Elder Landon Paskett's Journeys in Japan: September 8, 2016

My most marvelous mother who is mine,

That's too bad the email last week didn't go through! I'm sorry :( Nothing too big happened, honestly I can't even remember anything specific, it feels like so long ago. It's hard enough to remember just this last week haha. One fun thing was that we started trying to make any extra effort to make Eikaiwa fun so people will bring their friends, so we sang twinkle twinkle little star and then had everyone write their own poem to the same tune. My personal favorite:

"popping stepping jumping ice

why do you have such a price

how many ice cream in the world

a lot ice cream in the world

(repeat lines 1 and 2)"

Pure poetic gold right there.

We went to Don Kihote for the first time last week--that place is like a full-size Walmart crammed into a dollar-store sized building. Reminds me a little bit of IKEA actually. They have the most random stuff in there too. Like everything you could ever want is somewhere in the depths of that labyrinth. We found like 20 different flavors of kit-kats, so we tried some raspberry ones and they were actually pretty good.

We housed into a family last Friday who we thought had a lot of potential, but we dropped them this week...we weren't even able to give them a single lesson. It was actually really discouraging. We went for our original appointment on Monday and they weren't home, so we housed around a bit and then came back. They weren't there again so we housed around again and came back a third time--and they were home, but they didn't answer the door until the third time we had knocked. She said they were too busy that night, so we asked if we could come back another night and she said Friday would probably work. Then when we came back on Friday, the lights were on and the front window was open. I think they heard us talking outside, and then when we knocked on the door, they just shut the window and then didn't answer the door. Nice.

So if that wasn't enough to rain on our parade, the next day there was a typhoon in Aomori. Haha I actually enjoyed the typhoon though, mostly because of how ridiculous it was when we were knocking on doors with rain pounding us horizontally. Originally they said we weren't allowed to leave our apartments at all on Tuesday, but when we got up it was a beautiful, sunny day. So they said we could go out, we just had to be back by 6. So we went out for normal dendo, and it started raining at probably 3:00 or so. We had umbrellas so it wasn't a big deal, but then the wind picked up so fast. It got so strong that it actually broke Hancock Choro's umbrella, and I had to stop using mine before the wind would sweep it away. So we kept knocking on doors with the rain coming horizontally, some people gave us the weirdest looks haha. But me and Hancock Choro had a good time. Then we got a call from the ZLs telling us we needed to get inside, so we went back to apartment and changed out of our soaking wet clothes and did weekly planning for the rest of the night.

We had a meeting in Sendai in Wednesday for all the new missionaries, so we got to take the 5-hour bus ride early in the morning. The meeting was really good, President Smith had one part of the meeting where he shared advice from previous missionaries in this mission (advice they would give to new missionaries, during their final interview as a missionary). The main idea I got from most of them was just that a mission really is so short--that we need to make the most out of every day. The 2 years will fly by, and we need to choose to work hard every day and also enjoy every day. So I am trying extra hard to make the Lord's time investment in me a profitable one :)

On the way back we got to take the Shinkansen, that was a pretty cool experience. It doesn't really feel like you're going fast until you look out the window and realize that you're flying past everything. We had to get back really quickly because the other missionaries in our district were staying the night in Sendai so there was no one in Aomori to teach Eikaiwa. But on the shink it took just under 2 hours instead of the 5 on a bus, so that was way nice.

One of the regular Eikaiwa attendees came to church! And even brought her little sister. She has been coming since before I got here and has never come to church before, so it really shows how important it is to keep inviting, even if people haven't shown interest previously.

We are still meeting regularly with T Kyoudai and J Kyoudai, and we were able to meet With R Kyoudai (a previous kyudosha from like 2 transfers ago, who disappeared all of a sudden). But me and Hancock Choro were able to meet with him out of the blue! He says he wants to be baptized, so hopefully we will be able to set a date soon and help him work towards that goal.

J Kyoudai has the goal to go to the temple but he hasn't really been coming to church lately (he came the first couple weeks I was here, but now he's kind of off and on) and has some word of wisdom problems too. He just told us that yesterday, which I think is a sign that he really trusts us and trusts that we can help him.

So this week has felt slow, but a lot of good things have happened. It's interesting to look back at the whole transfer and just see the people that I have really been able to help--I really feel like helping T Kyoudai and J Kyoudai were our main purposes for being in Aomori this transfer.

I'm glad you could spend the weekend with Taylor! Don't have too much fun playing ultimate without me!

Love you always!

パスケット長老

Elder Paskett