It's been a pretty good week here in the office again. Lot's of the same stuff, but there were a few other interesting things that happened as well.
Let's see... well, first of all, we've been pretty busy opening up new apartments for new missionaries still. President Wada showed us some of the numbers, and over the course of the next two transfers we have to find at least 12 new apartments. That's one per week. Tha'ts alot of work and time. We'll see how that ends up going. I won't have to worry about it too much though. I'm transfering out in a week. Elder Yagui is already here being trained to take over as recorder next transfer. He cameon Thursday. I still don't know where I'll be going to yet though. President Wada is making me wait until transfer calls like everyone else. So, all I know is that I won't be recorder next transfer, but I still don't know where I'm transfering to. I'll find outnext Monday.
Saturday we went out to the park near here to do some contacting, and we were able to get some of the easiest contacts I've done so far. At the park there's a pretty large lake, and the lake has been drained for the first time in years for cleaning. They found alot of trash on the lake bed. Cell phones, shoes, and even whole bycicles (over 200 of them!). There's a bridge that spans a portion of the lake, and there were dozens of people all on the bridge leaned up to the rails, watching the people clean the lake and looking at all the trash. So, we decided to pull up a spot on the rail too. The people next to us would be talking together, saying "woah, look at all that trash! It's so dirty!" Then we would say to them, "yeah, it is way dirty!" They would look at us kinda strange for a moment, then start talking with us about all the trash.From there it was easy to shift the topic and have just a normal conversation, which always ultimately led to them asking who we were. Perfect. Usually people on the street are way busy and don't want to talk. All these people had nothing but time (hence they had nothing better to do than go look at trash in a drained lake), and were all already talking anyway. It was really fun! Elder Yagui and I even talked to one man who had lived in Awatuki for a while. He knew about Gilbert, and said that he has many friends there. I of course showed him some pictures of the new Gilbert temple on my iPad after hearing that.
Oh yes! iPads. We got iPads in the Tokyo South mission this week. All the computers in the apartement have been switched out for iPads. Since the Tokyo mission was the only mission in the world with computers in the apartments before they started giving missions iPads, that means the set up was a little bit different for us. There was extra effort spent to make sure our existing mission portal would be supported on the iPads, for example. When we were given iPads, they were all set up with emails for each area, but since we had computers, that means we already had area emails. Now they're trying to figure out if we should keep using the old emails, or transition over to the new ones. If we switch over to the new ones, we have to re-enter all of our contacts, as well as make sure to tell all of our investigators and ward members our new address. Either way, there's work that will need to be done.
Sunday was an interesting day. We were supposed to go over to the Saito family's house for dinner, and we had invited Brother Takahashi, a less active recent convert, to come with us. He said he would come, and we arranged to meet at the church at 4 then drive to the house together. However, he didn't go to church that day. He also didn't pick up his phone when we called. Eventually we just decided that if he didn't pick up his phone or come to the church by 4, we would just go directly to his apartment and knock on his door. That's what ended up happening. We drove to his apartment, rang the doorbell, knocked on the door, and nobody answered. That's only slightly concerning. He wasn't anwering his phone all day, and nobody answered the door at his place. I hope he's ok. We ended up just going over the the Saito's without him. But, it ended up being a good dinner appointment anyway. Good food, good people, good atmosphere. It really was too bad that Brother Takahashi missed it. It would have helped him so much.
That's about all I can think of for now. I'll let you know where I'm tranferring to next week!
Elder Blake
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