Monday, April 22, 2013

Hello everyone!

   I can't believe it's already Monday again. This last week has really flown by. It sounds like everyone is having a good time back home. That's always good to hear. I have quite a few fun stories for you all this week. You ready? Here we go!

   So on Tuesday we went on splits with the missionaries in Mito. I stayed here in Ushiku with Elder Crain-Zamora, and Elder Miranda went to Mito with Elder Zamarripa. Mito is over an hour train ride away, so it's pretty far. Anyways, around 4 in the afternoon, Elder Crain-Zamora and I are out and about, and we get a phone call from Elder Zamarripa. He tells me to have Elder Crain-Zamora check his pockets. Um... ok. He does, and then he gets this look on his face and says "Oooh nooo". He pulls out the Mito apartment and church keys. Well, they obviously need the keys to get into the apartment, but they also had a lesson at 6 at the church, so they needed the keys really soon. What ended up happening was Elder Crain-Zamora and I ended up going out to Mito, giving them the keys, and since it's so far away we just stayed in Mito and worked out there for the rest of the night, and all four of us stayed in the mito apartment that night.

   So we went and had a lesson with Jose Comba last week during the day while his wife was at work. After the lesson, he starts telling me about this homemade drink that he makes for his girls every morning. I had this blank look on my face, and he started explaining it to me. I told him I had never had it or even heard of it, and he got this look of disbelief on his face. Apparently this drink is super popular in Brazil. Well, Jose had a problem to fix, so he got up, went to the kitchen, and starting making some of this "vitamin drink" for me. It's really simple. All it is is a banana, half an avocado, some papaya, and an apple (that's been peeled). Put it all in a blender with a couple spoonfuls of sugar, add enough milk to cover all the fruit and then some, and blend until it's smooth. So maybe it's not quite as healthy as the name "vitamin drink" would have you believe, but it is delicious. I would definitely recommend trying it sometime.

   Thursday we had a lesson with an investigator named Okawa. Brother Okubo came with us to the lesson to help out, and it went really well. On the way home from the lesson, Brother Okubo was riding in the lead and I was just behind him, with Elder Miranda trailing somewhere in the back. All of a sudden, Elder Miranda starts shouting and making all sorts of noise. I thought, "Oh no! My companion just got hit by a car or something!", right? We stop and turn around, and he's still riding his bike, but he's waving his arm at me trying to show me something. He got closer and I saw what it was: bird poop. Yup. We were riding our bikes, and a bird pooped on him. A one in a million chance, and Elder Miranda hit it. Once we realized that he was ok (but perhaps a little smelly), Brother Okubo and I couldn't stop laughing. Poor guy.

Here's Elder Miranda after he got pooped on by the bird.

   So I have some interesting news. On Friday we had a 3-zone conference, and during part of it President Budge was talking a little about the mission split coming up in July. There's some crazy stuff that's going to happen. Right now in the Tokyo Mission we have about 160 missionaries. After General Conference last October, the cap for the mission was raised to 250, and to get to that number a lot of missionaries have been called to Tokyo. Well, now that the Tokyo Mission is splitting in July, President Budge was asking what the new mission cap will be after the split when the mission gets essentially cut in half. The number he got back was 260. He thought that couldn't possibly be right, so he asked the soon-to-be mission president of the soon-to-be Tokyo South Mission what the cap was for that mission. He said 240. In other words, It's going to be like having 500 missionaries in the Tokyo Mission before it splits. Based on the number of wards and branches there are in the mission, we're gonna have 4 Elders and 4 Sister missionaries in almost every ward. I can't even imagine. That's going to be nuts.

Those are pretty much the big exciting things for the week. More to come next time!

Elder Blake