Monday, October 29, 2012

Seeing as how we don't have an oven,
we got creative and cooked the brownies
in our rice cooker

Well hello again. Yet another exciting week here in Yamato. So, I had a strange realization not too long ago. This friday is my 6 month mark. Even though it feels like I've been gone for quite some time, it really doesn't feel like I've been gone for 6 months... wierd.

Anyway, Elder Nakamura and I had a chance to use the party in a box that my family sent me for my birthday. We were planning to use it last week on p-day, but that ended up changing when we were invited to go bowling with the Elders in Fujisawa. Bowling was way fun, and it was good to spend some time with some of the other Elders in our District. What ended up happening with the party in a box, however, is we post-poned it a day, and had a short party during lunch. We blew up all the balloons, hung up the lanterns, then ate the brownies that were baking during study time. We of course had vanilla ice cream to go with them, compliments of missionaries past who left it in our freezer. We didn't quite finish it off, but I'm sure we will someday... maybe... But anyways, yes! We had brownies, icecream, and Dr. Pepper. The rest of the district helped us finish off the brownies at district meeting the next day.

The rest of the week has been fairly routine. Lots of finding, a few lessons, english class, and more finding. There were some interesting things of note however. One of the members in our ward, Sakuma Takuto, hasn't been coming to church for a while. I thought that was strange, because he's a pretty solid guy. We have an investigator that we thought Sakuma would be able to get along with and help out really well, so we tried to get in touch with him. When we called, he didn't answer. That was slightly dissapointing. Well, out of the blue, he shows up to a softball activity saturday morning. He apologized for missing our call, and explained that he's been really sick lately. He also said he was intending to go to Church on Sunday, which he did. Awesome. I don't think it's any coincidence that he just happened to come back to church the very same week we thought about him and how much help he could give our investigator.

We don't normally eat on the floor. I promise.

Also on Saturday, the Yamato Ward had a halloween party. We were invited to come. Well, that sounded like fun, so of course we decided to go. We invited Jun to come with us, and figured it would be a good opportunity for him to meet some of the members. Well, what they neglected to tell us when we were invited, and what we didn't find out until we showed up, was that the Halloween party was actually a Primary Halloween party. Yeah... That would have been nice to know before we invited a 40 year old man to the party. Haha! He laughed it off, and we ended up just having a chat off in the corner while the kids had their party. We did get some cake though, so I guess Jun enjoyed the party anyway.

Sunday ended up being really fun too. This week was the Yamato Ward's primary program. That was really fun. Some of the kids in the Yamato Ward are really funny. There are some kids in the primary that really remind me of the kids in my ward back home. Later that night, Elder Nakamura and I had dinner with the Gunn Family from the Zama Branch. We had tacos. Delicious. Well, that was really fun, and then something that's amusing in retrospect happened. First, I suppose I should explain a little bit so this makes sense. A vast majority of the members of the Zama Branch are military personell, and live on either the Sagamihara Housing installation or one of the two bases in our area. To get into any of these three areas, you need a sponsor to sign you in, and you're given a visitor's pass. We have to do this every time we go to visit any of the members that live on base. The Gunn family is one of these familes. So anyway, as we're leaving, Brother Gunn takes us to the pass office, we sign out, then he goes home and Elder Nakamura and I go our merry way. Well, as we're getting on our bikes to leave, I realized that my bag was still inside Brother Gunn's car. Well, we can't go back to his house to get it, because we need a sponsor to sign us in. We couldn't call him, because their number wasn't in the cell phone (and since we confirmed our appointment at church, we didn't call them earlier, so the number wasn't in the call history either). I had their number written in my planner, but my planner was inside my bag... along with my scriptures, my camera, my electronic dictionary, pass along cards, and pretty miuch everything else I typically carry around with me. The only thing we could do was go back to our apartment and look up their number on the meal calander. By that time, it was too late to do anything about it that night, so I had to wait until today to get my bag back. Oops. Haha! yeah, that was slightly embarrassing.

Anyways, that's about it for this week. I hope you all are doing well! More to come next week!

 

Elder Blake