July 13, 2016

こんいちわ、私の 愛する お母さん、

かんじ を わかる こと が ありません。 でも、私 と 愛 を わかります。 そして 光 も。

かんじ は 私の ぢストリクト に うちかって いる。 すべて の ほか の 長老たち は かんじ だけ べんきょう したい です。
でも、私 は はなすこと が もっと たいせつ だ と おもいます。レッスン を おしえる とき に、 かんじ を よめる こと は とくべつ じゃない。

(Konichi wa, my dear mother,
I do not know kanji. But I know "I" and "love." And "light." 
My district is being overcome by kanji. All the other elders only want to study kanji. 
But, I think that speaking is more important. When you teach a lesson, it wouldn't be too special to be able to read the kanji.)

Saturday would be perfect! Or  Sunday would work for me, but it sounds like you guys have a busy day. Wish I could be there to hear Tylor speak! He'll be so awesome.

しんでん を きよらか する こと は たのしかった です！ (Cleaning the temple was fun!) That was the first time I've been in the girls' locker room in the Provo temple (or any temple for that matter), so that was a new experience. If you ever find yourself in the baptistry changing room in Provo, pay special attention to how clean the lockers are. Also, they have a bathroom stall made of marble. Marble! We just have the regular plastic-y stall material. Talk about discrimination. (Speaking of discrimination, did you know that Elders get $6 every week but Sisters get $8? At the end of our 9 p-days that's like $18 extra dollars. You could buy like 12 book of Mormons (books of Mormon?) with that money. So jealous ;) Also there are two bathrooms on the floor where our classroom is, and they are BOTH girls' bathrooms. Haha one of the girls in our district is a hardcore feminist so we tease her about the bathrooms and the extra $2 all the time). But yeah it was a cool experience. They are redoing all the chairs and upholstery in the endowment rooms so we got to carry loads of the backs of chairs upstairs. Today the temple is back open so we will get to do a session today.

TRC is "teaching recent converts," so the volunteers are members and it's supposed to be practicing for continuing to teach our investigators after baptism. The skype ones actually start today, I thought they were going to be last week but they were just normal. It was good though, we taught a couple and the wife was にほんじん (Japanese) so I guess it was like a warm up. Tonight we will use our new かたかな (katakana) name tags for the first time! I am no longer Elder Paskett, but パスケット長老。 People say that the first Skype TRC is super hard because the audio quality over Skype isn't great and you have everyone in the same room talking combined with them speaking fluent Japanese without an accent. So it will be an adventure haha. They have a "practice listening" program on the computers here so I am actually getting pretty good at being able to tell where one word ends and another begins. I still don't know what half the words mean, but I figure if I can pick them out then we can look them up if we need to.

So today we were singing again, same day, same time, same showers, same songs, but this time a bunch of new 長老たち came in and told us that they loved it so much, they even asked us to do Take On Me again because they liked it so much. I thought they were being sarcastic at first but it was sincere! So I guess we just have to make sure that they stay here and that the old guy doesn't come back. Haha I actually worked in the Boise temple with one of the new elders, it was pretty funny because on my last day he was like, "well I'll never see you
again so goodbye, and I really like your hair." Then lo and behold, we are on the same floor of the same residence hall. Haha he is going to South Carolina (I think) so we didn't expect to see each other in the MTC, pretty funny coincidence.

Also speaking of increasing our repertoire, we started doing Grace Kelly with beatboxing and piano and singing this week. The Chōrōs in our zone love it so much! I would sing that all the time in Jenn's apartment at BYU and I actually made her get a noise complaint once. So it's nice to feel like such a good song is getting its proper appreciation ;)

I hope camping is fun! Did you guys have to reserve pine top or can you just go up there whenever it's not reserved?

Is the new debit card coming this week? I will just need it before my last week, other than that no time constraints. Other than that, will you just send me a bunch of lined paper? It is uncannily hard to find here. I feel like it shouldn't be, maybe I just don't know where to look. But yeah paper and if you have an any extra postage stamps that you are just dying to give away I could use some of those. But I can buy them here too. It's just difficult on my measly $6 per week ;)

A few stories from this week--Akagi Chōrō (our former DL--all the DLs and ZLs were changed this week) had his birthday on Monday! We knew it was in July but we could never figure out the day and he refused to
tell us. But, you have to log in to the computers using your birthdate so the しまいたち (sisters) watched him so closely and they were 90% sure he typed July 11th. Just to make sure, Nathan Chōrō and I looked at his drivers
license while he was in the shower and confirmed that it was indeed the 11th. So the しまいたち decorated his desk in the morning and he was so surprised when we came in. He asked how we found out and we just told
him it was the せいれい。(Holy Ghost)

Like I said, we were released as ZLs and so on Sunday afternoon we were in the awkward period of time where we weren't zone leaders anymore but hadn't had a chance to give the new ZLs the cell phone and
binders and stuff. So the phone rang 8 times and we accidentally missed all of them, but then we answered the 9th. They started to scold us saying that Zone Leaders were supposed to always have the phone on them. So we said that we're not the ZLs, we just answered the phone because it kept ringing and we didn't know where the ZLs were. Technically true. So they had us express their frustration to the ZLs for not being on top of things. I think they had a good first day.

We did teach a really good lesson to Asuka-San, she accepted our invitation to be baptized! We asked her like 3 lessons ago and kept asking her since then but she finally felt like she was ready. So that's cool, her "baptismal date" is set for October, so I'm assuming we will keep preparing her for baptism until we leave.

Our original teacher, Haderlie Shimai, is back from her trip to India! So it's cool to have her back, she had some crazy cool photos from and stories from her trip. She left on our 2nd week so she said our Japanese has come so far, she was shocked. That was nice because we don't really see our progress because it's not that different from one day to the next, but I guess if we take a step back we really have learned so much in such a small amount of time.

I gave my first sacrament meeting talk in Japanese this week! You find out if you're giving a talk when they announce your name over the pulpit, so you're supposed to prepare a talk every week (everyone has the same topic but it's different every week). This week was faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His atonement. It was only 3 minutes, so it wasn't bad. I shared a scripture in the middle and half of our branch didn't realize it was a scripture, so they said they were surprised by my expansive vocabulary. Haha I just told them it the いげん の たまもの。(gift of tongues)  I read most of my talk out of my notebook, but I gave my testimony at the end without the words prepared, but I think it was really good. We have a lot of practice bearing testimony in Japanese in our lessons, but it's just a little different in sacrament meeting. It was cool, our branch presidency said it was all totally understandable so that was really good to hear.

Hope you have a great week! Let me know about all your amazing adventures!

いつも あいしています、
Elder Paskett