we come home to our apartment, we have a cockroach check. They all hang out by the sink. We see one occasionally. We are starting to see baby ones too. They are smaller than an ant. We have a spray bottle in the kitchen to get the cockroaches. I am still not entirely sure how sanitary it is to spray that stuff in the sink and on the dishes and all that, but we haven't gotten any sicknesses so far. I bet in the summer there starts to be more of them.

We went to the Karruth's for dinner not last night but the night before. Get this. They lived in Saudi Arabia for 3 years for his work.Their married daughter lives in England. Their son went on a mission to an island where he rode and RV. Anyways, just way interesting. Oh, and they just got back from a trip from Egypt. Their kids are married. I think he works for Shell, or something like that. He does the money for it.

We had an appointment with Ayaka-san yesterday, a PI. Her appointment was at 1. Thing is, when we scheduled it we had forgotten we had an appointment at 1:30. We couldn't get ahold of Ayaka-san, but we figured we could do a quick church tour with her (the purpose of the apt. was a church tour). But, she came about 1:50. So, she and Akabane-san (the 1:30 apt) had a lesson together. We had had one lesson with Akabane-san before and talked about God and Family, not all of lesson one sort of thing. We taught lesson one yesterday for both of them. Ayaka-san had never been to a christian church before and she didn't know anything about christianity. She didn't understand all the things we told her, but we gave her a Book of Mormon and she said she would call us. We got another appointment with Akabane-san because she wanted to meet again.

Now for Hamasake-san. We had a really fun lesson yesterday. With her we teach english and gospel. For English, we did what Brother Hansen did when he taught eikaiwa last week... prepositions. We went over them and then did one of those "draw a clock in the bottom left hand corner, draw two fish in the middle of a box, draw an umbrella above the clock..." sort of thing. Then we did the fun activity.

Before she got there we made a treasure hunt, like we do at home for easter baskets, where one clue leads to the next. The clues used prepositions like "above the door, on the piano, next to the clock..." At the begining of the lessons, we asked her to write things that were close to her. Then we asked her to leave teh room and hid the paper. We hid it in teh BOok of Mormon. Then she did the treasure hunt. The last paper said "In the BOok of Mormon, where you started" and she came and found her paper. It was supposed to show how the Book of MOrmon leads us to these things and helps us keep them strong.

And, the interesting news is this. We asked if she had been reading the Book of Mormon. She said yes. We were so excited because she hadn't read the week before because she had just gotten it and still needed to warm up to the concept of religion and things. Anyways, we were excited. Then she said, "I started at the end. I always read books from the end." It was so interesting! She started from the index/dictionary part. I wondered if she read story books from the end. Probably just magazines and stuff. But anyways, isn't that funny? We asked her to read from the beginning.

And, other odd moments. We were biking the other day by our apartment which is by Shibuya Eki and I saw someone we had street contact the week or so before in Roppongi! She is half Australian and half Japanese. She spoke perfect english and didn't have interest in our message. But anyways, I saw her again. And she saw we three. I saw her kinda smile. We didn't make eye contact because we were going by fast, but I remember going by her!

We did yoga the other day for exercise. It was fun! We did "sun salutations" and basic warrior poses, because that is all I remembered. I am blessed to be with companions who like to exercise in the morning.

Sister McMahan