Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Week 22 - Kichijoji, Japan

Well Hello All!

We don`t have much time today, a good thing, but I have lots to tell you so things just won`t be in too much detail!
Last Zone Conference President Albrecht mentioned that he got a letter from a companionship of elders saying they were so busy that they didn`t have time to take a P-day, do laundry, go grocery shopping, etc. And President Albrecht said that`s a good thing, and it is! Well today that is us! Wahoo! Kind of difficult not having a full p-day, but it`s something I`m truly grateful for...looking back at last transfer everything here has completely changed!

In exciting news I received my Alma O. Taylor award! Which means absolutely nothing to you, but it`s good. It`s something our mission does for new missionaries, you have a series of guidelines and things you have to do, like get a certain amount of phone numbers from talking to people, teach all the lessons by yourself, etc. It`s a lot of things, and since my first transfer, we weren`t teaching and had to do a lot of finding, and had time for mogi`s I was able to finish it fast...I now get to wear a nice little pin on my nametag :) if you want to know who Alma O. Taylor is you can probably google him. He was one of the first missionaries in Japan and translated the BoM into Japanese.
Speaking of google, if you google Kichijoji Eikaiwa Japan, and search for the church`s eikaiwa you should be able to see pictures of me teaching, but you`ll have to wait a bit, we haven`t put the pictures up yet, I have reviewed it though, so you can see my review.

So Elder Holland CAME!!!! Exciting and absolutely amazing!!! We had conference with him and Elder Rasband and got to shake their hands, tell them our names and where we`re from. Elder Holland did tell me I have a cute dimple and Sister Holland gave me a hug! Later I found out, from Sister Albrecht that I was on Elder Hollands list to speak if there was time for missionaries to talk! A little scary, but really cool to know that Elder Holland was thinking about me! Later that night we had 3 investigators come to his talk in Kichijoji, because we live in Kichijoji and had to be at the church anyway, we were able to save seats on the 2nd row for them! Really cool and great experience! the Musashino Stake (Kichijoji and Suginami ward`s Stake) President asked all the missionaries to sing in the choir too, so for the conference I was sitting 2 rows and 3 seats away from Elder Holland, right behind Elder Rasband!
Sadly, no Shimoyachi san didn`t get baptized this past Sunday. We`re still teaching her and she`s doing amazing!!! Completely amazing, actually! However, her parents own a buddhist temple and are completely against it. Even though she`s 20, and wants to be baptized, she won`t until her parents are okay with it. Which is how it should be, we`re not here to break up families, we`re here to build them. So we`re continuing to teach her and working on building her faith. We`ll see. All our other investigators, including Megumi san are all still doing good!

In other completely different news, I found out something Japan doesn`t have...deoderant! Yeah, who would have thought! Luckily I found this out from Sister Adams, before I ran out (sadly, she suffered a different fate..) And yes only a year...strange huh, my one year left date is in 2 weeks, strange how things go like that! Transfers are this week too! Utsumi shimai and I honestly have no idea what will happen, we could both stay, or because we both came in at the same time either one of us could leave, most likely one of us is definitely leaving though...sad. Plus I don`t want to leave our investigators, I can`t, not yet!!!
mom, dad, thanks for the Valentines Card! I found it very ironic that mine was written in Japanese and Sister Utsumi`s in English, but it was great! We still could both read them!

So much for quick and short!
Haha! Love you all so much!!!
Sister Erin Benne

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