If anyone wants to write Tyler a letter I will be sending a package the first week of December and could put it in the package. Just e-mail it to me at Monica.hooton@gmail.com. Just a reminder his address is:
Elder Tyler Andrus Hooton
Japan Nagoya Mission
1-304 Itakadai, Meito-ku, Nagoya-shi
Aichi 465-0028 Japan
Thanks so much for supporting him. I know he appreciates it.
Monica
Monday, November 8, 2010
November 7, 2010 - Two Broken Ribs
Dear Family,
It sounds like some things were lost in translation on my injury so I will try to clear it up. I was having a hard night trying to get my companion get motivated. I wanted to house one last building before we went home. I was across the street from it and waiting to get a green light to cross the side walk. It was raining quite hard so I had on my white shirt, sweater vest, suit coat, and rain coat (which all together made for pretty good padding luckily). I got the green light and was trying to see if straight ahead or to the left side of the building was better for parking. I looked left and saw that the entrance into the parking lot was pretty far away so I looked forward and saw that there were bikes straight ahead (about 40 feet). I thought I was on a side walk that kept on going.
At first there was a little dip but I assumed it was just a little drop onto the side walk. By the way, Japanese roads and side walks are the biggest joke in the world. I then realized that I was falling forward and in my head I had an image of what I thought was happening but it was all happening too fast for me to realize what was actually happening. I thought I was falling into a smaller ditch and my pedals would catch on the walls and I’d catch my self and be fine. Turns out it was about 4 feet wide. Ditches are four feet wide and have horizontal pillars that connect the two walls. The ditches are about 3 and a half feet deep. So my bike went down and I went straight into a horizontal pillar. My arms went over it which resulted in a huge lump on my elbow. My chest went straight into the dang thing (it was cement and it was a rectangle so it didn’t have smooth edges). I bounced off of it and landed on my butt in running water at the bottom of the ditch.
I jumped up and pulled myself out of the ditch by myself (luckily I had enough adrenalin to pull my body weight up). Of course I had the wind knocked out of me so I took a couple of seconds and regained it a little. Then with the help of Elder Momose, I pulled my bike out. During the crash, my bike wacked my knee and thigh pretty hard. They are okay now though. When I pulled my bike out I said, “I’ve got two broken ribs.” I could tell that I jacked them up pretty bad. I also couldn’t breathe at all. Elder Momose asked if we could go home. I was so angry that he asked that, that just to spite him I said no we were going to house the four apartments in the building. I had already broke two ribs to get there, I wasn’t going to let that go to waste.
No one was home at three of the houses and the other one said to go away. I told Elder Momose we could go home. We started to ride home and I realized I was starting to hurt more and more. I was worried that I was bleeding internally. I caught up to him and told him we needed to go to the hospital. He asked why. Being a really stupid question and me not wanting to explain in Japanese I just breathed in really hard and he got the idea. We called a member who met us at the train station and then drove us to the hospital. They took x-rays and blood tests to make sure my liver wasn’t punctured. Finally they gave me a CT scan to make sure my lungs were okay. My lung was a little deflated but they thought it was a concussion of the lung and it would heal by itself. I’m on the mend. Elder Momose gave me a blessing and I’d say I have healed at miracle speed. I can’t do a push up by any means but I can breath deep and it’s just a little sore. I’d say I’m healing incredibly fast. It’s quite the blessing. So don’t worry about me. I feel worse for my suit pants which got a little tear and also for my rain pants which got a tear as well.
This week wasn’t one of the hardest weeks of my mission or life. It was just dealing with some pain. I had to do a ton of tracting though which I’m okay with but it sucks more than anything when you have a companion that complains or that gets angry when people turn us down. People that get angry about small things drive me NUTS. It actually makes me angry, which makes me a hypocrite, which makes me even more angry. It’s a vicious cycle.
Anyway, the missionary side of things this week just kept going down hill and I was about ready to break yesterday. I was praying in my head while we were walking and Elder Momose said that the phone in my pocket was ringing. It was the Ward Mission Leader. He was at the church and someone showed up and said that they wanted to be baptized. It was a Korean woman actually. She feels like she needs to get baptized. We quickly got her a Book of Mormon in Korean and some pamphlets and we are going to meet with her next week. Hopefully it will turn into something good.
So that’s pretty much my story for this week. I’ll try to be a little more organized next week. I love you all. I’m doing just fine. Just pray that things will get better in my area and that I’ll be more tolerant. I’m actually improving by leaps and bounds. It’s just that there is so much being thrown at me right now. It’s driving me nuts. I love you all once again. Have a great week. Good luck with everything and keep working hard.
Love, Tyler
It sounds like some things were lost in translation on my injury so I will try to clear it up. I was having a hard night trying to get my companion get motivated. I wanted to house one last building before we went home. I was across the street from it and waiting to get a green light to cross the side walk. It was raining quite hard so I had on my white shirt, sweater vest, suit coat, and rain coat (which all together made for pretty good padding luckily). I got the green light and was trying to see if straight ahead or to the left side of the building was better for parking. I looked left and saw that the entrance into the parking lot was pretty far away so I looked forward and saw that there were bikes straight ahead (about 40 feet). I thought I was on a side walk that kept on going.
At first there was a little dip but I assumed it was just a little drop onto the side walk. By the way, Japanese roads and side walks are the biggest joke in the world. I then realized that I was falling forward and in my head I had an image of what I thought was happening but it was all happening too fast for me to realize what was actually happening. I thought I was falling into a smaller ditch and my pedals would catch on the walls and I’d catch my self and be fine. Turns out it was about 4 feet wide. Ditches are four feet wide and have horizontal pillars that connect the two walls. The ditches are about 3 and a half feet deep. So my bike went down and I went straight into a horizontal pillar. My arms went over it which resulted in a huge lump on my elbow. My chest went straight into the dang thing (it was cement and it was a rectangle so it didn’t have smooth edges). I bounced off of it and landed on my butt in running water at the bottom of the ditch.
I jumped up and pulled myself out of the ditch by myself (luckily I had enough adrenalin to pull my body weight up). Of course I had the wind knocked out of me so I took a couple of seconds and regained it a little. Then with the help of Elder Momose, I pulled my bike out. During the crash, my bike wacked my knee and thigh pretty hard. They are okay now though. When I pulled my bike out I said, “I’ve got two broken ribs.” I could tell that I jacked them up pretty bad. I also couldn’t breathe at all. Elder Momose asked if we could go home. I was so angry that he asked that, that just to spite him I said no we were going to house the four apartments in the building. I had already broke two ribs to get there, I wasn’t going to let that go to waste.
No one was home at three of the houses and the other one said to go away. I told Elder Momose we could go home. We started to ride home and I realized I was starting to hurt more and more. I was worried that I was bleeding internally. I caught up to him and told him we needed to go to the hospital. He asked why. Being a really stupid question and me not wanting to explain in Japanese I just breathed in really hard and he got the idea. We called a member who met us at the train station and then drove us to the hospital. They took x-rays and blood tests to make sure my liver wasn’t punctured. Finally they gave me a CT scan to make sure my lungs were okay. My lung was a little deflated but they thought it was a concussion of the lung and it would heal by itself. I’m on the mend. Elder Momose gave me a blessing and I’d say I have healed at miracle speed. I can’t do a push up by any means but I can breath deep and it’s just a little sore. I’d say I’m healing incredibly fast. It’s quite the blessing. So don’t worry about me. I feel worse for my suit pants which got a little tear and also for my rain pants which got a tear as well.
This week wasn’t one of the hardest weeks of my mission or life. It was just dealing with some pain. I had to do a ton of tracting though which I’m okay with but it sucks more than anything when you have a companion that complains or that gets angry when people turn us down. People that get angry about small things drive me NUTS. It actually makes me angry, which makes me a hypocrite, which makes me even more angry. It’s a vicious cycle.
Anyway, the missionary side of things this week just kept going down hill and I was about ready to break yesterday. I was praying in my head while we were walking and Elder Momose said that the phone in my pocket was ringing. It was the Ward Mission Leader. He was at the church and someone showed up and said that they wanted to be baptized. It was a Korean woman actually. She feels like she needs to get baptized. We quickly got her a Book of Mormon in Korean and some pamphlets and we are going to meet with her next week. Hopefully it will turn into something good.
So that’s pretty much my story for this week. I’ll try to be a little more organized next week. I love you all. I’m doing just fine. Just pray that things will get better in my area and that I’ll be more tolerant. I’m actually improving by leaps and bounds. It’s just that there is so much being thrown at me right now. It’s driving me nuts. I love you all once again. Have a great week. Good luck with everything and keep working hard.
Love, Tyler
October 31, 2010
It sounds like everyone is doing well. I’m sorry that Jacob didn’t make it to out rounds at his debate tournament. I know all too well how that feels. It’s okay though. He’ll do better next time. It also sounds like Monica and Quincy had life changing experiences over the weekend. I wish I could have been there. I’m afraid I’m probably becoming the person that the event was trying to put down. I’m starting to become way too much one sided (don’t worry it’s too the left, but please edit for grandparents and other Republicans).
This week in Fukui was alright. It was stressful because last Tuesday I had to do training again in Nagoya and we come back to Fukui that night because we had an appointment the next morning (which canceled on me). I was exhausted. Luckily antibiotics are miracles (I mean that in a very serious sense). I was better by Tuesday. My voice was just a little hoarse. So I’ll finish up the last two days tomorrow and then be off of them. They were a quite helpful. Mom is absolutely brilliant for giving me antibiotics to bring.
So you know you are getting old and things are changing at home when you are a Hooton and you get a box of brownies in a package but the package is different from what it had always been that you don’t recognize it. I almost cried when I realized it was a box of brownies. America is changing. Also, Mom told me today that Brother Comin got released. Either I’ve been away so long that I’ve forgotten people or he is new to the ward and I didn’t get to know him because I have no idea who that is. Speaking of ward members, there is a member of the Bishopric here who is exactly like Bishop Schofield. (By the way, what was the name of our ward before the split? I forgot). The only difference is he talks really impolitely during sacrament meeting when he is conducting, makes fun of people’s talks, makes inappropriate comments, is a little bit bigger, and tries embarrassing children....wait that’s exactly the same as Bishop Schofield.
So does anyone remember what McDonalds used to smell like before it became healthier? Back in the days of the Notre Dame toys or the toy story toys? Like the Mr. Potato Head that would throw French Fries out of his backpack? I know Monica knows what I’m talking about. Anyway, I smelled that smell this week and it was great. It reminded me a lot of Korea.
Good segue huh? So Elder Chei is coming to our zone on Friday. It’s the new source of a lot of my stress today. He is Korean and in the Area Presidency. I’m sure dad knows about him. I’m very scared because President Baird seems way too on edge and scared. A man that scares President Baird because he is so strict scares the day lights out of me. We were told exactly what to wear and how to dress and groom for our conference. We were also told that Elder Chei might be doing apartment checks. So the rest of my day will be spent cleaning up crap that previous missionaries left here (funny story but we found a working TV in the futon closest the other night. Missionaries in this apartment got in trouble a while ago for having a PS3. To answer your question Jacob, yes if I find the PS3 I’ll send it home to you).
Will everyone (but me of course...unless I get blamed for this TV thing) be home for Christmas? Jason and Carey as well? That’d be way cool.
So there is the guy in our ward that loves pretzels. He sits in the kitchen during Sunday School because he is allergic to the carpets and just eats pretzels. We walked in and he pulled a GIANT bucket of pretzels out from under the table and asked me if I wanted any. There are so many weird people here.
The work here is still way slow. I’m excited because I got my old Zone Leader from Fuji back in my District. It’s very nice to have him back. I need help getting things going here. I’m running up against a brick wall. Thanks for your prayers. It’s helping. Sometimes I feel like my Japanese is getting a lot better but for the last two days I’ve felt like its almost non existent. My English is getting even worse I think. I now prefer speaking in Japanese to Elder Momose rather than English, mainly for comprehension purposes though.
Please send me a lasagna recipe. Due to a big mistake on my part, I now have 7 dollars worth of noodles on my desk and I would like to use them. So a recipe would be great.
So this week was alright. Things are getting better all the time (“they can’t get no worse…” see the Beatles). After this next week I should be doing a little bit better. It will be kind of stressful but I think things will get much better here soon. Thank grandma and grandpa for me for putting my name on the roll of every temple west of Wyoming. Thanks for your prayers and love. I’m doing well and enjoying life. I just need to be more tolerant. I think the Lord is trying to tell me that my wife will be super annoying and not be able to put up with any undesirable weather conditions (last time I checked 50 degrees didn’t constitute using 3 different heaters in the apartment).
Have a good week. Good luck with everything. Everyone seems really busy and working hard. I’ll continue to think about presents that I want (or more things that I need). Love you all. Have a great week.
Love Tyler
This week in Fukui was alright. It was stressful because last Tuesday I had to do training again in Nagoya and we come back to Fukui that night because we had an appointment the next morning (which canceled on me). I was exhausted. Luckily antibiotics are miracles (I mean that in a very serious sense). I was better by Tuesday. My voice was just a little hoarse. So I’ll finish up the last two days tomorrow and then be off of them. They were a quite helpful. Mom is absolutely brilliant for giving me antibiotics to bring.
So you know you are getting old and things are changing at home when you are a Hooton and you get a box of brownies in a package but the package is different from what it had always been that you don’t recognize it. I almost cried when I realized it was a box of brownies. America is changing. Also, Mom told me today that Brother Comin got released. Either I’ve been away so long that I’ve forgotten people or he is new to the ward and I didn’t get to know him because I have no idea who that is. Speaking of ward members, there is a member of the Bishopric here who is exactly like Bishop Schofield. (By the way, what was the name of our ward before the split? I forgot). The only difference is he talks really impolitely during sacrament meeting when he is conducting, makes fun of people’s talks, makes inappropriate comments, is a little bit bigger, and tries embarrassing children....wait that’s exactly the same as Bishop Schofield.
So does anyone remember what McDonalds used to smell like before it became healthier? Back in the days of the Notre Dame toys or the toy story toys? Like the Mr. Potato Head that would throw French Fries out of his backpack? I know Monica knows what I’m talking about. Anyway, I smelled that smell this week and it was great. It reminded me a lot of Korea.
Good segue huh? So Elder Chei is coming to our zone on Friday. It’s the new source of a lot of my stress today. He is Korean and in the Area Presidency. I’m sure dad knows about him. I’m very scared because President Baird seems way too on edge and scared. A man that scares President Baird because he is so strict scares the day lights out of me. We were told exactly what to wear and how to dress and groom for our conference. We were also told that Elder Chei might be doing apartment checks. So the rest of my day will be spent cleaning up crap that previous missionaries left here (funny story but we found a working TV in the futon closest the other night. Missionaries in this apartment got in trouble a while ago for having a PS3. To answer your question Jacob, yes if I find the PS3 I’ll send it home to you).
Will everyone (but me of course...unless I get blamed for this TV thing) be home for Christmas? Jason and Carey as well? That’d be way cool.
So there is the guy in our ward that loves pretzels. He sits in the kitchen during Sunday School because he is allergic to the carpets and just eats pretzels. We walked in and he pulled a GIANT bucket of pretzels out from under the table and asked me if I wanted any. There are so many weird people here.
The work here is still way slow. I’m excited because I got my old Zone Leader from Fuji back in my District. It’s very nice to have him back. I need help getting things going here. I’m running up against a brick wall. Thanks for your prayers. It’s helping. Sometimes I feel like my Japanese is getting a lot better but for the last two days I’ve felt like its almost non existent. My English is getting even worse I think. I now prefer speaking in Japanese to Elder Momose rather than English, mainly for comprehension purposes though.
Please send me a lasagna recipe. Due to a big mistake on my part, I now have 7 dollars worth of noodles on my desk and I would like to use them. So a recipe would be great.
So this week was alright. Things are getting better all the time (“they can’t get no worse…” see the Beatles). After this next week I should be doing a little bit better. It will be kind of stressful but I think things will get much better here soon. Thank grandma and grandpa for me for putting my name on the roll of every temple west of Wyoming. Thanks for your prayers and love. I’m doing well and enjoying life. I just need to be more tolerant. I think the Lord is trying to tell me that my wife will be super annoying and not be able to put up with any undesirable weather conditions (last time I checked 50 degrees didn’t constitute using 3 different heaters in the apartment).
Have a good week. Good luck with everything. Everyone seems really busy and working hard. I’ll continue to think about presents that I want (or more things that I need). Love you all. Have a great week.
Love Tyler
October 24, 2010
Well this week will go down as the most stressful week of my life. I went to Kanazawa on Monday, that night I had to stay in Komatsu with the other two missionaries before we started our exchange the next day. Since there were four of us I had to sleep on a futon out of a closest that probably hadn:t be used in months if not years. I woke up and felt just a little stuffed up but I could tell I got stuff into my sinuses. I then started that exchange with my zone leader who is actually going home tomorrow (he finished his mission) he is from Brazil but speaks pretty good english. It was stressful because we really had nothing to do. He suggested things during our planning but none of them were going to work out. I would tell him the reason and then just felt like I was making up excuses. In the end the whole day was spent trying to ride our bike to Takefu city to visit some people but after an hour and a half we decided it would be more effective to just do finding in the city that we were in. So it was kinda stressful always trying to figure out what to do next. It:s the probably with having Fukui Ken as your area. (it:s 40 miles by 40 miles. It might not sound too big but in Japan it:s huge. It:s a whole state here).
So Monday night when we were planning for the exchange I got the big news from one of the president’s assistants. He said that on Thursday President Baird wants to go to Fukui and work with your for the day in your area. So after coming up with no plans for my exchange with my Zone Leader, I had to then plan for working with the Mission President for the day. Not only the mission president. President Baird. So Tuesday night towards the end of our exchange I start to lose my voice to a really bad sore throat. By Wednesday morning I had a full on sinus infection. I took the first nap of my mission on Wednesday to try to get better. I thought it was a miracle because I got better.
Wednesday night I pulled plans together for the next day. It was a miracle and the Lord was keeping me above water. He decided he’d try to test me again though and the next morning both Elder Momose and I got really sick. (my sinus infection came back) I also had a fight with Elder Momose during study and was about ready to explode with anger. The anxious feelings started to come for out time with President Baird (luckily he was coming towards the evening (5:00) but as it came closer I started to get really bad diarrhea. So that didn’t make things pleasant. In the end I pulled it together. Elder Momose got a little bit better and we started the night with President Baird. We visited three families. The first one did not want to make the appointment but agreed anyway. It was difficult because they have five kids. We worked through that and then went to a dinner appointment (super, super rare). It was a couple that just had a baby about a month ago. It went all right. The husband is kind of like Bishop Schofield. I think it was really awkward for him because President Baird is so intense. It went well though and we ended the night visiting our Ward Mission Leader who has no motivation to help us at all.
We ended up actually breaking curfew which was really embarrassing and we found out in our second appointment that President Baird was actually planning on staying in our apartment that night. I just about pooped myself when I heard that (edit for grandparents..thanks). So we ended the night and I felt like I was being judged in everything that I did. It was weird sleeping on the floor next to my mission president. While we were getting ready for bed, I decided I’d try to make conversation. Since I have lost all social skills the best thing I could come up with was to ask President Baird if he had gained weight (good one...I know and yes he has by the way). We went to sleep and I woke up at 6:30 the next morning and he was gone. His suitcase was still there but his futon and stuff was gone. It was scary. I felt like he was hiding under a desk or on the ceiling judging me as I worked out and did study. He was actually on a walk.
We left with him in his van to go to Kanazawa again because we had interviews that day. It was fun seeing people but I started to get really, really sick and couldn’t talk. I started to get bad sinus headaches. On the car ride up he gave us rules that he wanted us to follow. We are suppose to go on a walk every morning (kills my working out time); also he wants us to speak English in the apartment from now on. It’s a little more difficult because I learned how to express myself in Japanese a little bit better but now I have to speak a little more simplistically in the apartment. It’s good though because it’s helping with our relationship. It does add to my stress though.
So during my interview I asked him for permission for something and he flat out said no and so that on top of everything else I had a hard night on Friday. I ended up trying to do my best on Saturday and we had a really good day. We worked all day which was a miracle. I was very happy that we stayed out all day. Sunday was stake conference so we had to get a ride to Komatsu. It was good to see people but a lot of people from Takaoka had forgotten me. Oh well. On the way home I thought I was going to die. I got home and started a course of anti-biotics. I’m on the mend now. I had to just sleep last night though. We visited one person but I was losing my sense of balance so I thought riding a bike wasn’t the best idea (it was really windy and stormy so it made for difficult riding). I’m feeling better today. The medicine of course helps fast.
We got transfer calls today. We didn’t receive a call so we are both staying I guess. No one in our district was told that they were district leader though. It might be more. We didn:t get a call but we also didn:t get a text saying that it was over so I might still get a call or they might have just straight up forgotten us. so I might be district leader. I:m happy with transfers. It turned out good. My old zone leader from Fuji is the new zone leader here. He will be in Komatsu. It will be way fun. I like him a ton. also Elder Momose and I have a good relationship right now. The learning english thing helps.
So thanks for your prayers I:ll continue to try to work hard. Oh President Baird also commanded me (used the word nasai) to learn chineese characters. To answer some questions and say some things. Can I get matt graham:s address. It sounds liek you are all working really hard. It sounds like Katie did absolutely wonderful. I*m so proud of here. She got contacts huh? Awesome. I*m fine on contacts. I:ll read that sheet when I get it. My allergies are bad but I:m taking care of it. No medicine needed. I:ve still got another course. I might ask for more if I have to use the other course. Way to go for monica and quincy going out with the missionaries. Way good. I*m glad byu won. I:m glad the bishop didn:t swear when it was coming down to the wire.
I love you all have a wonderful week. Thanks for yoru prayers. I:m doing much better. I*m just trying to make it and work as hard as I can. I*m feeling better so that will help with the stress I think. Keep up the good work and working hard. Good luck with debate jacob. I bet you look great now with your braces off (you looked great before too.)
Love
Tyler
So Monday night when we were planning for the exchange I got the big news from one of the president’s assistants. He said that on Thursday President Baird wants to go to Fukui and work with your for the day in your area. So after coming up with no plans for my exchange with my Zone Leader, I had to then plan for working with the Mission President for the day. Not only the mission president. President Baird. So Tuesday night towards the end of our exchange I start to lose my voice to a really bad sore throat. By Wednesday morning I had a full on sinus infection. I took the first nap of my mission on Wednesday to try to get better. I thought it was a miracle because I got better.
Wednesday night I pulled plans together for the next day. It was a miracle and the Lord was keeping me above water. He decided he’d try to test me again though and the next morning both Elder Momose and I got really sick. (my sinus infection came back) I also had a fight with Elder Momose during study and was about ready to explode with anger. The anxious feelings started to come for out time with President Baird (luckily he was coming towards the evening (5:00) but as it came closer I started to get really bad diarrhea. So that didn’t make things pleasant. In the end I pulled it together. Elder Momose got a little bit better and we started the night with President Baird. We visited three families. The first one did not want to make the appointment but agreed anyway. It was difficult because they have five kids. We worked through that and then went to a dinner appointment (super, super rare). It was a couple that just had a baby about a month ago. It went all right. The husband is kind of like Bishop Schofield. I think it was really awkward for him because President Baird is so intense. It went well though and we ended the night visiting our Ward Mission Leader who has no motivation to help us at all.
We ended up actually breaking curfew which was really embarrassing and we found out in our second appointment that President Baird was actually planning on staying in our apartment that night. I just about pooped myself when I heard that (edit for grandparents..thanks). So we ended the night and I felt like I was being judged in everything that I did. It was weird sleeping on the floor next to my mission president. While we were getting ready for bed, I decided I’d try to make conversation. Since I have lost all social skills the best thing I could come up with was to ask President Baird if he had gained weight (good one...I know and yes he has by the way). We went to sleep and I woke up at 6:30 the next morning and he was gone. His suitcase was still there but his futon and stuff was gone. It was scary. I felt like he was hiding under a desk or on the ceiling judging me as I worked out and did study. He was actually on a walk.
We left with him in his van to go to Kanazawa again because we had interviews that day. It was fun seeing people but I started to get really, really sick and couldn’t talk. I started to get bad sinus headaches. On the car ride up he gave us rules that he wanted us to follow. We are suppose to go on a walk every morning (kills my working out time); also he wants us to speak English in the apartment from now on. It’s a little more difficult because I learned how to express myself in Japanese a little bit better but now I have to speak a little more simplistically in the apartment. It’s good though because it’s helping with our relationship. It does add to my stress though.
So during my interview I asked him for permission for something and he flat out said no and so that on top of everything else I had a hard night on Friday. I ended up trying to do my best on Saturday and we had a really good day. We worked all day which was a miracle. I was very happy that we stayed out all day. Sunday was stake conference so we had to get a ride to Komatsu. It was good to see people but a lot of people from Takaoka had forgotten me. Oh well. On the way home I thought I was going to die. I got home and started a course of anti-biotics. I’m on the mend now. I had to just sleep last night though. We visited one person but I was losing my sense of balance so I thought riding a bike wasn’t the best idea (it was really windy and stormy so it made for difficult riding). I’m feeling better today. The medicine of course helps fast.
We got transfer calls today. We didn’t receive a call so we are both staying I guess. No one in our district was told that they were district leader though. It might be more. We didn:t get a call but we also didn:t get a text saying that it was over so I might still get a call or they might have just straight up forgotten us. so I might be district leader. I:m happy with transfers. It turned out good. My old zone leader from Fuji is the new zone leader here. He will be in Komatsu. It will be way fun. I like him a ton. also Elder Momose and I have a good relationship right now. The learning english thing helps.
So thanks for your prayers I:ll continue to try to work hard. Oh President Baird also commanded me (used the word nasai) to learn chineese characters. To answer some questions and say some things. Can I get matt graham:s address. It sounds liek you are all working really hard. It sounds like Katie did absolutely wonderful. I*m so proud of here. She got contacts huh? Awesome. I*m fine on contacts. I:ll read that sheet when I get it. My allergies are bad but I:m taking care of it. No medicine needed. I:ve still got another course. I might ask for more if I have to use the other course. Way to go for monica and quincy going out with the missionaries. Way good. I*m glad byu won. I:m glad the bishop didn:t swear when it was coming down to the wire.
I love you all have a wonderful week. Thanks for yoru prayers. I:m doing much better. I*m just trying to make it and work as hard as I can. I*m feeling better so that will help with the stress I think. Keep up the good work and working hard. Good luck with debate jacob. I bet you look great now with your braces off (you looked great before too.)
Love
Tyler
October 10, 2010
Dear Family,
Honestly, what person in the right mind would think that you can get to Heaven by building a tower? I want to find the jerk that first suggested it and punch him in the face.
So Japanese this week royally kicked my butt as Jason might put it. It was super tough. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it was the hardest week of my life. I’m so tired of not being able to vent in my native language. The problems I face with Elder Momose on a daily basis are not being resolved because of the language barrier. It’s building up and it’s not fair to either of us. It might end in someone getting punch in the face (I hope it’s the dude that tried to build the tower). I think the Lord is trying to get me to learn how to overcome anger because I’ve never had to deal with so much anger in my life (this even trumps debate). I’m doing my best though and trying to love people. I’m doing better. I had some good experiences today. It is getting better but I’ve had to wear my retainer every night because I’m getting headaches from my teeth grinding so much. Anyway, I’m learning and trying to become more Christ like.
I did have the highlight of my mission this week. I was praying so hard that I’d find a prepared soul that I could love and help. We have been receiving a lot of training lately and it was so frustrating that I couldn’t put it into affect and help someone. So I was praying that I would find someone and I got in a little argument with my companion but then calmed down and we went to this apartment complex. We found this woman that has had a recent interest in religion and has been going to a Catholic Church. She readily accepted the Book or Mormon and I think she is reading it. It was too bad that she caught a cold and couldn’t come to General Conference this week but I truly can tell you that I was led to her and I have high hopes for her.
I watched General Conference in Japanese. As you might expect my comprehension was a little weak but I can read it later. It was good study and I still enjoyed it. It was sure tough though.
So I’ll give you an overview of how I would characterize some of the members I’ve recently gotten to know. We have a Japanese Kevin from the office. We have a Japanese Bishop Schofield, Ron Weasel’s dad, and scare crow from batman begins (that one is freaky because he looks exactly like him. Let’s just say I don’t get within arm’s reach of him).
Elder Momose is getting antsy that we might have to pay another dollar so I’ll answer your emails real quick. It’s good that BYU won. Could someone contact Carson for me and get me his address and tell him that he’s the man and I miss him? Jason you did get rocked with home teaching. Gomen (ask someone what that means. Oh I’ll just tell you. It means sorry). Sweet the monitor sounds awesome. That’s okay about Monica and Quincy. Thanks for the letter mom and dad. I’ve got a good story to tell you next week. Also, thanks everyone for your prayers. Jason yours was answered quite well this week that I’d find someone. I love you all. Have a good week. Thanks for sending the package I’ll probably get it tomorrow. Love you all have a great week.
Love, Tyler
Please pray for me. I’m still dying with the language. I also have to do an exchange tomorrow and I have nothing to do with my District Leader so it’s going to be really awkward. Prayers please. The Church is true.
Honestly, what person in the right mind would think that you can get to Heaven by building a tower? I want to find the jerk that first suggested it and punch him in the face.
So Japanese this week royally kicked my butt as Jason might put it. It was super tough. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it was the hardest week of my life. I’m so tired of not being able to vent in my native language. The problems I face with Elder Momose on a daily basis are not being resolved because of the language barrier. It’s building up and it’s not fair to either of us. It might end in someone getting punch in the face (I hope it’s the dude that tried to build the tower). I think the Lord is trying to get me to learn how to overcome anger because I’ve never had to deal with so much anger in my life (this even trumps debate). I’m doing my best though and trying to love people. I’m doing better. I had some good experiences today. It is getting better but I’ve had to wear my retainer every night because I’m getting headaches from my teeth grinding so much. Anyway, I’m learning and trying to become more Christ like.
I did have the highlight of my mission this week. I was praying so hard that I’d find a prepared soul that I could love and help. We have been receiving a lot of training lately and it was so frustrating that I couldn’t put it into affect and help someone. So I was praying that I would find someone and I got in a little argument with my companion but then calmed down and we went to this apartment complex. We found this woman that has had a recent interest in religion and has been going to a Catholic Church. She readily accepted the Book or Mormon and I think she is reading it. It was too bad that she caught a cold and couldn’t come to General Conference this week but I truly can tell you that I was led to her and I have high hopes for her.
I watched General Conference in Japanese. As you might expect my comprehension was a little weak but I can read it later. It was good study and I still enjoyed it. It was sure tough though.
So I’ll give you an overview of how I would characterize some of the members I’ve recently gotten to know. We have a Japanese Kevin from the office. We have a Japanese Bishop Schofield, Ron Weasel’s dad, and scare crow from batman begins (that one is freaky because he looks exactly like him. Let’s just say I don’t get within arm’s reach of him).
Elder Momose is getting antsy that we might have to pay another dollar so I’ll answer your emails real quick. It’s good that BYU won. Could someone contact Carson for me and get me his address and tell him that he’s the man and I miss him? Jason you did get rocked with home teaching. Gomen (ask someone what that means. Oh I’ll just tell you. It means sorry). Sweet the monitor sounds awesome. That’s okay about Monica and Quincy. Thanks for the letter mom and dad. I’ve got a good story to tell you next week. Also, thanks everyone for your prayers. Jason yours was answered quite well this week that I’d find someone. I love you all. Have a good week. Thanks for sending the package I’ll probably get it tomorrow. Love you all have a great week.
Love, Tyler
Please pray for me. I’m still dying with the language. I also have to do an exchange tomorrow and I have nothing to do with my District Leader so it’s going to be really awkward. Prayers please. The Church is true.
October 3, 2010
Dear Family,
Once again, I don’t have a whole lot of time. I tried sending off that package this week and it got sent back to me because there was a battery in the ipod. That was super frustrating. I put the return address as the mission home so I don’t even have it right now. Luckily I sent it pretty cheap so that wasn’t too big of a deal. I took out 70 bucks but since it charges me a little I decided to take out a lot more than I needed. I’m going to try to figure out if I can even send it to the United States. There were some language barriers when it got returned to the mission home. I’m going to go to the post office today and ask. Sorry. I might have to end up just sending it back with a missionary that I trust who is going home and then having them mail it from within the US. Unfortunately, no one is going back to America until after Christmas except Sister Baird. It’s also a bummer because I put my SD card from my camera in the package so I could have you copy off the pictures. But now I’ll have to wait on that as well. I have my other card though and I still have some room. Hey can you send that package off asap? I don’t have any deodorant. Just put in some of the contact solution and case and deodorant and toothpaste. I’m good on tooth brushes. If you could also send me a cookie recipe and a brownie recipe from scratch so I can make them for members. Also, I need Matt Graham’s address. Forget about the recorder thing unless you already bought it.
To answer your questions, I’m trying to be healthy but my body is getting the crap beat out of it. My toes are killing me. My ankles always hurt. Luckily my joints are doing better though. I do have shin splits really bad. It’s just from riding my bike so much. I figure I’m just going to lay on the couch for a full two days when I get back to get better. I’ve already gone 9 months with my toe problems so I can handle another year or so.
I don’t get to watch Conference until next week. They put it on DVD’s and send them to the wards. I’m the only English speaker in my ward (actually all other missionaries in our zone go to Kanazawa to watch it but we are just by ourselves). I sit at the back of the room by myself with my own TV and have to switch DVDs out with everyone so I don’t get to watch it in order. It’s too bad, but I’ll survive. People will just wonder why there is one lone voice in the back of the room singing in English.
I loved the temple issue this last month. It was great. I wish I could go to the temple. I really, really want to be able to go. Oh well.
So if one more person tells me they can’t meet because they are too busy I’m going to punch them. I asked all the members I could on Sunday if they had any time this week. All of them said they were busy. I don’t buy for a second that they can’t find 30 minutes at just one point during the week. It’s not like they have five kids or anything. Most of them only have one if any at all. It’s so frustrating. We have a new rule that we can’t even talk to members at the door if there isn’t a priesthood holder home. If it’s just a woman we can’t meet at the door. It: makes teaching members almost impossible.
This week was better. Things are getting on track a little bit more. We actually didn’t have any investigator lessons this week which is really bad but we got two new investigators that we will meet with soon. I will attest that my prayers have been answered. Things are falling into place. I just need to continue getting better at Japanese. Sometimes it feels like I’m getting worse. Anyway, Elder Momose is wanting to leave so I should probably go. I’m sorry this letter was so short. I don’t have a whole lot to write about. It’s just difficult living with someone that doesn’t speak your own language. It’s rough stuff. So I’ll try to write more next week. Love you all. Have a good week. Thanks for the emails and prayers.
Love Tyler
Once again, I don’t have a whole lot of time. I tried sending off that package this week and it got sent back to me because there was a battery in the ipod. That was super frustrating. I put the return address as the mission home so I don’t even have it right now. Luckily I sent it pretty cheap so that wasn’t too big of a deal. I took out 70 bucks but since it charges me a little I decided to take out a lot more than I needed. I’m going to try to figure out if I can even send it to the United States. There were some language barriers when it got returned to the mission home. I’m going to go to the post office today and ask. Sorry. I might have to end up just sending it back with a missionary that I trust who is going home and then having them mail it from within the US. Unfortunately, no one is going back to America until after Christmas except Sister Baird. It’s also a bummer because I put my SD card from my camera in the package so I could have you copy off the pictures. But now I’ll have to wait on that as well. I have my other card though and I still have some room. Hey can you send that package off asap? I don’t have any deodorant. Just put in some of the contact solution and case and deodorant and toothpaste. I’m good on tooth brushes. If you could also send me a cookie recipe and a brownie recipe from scratch so I can make them for members. Also, I need Matt Graham’s address. Forget about the recorder thing unless you already bought it.
To answer your questions, I’m trying to be healthy but my body is getting the crap beat out of it. My toes are killing me. My ankles always hurt. Luckily my joints are doing better though. I do have shin splits really bad. It’s just from riding my bike so much. I figure I’m just going to lay on the couch for a full two days when I get back to get better. I’ve already gone 9 months with my toe problems so I can handle another year or so.
I don’t get to watch Conference until next week. They put it on DVD’s and send them to the wards. I’m the only English speaker in my ward (actually all other missionaries in our zone go to Kanazawa to watch it but we are just by ourselves). I sit at the back of the room by myself with my own TV and have to switch DVDs out with everyone so I don’t get to watch it in order. It’s too bad, but I’ll survive. People will just wonder why there is one lone voice in the back of the room singing in English.
I loved the temple issue this last month. It was great. I wish I could go to the temple. I really, really want to be able to go. Oh well.
So if one more person tells me they can’t meet because they are too busy I’m going to punch them. I asked all the members I could on Sunday if they had any time this week. All of them said they were busy. I don’t buy for a second that they can’t find 30 minutes at just one point during the week. It’s not like they have five kids or anything. Most of them only have one if any at all. It’s so frustrating. We have a new rule that we can’t even talk to members at the door if there isn’t a priesthood holder home. If it’s just a woman we can’t meet at the door. It: makes teaching members almost impossible.
This week was better. Things are getting on track a little bit more. We actually didn’t have any investigator lessons this week which is really bad but we got two new investigators that we will meet with soon. I will attest that my prayers have been answered. Things are falling into place. I just need to continue getting better at Japanese. Sometimes it feels like I’m getting worse. Anyway, Elder Momose is wanting to leave so I should probably go. I’m sorry this letter was so short. I don’t have a whole lot to write about. It’s just difficult living with someone that doesn’t speak your own language. It’s rough stuff. So I’ll try to write more next week. Love you all. Have a good week. Thanks for the emails and prayers.
Love Tyler
September 26, 2010
Dear Family,
This week was really tough. Luckily it was by far the fastest week of my mission up until this morning. It felt like it went by in a snap. I’m still way stressed though and trying to manage being in a foreign country while living with another human being that doesn’t speak the same language as me. It’s been tough and I’ve just had my just compromises and refrained from just yelling in English (I did it a couple of times though).
Funny story, I had told some people that my grandpa has served in Kanazawa and the senior missionary couple here got wind and the Elder, Elder Oldroid called me and told me that he knew my grandpa. I was shocked and then he told me to look up his name on the North Asia Mission website. It says that Elder Oldroid and Elder Hooton served together and baptized 3 people or something like that. I just played along and didn’t bother to tell him that it was my mother’s father that served in Japan but I guess a Hooton served here as well with Elder Oldroid. I told you Japan missions run in families.
We went into the post office the other morning. We walk in and I went to stand off to the side to wait for Elder Momose to use the ATM. It was just what I usually do. I could tell something was wrong because Elder Momose turned around and gave me a weird look. At first I just thought it was because the man using the ATM was obviously drunk (he was yelling slurred Japanese words). It wasn’t a huge deal. If you are over the age of 70 and live in Japan that’s the cool thing to do is get drunk and roam the streets yelling at high school girls. Anyway, when I looked closer I realized that his pants were around his ankles. Elder Momose tried to help him use the ATM machine. After awhile he told me why the man had his pants down. He was unaware of the matter. We had to help him out and eventually he went home and we got our money. It was quite the experience though.
So this inactive woman called us and wanted to meet. It was a little weird. She was a little crazy from what I could tell from the teaching record. She told missionaries that if they translated some papers for her into English then she’d get baptized. I guess the missionaries started teaching her and she gained legitimate interest and she eventually got baptized. Anyway, half way through the conversation with Elder Momose (on the phone) she started asking tons of questions about me like how tall I was, my eye color, hair color, etc.. It was quite weird. I feel like I have a stalker. Her children are high school age and not members so we wouldn’t mind trying to teach them so we are going to visit her this week. I’ll be careful.
Don’t worry about printing emails and sending them. Short ones are fine. If you want to send other letters by regular mail that’d be great. We don’t get NBC on DirecTV? How are we supposed to watch The Office at home?
I was tired of Elder Momose always leading the way because I think it stressed him a little bit that he always had to be finding the homes of people, so one day I decided I’d look up the addresses in the map book and I’d map out a route. He was a little unsure but I was fairly certain I could do it. After the first three minutes I took a wrong turn. It’s not my fault though. Elder Momose kind of threw me off. Anyway, Japanese maps are stupid. Streets have names but the names aren’t anywhere on the actual street. They are really only on maps. They name intersections. That’s stupid if you ask me. Why would you only name intersections? So on all four poles with traffic lights on them there is a sign and all four of them say the same thing. Anyway, I found the way after a while. It went well for a long time. In the end I misjudged the size of the river (well actually creek) that we needed to cross and I went about a good 30 minutes farther than we needed to. In my defense though, that creek looked huge on the map. Also, yesterday we had to go that way anyway. It was 2 hours by bike there and 1 and a half hour to get back (we took a different way) it was super exhausting.
Well the area hasn’t really picked up that much. We are still kind of just fluttering around trying to figure things out but it’s at least going a little better. I’m doing alright. Just please keep on praying for me. I love you all. Have a good week.
Elder Hooton
This week was really tough. Luckily it was by far the fastest week of my mission up until this morning. It felt like it went by in a snap. I’m still way stressed though and trying to manage being in a foreign country while living with another human being that doesn’t speak the same language as me. It’s been tough and I’ve just had my just compromises and refrained from just yelling in English (I did it a couple of times though).
Funny story, I had told some people that my grandpa has served in Kanazawa and the senior missionary couple here got wind and the Elder, Elder Oldroid called me and told me that he knew my grandpa. I was shocked and then he told me to look up his name on the North Asia Mission website. It says that Elder Oldroid and Elder Hooton served together and baptized 3 people or something like that. I just played along and didn’t bother to tell him that it was my mother’s father that served in Japan but I guess a Hooton served here as well with Elder Oldroid. I told you Japan missions run in families.
We went into the post office the other morning. We walk in and I went to stand off to the side to wait for Elder Momose to use the ATM. It was just what I usually do. I could tell something was wrong because Elder Momose turned around and gave me a weird look. At first I just thought it was because the man using the ATM was obviously drunk (he was yelling slurred Japanese words). It wasn’t a huge deal. If you are over the age of 70 and live in Japan that’s the cool thing to do is get drunk and roam the streets yelling at high school girls. Anyway, when I looked closer I realized that his pants were around his ankles. Elder Momose tried to help him use the ATM machine. After awhile he told me why the man had his pants down. He was unaware of the matter. We had to help him out and eventually he went home and we got our money. It was quite the experience though.
So this inactive woman called us and wanted to meet. It was a little weird. She was a little crazy from what I could tell from the teaching record. She told missionaries that if they translated some papers for her into English then she’d get baptized. I guess the missionaries started teaching her and she gained legitimate interest and she eventually got baptized. Anyway, half way through the conversation with Elder Momose (on the phone) she started asking tons of questions about me like how tall I was, my eye color, hair color, etc.. It was quite weird. I feel like I have a stalker. Her children are high school age and not members so we wouldn’t mind trying to teach them so we are going to visit her this week. I’ll be careful.
Don’t worry about printing emails and sending them. Short ones are fine. If you want to send other letters by regular mail that’d be great. We don’t get NBC on DirecTV? How are we supposed to watch The Office at home?
I was tired of Elder Momose always leading the way because I think it stressed him a little bit that he always had to be finding the homes of people, so one day I decided I’d look up the addresses in the map book and I’d map out a route. He was a little unsure but I was fairly certain I could do it. After the first three minutes I took a wrong turn. It’s not my fault though. Elder Momose kind of threw me off. Anyway, Japanese maps are stupid. Streets have names but the names aren’t anywhere on the actual street. They are really only on maps. They name intersections. That’s stupid if you ask me. Why would you only name intersections? So on all four poles with traffic lights on them there is a sign and all four of them say the same thing. Anyway, I found the way after a while. It went well for a long time. In the end I misjudged the size of the river (well actually creek) that we needed to cross and I went about a good 30 minutes farther than we needed to. In my defense though, that creek looked huge on the map. Also, yesterday we had to go that way anyway. It was 2 hours by bike there and 1 and a half hour to get back (we took a different way) it was super exhausting.
Well the area hasn’t really picked up that much. We are still kind of just fluttering around trying to figure things out but it’s at least going a little better. I’m doing alright. Just please keep on praying for me. I love you all. Have a good week.
Elder Hooton
Sunday, October 3, 2010
September 19, 2010
Dear Family,
Well I think it will be hard to email this transfer. Elder Momose, my companion, is already done and I just finished reading the letters. This week was way hard. There are a lot of barriers with opening a new area and having a Japanese companion. We’ve made due though.
Tuesday I got up and went to Nagoya with most of my zone. We were way late because of mess ups on train times and lazy missionaries. We showed up a little late for the training but luckily it hadn’t started yet. So I ate at 7:00 am that morning and didn’t get to eat until about 8:00 that night. I assumed Elder Momose and I would be going to Fukui that night but unfortunately no one told us we would be staying in Nonami that night which is about 40 minutes away from Nagoya. We were there with a missionary that I knew in the MTC who is one transfer older than me and then my old MTC companion and the missionary that he is training (it was his area). They had no idea would be going back with them to their area (neither did we). Their area got a new apartment recently so they only have two futons. So we took the blankets and laid them across the floor so all five of us had something to lay on. To say the least no one really slept that night.
The next day we had to go back to Nagoya because we had to meet Elder Brown and Sister Tsukino so we could all go to Kanazawa (about an hour past Fukui, we went through Fukui to get there). We started our trek and found out that we had to wait two hours for a train to leave the Nagoya station that would go all the way to Kanazawa. I wanted to eat at someplace cheap like McDonalds but we ended up eating at a more expensive Roman place (it doesn’t fill you up). We took the train all the way to Kanazawa. I wanted to sit next to Sister Tsukino because her Japanese is so much easier to understand and I would have plenty of time to talk with Elder Momose over the length of a transfer. I also didn’t want to use up conversation topics too quickly. I ended up sitting with Elder Brown. There are two Elder Browns and he is referred to as, “the talking Brown.” He talks a ton and talks about stuff I don’t want to talk about either. I just didn’t have any interest in Japanese cartoons.
Anyway, we finally arrived and dropped them off and then went back to Fukui where we couldn’t find the apartment. I got directions from Elder Wilson before I left and it was “take a right and you’ll see a yellow building.” He was the only person to give me directions. We eventually found it and walked into a dump. Most of the appliances were broken (intentionally I think). We also didn’t have any gas. I started to clean up. We got a notice that they tried to drop off my luggage but we weren’t there. We called them and it turns out we were just barely too late to get it that night. We had the gas guy come so we had hot water and stuff and then we did a little planning and we were getting ready to get some sleep when the Ward Mission Leader called and dropped off some rice. He then left and came back and said the Bishop was in a meeting at the church which was close so we went and met him before finally going back to the apartment and going to sleep.
We tried to do work for the next couple of days but we live in the city and no member live around us and we didn’t get Elder Momose’s bike until yesterday afternoon so we couldn’t really do a whole lot except just walking. My Japanese is terrible by the way. One night we did meet with the Ward Mission Leader and he had a really bad “why even bother”* attitude. So our first objective is to get the members more excited. Now that we finally have bikes we are starting to visit them. We were also blessed with a referral from Tokyo and Elder Momose just got off the phone with her and it sounded alright. That was a huge blessing.
Things are going alright. I wish I could write more but I feel bad making Elder Momose stay here (and pay more) when he isn’t doing anything. Also, I guess we worked too hard yesterday because he slept in today and I was getting a little angry until he got up and went into the bathroom for a while and he was throwing up. I guess I need to slow it down a little. Things are going alright though. It will get dang cold here eventually. I’ll just have to endure though. I’m going to just have to call that good for this week. I’m doing well. Just keep praying for me. I’m starting to lose my hair I’m so stressed.
Everyone have a good week. I miss English a lot. Luckily in our four man district there is someone that speaks English. He was pretty annoying though. Oh well, I should be more positive. I love you all. Don’t worry about me just pray for me. Have a good week.
Love Tyler
Well I think it will be hard to email this transfer. Elder Momose, my companion, is already done and I just finished reading the letters. This week was way hard. There are a lot of barriers with opening a new area and having a Japanese companion. We’ve made due though.
Tuesday I got up and went to Nagoya with most of my zone. We were way late because of mess ups on train times and lazy missionaries. We showed up a little late for the training but luckily it hadn’t started yet. So I ate at 7:00 am that morning and didn’t get to eat until about 8:00 that night. I assumed Elder Momose and I would be going to Fukui that night but unfortunately no one told us we would be staying in Nonami that night which is about 40 minutes away from Nagoya. We were there with a missionary that I knew in the MTC who is one transfer older than me and then my old MTC companion and the missionary that he is training (it was his area). They had no idea would be going back with them to their area (neither did we). Their area got a new apartment recently so they only have two futons. So we took the blankets and laid them across the floor so all five of us had something to lay on. To say the least no one really slept that night.
The next day we had to go back to Nagoya because we had to meet Elder Brown and Sister Tsukino so we could all go to Kanazawa (about an hour past Fukui, we went through Fukui to get there). We started our trek and found out that we had to wait two hours for a train to leave the Nagoya station that would go all the way to Kanazawa. I wanted to eat at someplace cheap like McDonalds but we ended up eating at a more expensive Roman place (it doesn’t fill you up). We took the train all the way to Kanazawa. I wanted to sit next to Sister Tsukino because her Japanese is so much easier to understand and I would have plenty of time to talk with Elder Momose over the length of a transfer. I also didn’t want to use up conversation topics too quickly. I ended up sitting with Elder Brown. There are two Elder Browns and he is referred to as, “the talking Brown.” He talks a ton and talks about stuff I don’t want to talk about either. I just didn’t have any interest in Japanese cartoons.
Anyway, we finally arrived and dropped them off and then went back to Fukui where we couldn’t find the apartment. I got directions from Elder Wilson before I left and it was “take a right and you’ll see a yellow building.” He was the only person to give me directions. We eventually found it and walked into a dump. Most of the appliances were broken (intentionally I think). We also didn’t have any gas. I started to clean up. We got a notice that they tried to drop off my luggage but we weren’t there. We called them and it turns out we were just barely too late to get it that night. We had the gas guy come so we had hot water and stuff and then we did a little planning and we were getting ready to get some sleep when the Ward Mission Leader called and dropped off some rice. He then left and came back and said the Bishop was in a meeting at the church which was close so we went and met him before finally going back to the apartment and going to sleep.
We tried to do work for the next couple of days but we live in the city and no member live around us and we didn’t get Elder Momose’s bike until yesterday afternoon so we couldn’t really do a whole lot except just walking. My Japanese is terrible by the way. One night we did meet with the Ward Mission Leader and he had a really bad “why even bother”* attitude. So our first objective is to get the members more excited. Now that we finally have bikes we are starting to visit them. We were also blessed with a referral from Tokyo and Elder Momose just got off the phone with her and it sounded alright. That was a huge blessing.
Things are going alright. I wish I could write more but I feel bad making Elder Momose stay here (and pay more) when he isn’t doing anything. Also, I guess we worked too hard yesterday because he slept in today and I was getting a little angry until he got up and went into the bathroom for a while and he was throwing up. I guess I need to slow it down a little. Things are going alright though. It will get dang cold here eventually. I’ll just have to endure though. I’m going to just have to call that good for this week. I’m doing well. Just keep praying for me. I’m starting to lose my hair I’m so stressed.
Everyone have a good week. I miss English a lot. Luckily in our four man district there is someone that speaks English. He was pretty annoying though. Oh well, I should be more positive. I love you all. Don’t worry about me just pray for me. Have a good week.
Love Tyler
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
September 12, 2010
Dear Family,
So I’m going back to Kanazawa Zone. That’s where Takaoka is. I will be in a district with Komatsu and that’s it. It really stinks being in a four man district. I’m not looking forward to that. Fukui get’s super cold during the winter. Elder Wilson left Fukui when I came to the mission. It was then closed when I left Takaoka because they had no investigators. So now Elder Momose and I get to go open it tomorrow night.
I will leave here tomorrow morning and go to the train station in Nagoya where we will meet most of the missionaries in the mission because a special trainer session is being held for missionaries that President Baird picked. We will go into the mission home and have a four hour special training session (mainly zone leaders, trainers, and people opening areas). I’ll probably leave the mission home around 7:00 pm and get to Fukui around 9:00 or 10:00 pm. It’s the second longest transfer possible in the mission from Fuji to Fukui. It’s going to cost me tons of money and I’m going to be exhausted.
Then I’ve got to deal with opening an area. I have to set up English class and meet with the ward mission leader each week and all that stuff. Geez I need better Japanese. It will be good though. I’m happy that I’ll be given a companion that’s motivated and an area that we can mold to what we want it to be. It’ll be nice to start from the ground up. Hopefully since I’m senior companion a lot of pressure will be put on me and it will force my Japanese to get better. Having a Japanese companion will help as well. I might write next week’s email through tears though. It will just be difficult because there isn’t a zone conference next transfer and I don’t think anyone is my district is a native English speaker. There is a Brazilian that is pretty good but not fluent. Oh well. My English will just have to suffer even more.
This week I officially became a normal Japanese missionary. I opened up the rice cooker and just started eating plain rice for a meal. I never thought I’d see the day. I realized a few good things this week. First, that someone that I housed into and I was the one that knocked on the door and talk to them, well they got baptized last transfer. It was in Kanazawa. He is Chinese (I swear the work will explode in China, those people are gold) and got baptized on the same day as someone that I taught a couple days later in Kanazawa. Elder Insch and I taught him lesson 3 and committed him to baptism when we were on a companion exchange. Also a man I taught in Shizuoka last transfer with our Zone Leader was baptized last week and confirmed yesterday. So I just need to work on people in my area now. I didn’t play a huge part at all but it was cool to participate in their conversion and see what it takes to get someone to be baptized.
This week I also learned the power and purpose of testimonies. It’s great to always back up what you say with a testimony. I think the real purpose of a testimony though is when an investigator has a bunch of little hang-ups they can’t get past then you just have to break things down very basic and explain the premise that if the Book Of Mormon is true then none of that matters because it testifies of the restoration which proves everything else.
We found a new investigator this week. I don’t know if he should be referred to as an investigator exactly but he’ll talk with us and listen a little. It’s funny because after we say something is always yells “uso!” which means lie. His main hang up is that he says he can’t believe that God created everything. We assured him that yes, God did create everything. We taught him some good things though and family is quite important to him. We tried to talk to him about how families can be together forever but we were cute off by his friend (we did the lesson in the lounge of a car repair shop with he and his two friends who were watching the baseball game on the TV next to me) who had a question about our church. The friends were alright. They had some good questions but not a ton of interest. It was awkward when some random woman walked in and said “ooh it Mormons.” She then started to list off the things from the word of wisdom which made us sound weird. Then the guy asked if we could get married. We said yes but after we finished our missions. He said, “you won’t be able to find anyone if you don’t drink coffee or beer.” I then said “uso!” to him and told him I’ve dated plenty of attractive women. It was an interesting conversation that only got more interesting because he then informed us that he once saw two UFOs in Japan. He then asked us what we thought about a scenario where our grandchildren visit us from the future in a time capsule. We played along for a while and then got back to the important stuff. He said that he’d read the introduction to the Book or Mormon and we explained the story a little bit. It all made for an interesting hour long lesson but for some reason Elder Wilson and I both have a fairly positive feeling about him even though he seems pretty.....well I don’t know the word in English but pretty muri. (Impossible maybe).
I don’t know what else to write about. We mainly did a lot of housing this week which I was happy about. We played Jenga in the big food court in the mall. We are Jenga pros now. We met this one guy who was stoked about our Jenga playing skills. He watched us for like a half an hour but he said he didn’t want to play with us. He and his wife and kid were pretty funny. Hopefully we house into him sometime. Other than that we just tried to meet people. Suzuki is going well. We really didn’t get to meet with her that much though. She is reading and stuff and will hopefully come to church this next week.
I spent most of today packing. It’s SUCH a pain. I hate it. I now have to go call the shipping place and wait around for them to come by the pick up my stuff. I found a contact case that I used probably the first month I was in Japan and I hadn’t opened it since. I was going to use it for when I transfer (so I don’t have to use the case that has the acid stuff in it) and I opened it up and the fluid was yellow. I then smelled it and it’s hands down the worst smell I’ve ever encountered. I felt sick for about an hour and a half after. I dumped it down the drain and left the water running and when we left the apartment it still smelled. I was amazed at how bad it smelled. Change your contact fluid regularly people!!
Well that’s all I’ve got. Maybe I’ll think of something in a bit. I’ve still got time, anyway. I love you all. Hopefully this coming week will go well and the work will pick up fast in Fukui. It should be nice and cool there until about October then it’ll start to get cold. Then again I come from Montana. Elder Wilson says he loves the cold and he said Fukui was way cold but he comes from Oregon where in the winter it gets down around the 30’s. That’s a joke compared to Montana. I’m used to super cold winters. I think I might be fine. It’ll just remind me of home. Anyway. Everyone have a great week. Love you all.
Elder Hooton
So I’m going back to Kanazawa Zone. That’s where Takaoka is. I will be in a district with Komatsu and that’s it. It really stinks being in a four man district. I’m not looking forward to that. Fukui get’s super cold during the winter. Elder Wilson left Fukui when I came to the mission. It was then closed when I left Takaoka because they had no investigators. So now Elder Momose and I get to go open it tomorrow night.
I will leave here tomorrow morning and go to the train station in Nagoya where we will meet most of the missionaries in the mission because a special trainer session is being held for missionaries that President Baird picked. We will go into the mission home and have a four hour special training session (mainly zone leaders, trainers, and people opening areas). I’ll probably leave the mission home around 7:00 pm and get to Fukui around 9:00 or 10:00 pm. It’s the second longest transfer possible in the mission from Fuji to Fukui. It’s going to cost me tons of money and I’m going to be exhausted.
Then I’ve got to deal with opening an area. I have to set up English class and meet with the ward mission leader each week and all that stuff. Geez I need better Japanese. It will be good though. I’m happy that I’ll be given a companion that’s motivated and an area that we can mold to what we want it to be. It’ll be nice to start from the ground up. Hopefully since I’m senior companion a lot of pressure will be put on me and it will force my Japanese to get better. Having a Japanese companion will help as well. I might write next week’s email through tears though. It will just be difficult because there isn’t a zone conference next transfer and I don’t think anyone is my district is a native English speaker. There is a Brazilian that is pretty good but not fluent. Oh well. My English will just have to suffer even more.
This week I officially became a normal Japanese missionary. I opened up the rice cooker and just started eating plain rice for a meal. I never thought I’d see the day. I realized a few good things this week. First, that someone that I housed into and I was the one that knocked on the door and talk to them, well they got baptized last transfer. It was in Kanazawa. He is Chinese (I swear the work will explode in China, those people are gold) and got baptized on the same day as someone that I taught a couple days later in Kanazawa. Elder Insch and I taught him lesson 3 and committed him to baptism when we were on a companion exchange. Also a man I taught in Shizuoka last transfer with our Zone Leader was baptized last week and confirmed yesterday. So I just need to work on people in my area now. I didn’t play a huge part at all but it was cool to participate in their conversion and see what it takes to get someone to be baptized.
This week I also learned the power and purpose of testimonies. It’s great to always back up what you say with a testimony. I think the real purpose of a testimony though is when an investigator has a bunch of little hang-ups they can’t get past then you just have to break things down very basic and explain the premise that if the Book Of Mormon is true then none of that matters because it testifies of the restoration which proves everything else.
We found a new investigator this week. I don’t know if he should be referred to as an investigator exactly but he’ll talk with us and listen a little. It’s funny because after we say something is always yells “uso!” which means lie. His main hang up is that he says he can’t believe that God created everything. We assured him that yes, God did create everything. We taught him some good things though and family is quite important to him. We tried to talk to him about how families can be together forever but we were cute off by his friend (we did the lesson in the lounge of a car repair shop with he and his two friends who were watching the baseball game on the TV next to me) who had a question about our church. The friends were alright. They had some good questions but not a ton of interest. It was awkward when some random woman walked in and said “ooh it Mormons.” She then started to list off the things from the word of wisdom which made us sound weird. Then the guy asked if we could get married. We said yes but after we finished our missions. He said, “you won’t be able to find anyone if you don’t drink coffee or beer.” I then said “uso!” to him and told him I’ve dated plenty of attractive women. It was an interesting conversation that only got more interesting because he then informed us that he once saw two UFOs in Japan. He then asked us what we thought about a scenario where our grandchildren visit us from the future in a time capsule. We played along for a while and then got back to the important stuff. He said that he’d read the introduction to the Book or Mormon and we explained the story a little bit. It all made for an interesting hour long lesson but for some reason Elder Wilson and I both have a fairly positive feeling about him even though he seems pretty.....well I don’t know the word in English but pretty muri. (Impossible maybe).
I don’t know what else to write about. We mainly did a lot of housing this week which I was happy about. We played Jenga in the big food court in the mall. We are Jenga pros now. We met this one guy who was stoked about our Jenga playing skills. He watched us for like a half an hour but he said he didn’t want to play with us. He and his wife and kid were pretty funny. Hopefully we house into him sometime. Other than that we just tried to meet people. Suzuki is going well. We really didn’t get to meet with her that much though. She is reading and stuff and will hopefully come to church this next week.
I spent most of today packing. It’s SUCH a pain. I hate it. I now have to go call the shipping place and wait around for them to come by the pick up my stuff. I found a contact case that I used probably the first month I was in Japan and I hadn’t opened it since. I was going to use it for when I transfer (so I don’t have to use the case that has the acid stuff in it) and I opened it up and the fluid was yellow. I then smelled it and it’s hands down the worst smell I’ve ever encountered. I felt sick for about an hour and a half after. I dumped it down the drain and left the water running and when we left the apartment it still smelled. I was amazed at how bad it smelled. Change your contact fluid regularly people!!
Well that’s all I’ve got. Maybe I’ll think of something in a bit. I’ve still got time, anyway. I love you all. Hopefully this coming week will go well and the work will pick up fast in Fukui. It should be nice and cool there until about October then it’ll start to get cold. Then again I come from Montana. Elder Wilson says he loves the cold and he said Fukui was way cold but he comes from Oregon where in the winter it gets down around the 30’s. That’s a joke compared to Montana. I’m used to super cold winters. I think I might be fine. It’ll just remind me of home. Anyway. Everyone have a great week. Love you all.
Elder Hooton
Tyler teaching
We were followed home by a praying mantis that stowed away on Elder Wilson:s bike so we took it as a sign and started to talk to him about our book.
Tyler teaching
We found a praying mantis so we decided to take it as a sign. So we showed him the Book or Mormon.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
September 5, 2010
Dear Family and friends,
I wonder if this internet place wonders why they make less of a profit on Mondays because they have to refill the ice cream machine so much. Even though I’m stuffed, I refuse to pay money to email at a place that has free ice cream and not eat as much ice cream as my physical body can handle (my non physical body never gets tired of ice cream. I claim that it’s good for my soul). I have already eaten a bunch today which I will get to later. I’ve decided that carbonated drink with ice cream is probably too unhealthy for me so I poured natchan into my ice cream instead. It’s like the Sunny-D of Japan but it’s not caffeinated and its logo is just a creepy smiley face with a leaf for an eyebrow that is winking at you. It gives me the shivers but oddly enough makes me want to drink more. I’ll get back to you on how Sunny-D over ice cream tastes. I’m still not sure.
I’m sorry I’m emailing so late today. A member took us up to Mt. Fuji this morning. We left pretty early and we drove up to the fifth climbing marker. It’s the highest point you can drive to. It’s against the mission rules to go above six. So he dropped us off and said I’ll be back in an hour, go climb around and have fun. We climbed up to the sixth point in record speed. We cut the estimated time in half and I was even unprepared enough that I was wearing my dress shoes. I can now agree with that eccentric man at Dillards and swear by these shoes. Maybe it’s the injected whatever that he kept on raving about, but they are durable shoes. They just have a little dust on them. They didn’t even get scuffed up and we were going through tons of crap. People were giving us weird looks since I was in slacks and dress shoes but we were still booking it up the mountain. We estimate that it would take us two hours to climb the whole thing. It takes most people 3 or 4 hours to get up and about the same to get down. I will say going down was harder but still if I had proper shoes it would have been a cinch.
So after that we drove back down the mountain. I was reluctant to leave the cool climate at 7,800 ft. Now we are back down in the muggy hot climate. On the way back brother Mochizuki took us to Ideboku. Look it up. It’s the best ice cream on the whole dang planet. I had it the other day when we went with a member to an appointment close by (one of our investigator lives on Mt. Fuji essentially). I will stand by the statement that it’s the best soft serve on the whole planet. Now dad don’t let the term soft serve deter you. It’s sooo good. It comes straight out of the cow with sugar added. I’m pretty sure it’s really famous. You should look it up online and let me know. It’s super good. Some people say “oh I could eat pizza for the rest of my life.” Those people are not anchored in reality and obviously crap like jiggling fat will make it go away. But I will say that I could eat ideboku ice cream for dessert for the rest of my life. It’s soooo good.
Anyway after that we went to a Chinese restaurant. They are nothing like ones in America. It’s pretty much just Japanese food. I had some meat with rice and some sauce that was kind of like sweat and sour sauce but of course it’s not called that. Brother Mochizuki ordered the drink for us so I swore that I’d get his money’s worth so I decided I’d go for the Melon Fanta (you don’t have it in the States but I love it so). I was super sick before I even got my food. I then ate that and decided that I might die. I went to the bathroom and tried to free up any space I could by urinating. Then I just sat on the toilet writhing in pain. after about 5 minutes I felt like I could at least go back out. From there I slowly started to feel better. Oh I also drank 2 cups of vegetable juice. It was way delicious though.
So some good things happened this week. We ended up teaching Suzuki San all of Lesson Two. It was way great. We were just going to teach her a little lesson but we ended up teaching her and her son the whole lesson. It was cool because we gave her Alma 40 to read because both of her parents passed away when she was younger so we wanted to emphasize that families can live together forever. She ended up reading 40 and 41. It was so a great feeling when I heard that. An investigator that actually cared enough to read more on their own. We started to teach and she was understanding everything and re-explaining it to her son so that he could understand. I made a little mistake though because we needed a map of the plan of salvation so I pulled out the Lesson Two pamphlet from a case in my backpack. The case was left by the missionary that I replaced and he went home so he left all of his stuff so I just took his pamphlets and stuff. Suzuki San was having a hard time understanding the names of all of places and in Japanese they might not understand a spoken word but if they read it then they fully understand it. It makes explaining words like “Apostasy” much easier. We were wondering why she was having such a hard time. Then the son was like “hey is this Chinese?” I flipped it over and realized that I couldn’t read anything on the front of the pamphlet (I can read some kanji now). Turns out it was Chinese. I was impressed that they understood about 50 percent of it anyway. The kanji explaining the Plan of Salvation did look a little weird to me. I just thought. “oh wow I’ve forgotten a lot since the MTC.” Anyway, once we got that all straightened out I was reading a scripture to her and all the sudden this giant beetle smacks right onto my scriptures right in front of my face. I thought it was going to poke my eye out or something. The mom freaked out and got angry at the son (it’s his pet) for letting it out. It was kind of funny but it scared me.
I’ve learned a lot this week about preparing someone to go to church. At first it can seem weird, especially to someone that doesn’t have a grasp on Christianity. A couple observations are that we sing a lot, pray a lot, and we seem to randomly raise our hands. Suzuki San came to church and we forgot to mention those things. So it seemed a little strange to her. Every time we sang she looked over at me for the page number. I was like “lady he just said it in Japanese, I don’t speak Japanese you do.” I guess the vocab we use during sacrament meeting is difficult so I just showed her the page number and hoped it didn’t make for a bad experience. She caught on that the numbers were on the wall but only when it was time to sing our rest hymn when we all stood up. So that probably seemed weird and there wasn’t a slot for a rest hymn and I wasn’t listening so I had to ask someone next to me what the number was.
Elder Wilson bore his testimony and so did some of the youth (they do that every sacrament meeting). Then we had brother Nonaka give a talk. He is a convert and a good member so I was excited. He was aware that we had an investigator so I was hoping he’d try to help us out a little. His talk turned out to be on obedience. He then continued to say that he wanted to talk about the Word of Wisdom. I wanted to punch him in the face. We hadn’t gotten to any of the commandments yet with Suzuki so it was all a surprise to her. She didn’t freak out or anything and in the end she said it was fun (I don’t know how sincere she was). Luckily before she left the bishop’s daughters went and talked to her and tried talking to her son. They are really upbeat so it was good. People were really friendly so that was good as well. Suzuki actually knew the bishop because they both work at the same company but she didn’t know he was a member. I bet he feels pretttttty embarrassed about not giving her to us as a referral a long time ago. Anyway, it was good in the end. Hopefully she will be willing to come again.
So Sunday we visited a potential investigator that we’d been talking with. He started to bring up the fact that he remembers World War II and I thought “ah crap this can’t be good.” He says he remembers the bombs going off and I jumped in the conversation and asked “so how’s your car? You said before you were working on your car. Is it almost done?” I wasn’t quite so abrupt but I did try to naturally change the subject fast. I really did ask that though.
I saw a poster of Jack Bauer today and cried a little. I went up and hugged it. I don’t know if it was for the newest season or if there are already advertisements for the movie but it looked way sweet and reminded me of the good old days.
We saw a pizza dude get in a weird argument with someone that lives in our apartment. I guess the pizza guy kept bugging this family for reasons that we know not. He would just stand outside the door and ring the doorbell every so often. Then finally a guy walked out and just started walking away. The pizza guy followed him for I don’t know how far. They were just yelling at each other. The dude kept telling the pizza guy to just go away. Elder Wilson and I were standing outside watching the whole thing. They both left. The pizza guy came back and got on his moped and left. Then this really old guy came out of the apartment and kept asking us if the guy and left. We assured him that the Pizza guy was gone and asked if we could do anything to help. He just muttered a bunch words and then went in the same direct as the first guy that left. It was all really weird. He was nice to us though and I think he likes us. I want pizza.
Anyway, I hope everyone has a good week. I’ve still got some emails to read. Thanks to Katie and my friends, I got lots of letters this week it was great. I sent Alec a birthday package kind of late but can I get an email next week letting me know if he got it or not? I’m worried that no one might ever see that package again. Alec I didn’t put a letter in it. I’ll send one some other time. Yeah some friend I am.
Love Elder Hooton
I wonder if this internet place wonders why they make less of a profit on Mondays because they have to refill the ice cream machine so much. Even though I’m stuffed, I refuse to pay money to email at a place that has free ice cream and not eat as much ice cream as my physical body can handle (my non physical body never gets tired of ice cream. I claim that it’s good for my soul). I have already eaten a bunch today which I will get to later. I’ve decided that carbonated drink with ice cream is probably too unhealthy for me so I poured natchan into my ice cream instead. It’s like the Sunny-D of Japan but it’s not caffeinated and its logo is just a creepy smiley face with a leaf for an eyebrow that is winking at you. It gives me the shivers but oddly enough makes me want to drink more. I’ll get back to you on how Sunny-D over ice cream tastes. I’m still not sure.
I’m sorry I’m emailing so late today. A member took us up to Mt. Fuji this morning. We left pretty early and we drove up to the fifth climbing marker. It’s the highest point you can drive to. It’s against the mission rules to go above six. So he dropped us off and said I’ll be back in an hour, go climb around and have fun. We climbed up to the sixth point in record speed. We cut the estimated time in half and I was even unprepared enough that I was wearing my dress shoes. I can now agree with that eccentric man at Dillards and swear by these shoes. Maybe it’s the injected whatever that he kept on raving about, but they are durable shoes. They just have a little dust on them. They didn’t even get scuffed up and we were going through tons of crap. People were giving us weird looks since I was in slacks and dress shoes but we were still booking it up the mountain. We estimate that it would take us two hours to climb the whole thing. It takes most people 3 or 4 hours to get up and about the same to get down. I will say going down was harder but still if I had proper shoes it would have been a cinch.
So after that we drove back down the mountain. I was reluctant to leave the cool climate at 7,800 ft. Now we are back down in the muggy hot climate. On the way back brother Mochizuki took us to Ideboku. Look it up. It’s the best ice cream on the whole dang planet. I had it the other day when we went with a member to an appointment close by (one of our investigator lives on Mt. Fuji essentially). I will stand by the statement that it’s the best soft serve on the whole planet. Now dad don’t let the term soft serve deter you. It’s sooo good. It comes straight out of the cow with sugar added. I’m pretty sure it’s really famous. You should look it up online and let me know. It’s super good. Some people say “oh I could eat pizza for the rest of my life.” Those people are not anchored in reality and obviously crap like jiggling fat will make it go away. But I will say that I could eat ideboku ice cream for dessert for the rest of my life. It’s soooo good.
Anyway after that we went to a Chinese restaurant. They are nothing like ones in America. It’s pretty much just Japanese food. I had some meat with rice and some sauce that was kind of like sweat and sour sauce but of course it’s not called that. Brother Mochizuki ordered the drink for us so I swore that I’d get his money’s worth so I decided I’d go for the Melon Fanta (you don’t have it in the States but I love it so). I was super sick before I even got my food. I then ate that and decided that I might die. I went to the bathroom and tried to free up any space I could by urinating. Then I just sat on the toilet writhing in pain. after about 5 minutes I felt like I could at least go back out. From there I slowly started to feel better. Oh I also drank 2 cups of vegetable juice. It was way delicious though.
So some good things happened this week. We ended up teaching Suzuki San all of Lesson Two. It was way great. We were just going to teach her a little lesson but we ended up teaching her and her son the whole lesson. It was cool because we gave her Alma 40 to read because both of her parents passed away when she was younger so we wanted to emphasize that families can live together forever. She ended up reading 40 and 41. It was so a great feeling when I heard that. An investigator that actually cared enough to read more on their own. We started to teach and she was understanding everything and re-explaining it to her son so that he could understand. I made a little mistake though because we needed a map of the plan of salvation so I pulled out the Lesson Two pamphlet from a case in my backpack. The case was left by the missionary that I replaced and he went home so he left all of his stuff so I just took his pamphlets and stuff. Suzuki San was having a hard time understanding the names of all of places and in Japanese they might not understand a spoken word but if they read it then they fully understand it. It makes explaining words like “Apostasy” much easier. We were wondering why she was having such a hard time. Then the son was like “hey is this Chinese?” I flipped it over and realized that I couldn’t read anything on the front of the pamphlet (I can read some kanji now). Turns out it was Chinese. I was impressed that they understood about 50 percent of it anyway. The kanji explaining the Plan of Salvation did look a little weird to me. I just thought. “oh wow I’ve forgotten a lot since the MTC.” Anyway, once we got that all straightened out I was reading a scripture to her and all the sudden this giant beetle smacks right onto my scriptures right in front of my face. I thought it was going to poke my eye out or something. The mom freaked out and got angry at the son (it’s his pet) for letting it out. It was kind of funny but it scared me.
I’ve learned a lot this week about preparing someone to go to church. At first it can seem weird, especially to someone that doesn’t have a grasp on Christianity. A couple observations are that we sing a lot, pray a lot, and we seem to randomly raise our hands. Suzuki San came to church and we forgot to mention those things. So it seemed a little strange to her. Every time we sang she looked over at me for the page number. I was like “lady he just said it in Japanese, I don’t speak Japanese you do.” I guess the vocab we use during sacrament meeting is difficult so I just showed her the page number and hoped it didn’t make for a bad experience. She caught on that the numbers were on the wall but only when it was time to sing our rest hymn when we all stood up. So that probably seemed weird and there wasn’t a slot for a rest hymn and I wasn’t listening so I had to ask someone next to me what the number was.
Elder Wilson bore his testimony and so did some of the youth (they do that every sacrament meeting). Then we had brother Nonaka give a talk. He is a convert and a good member so I was excited. He was aware that we had an investigator so I was hoping he’d try to help us out a little. His talk turned out to be on obedience. He then continued to say that he wanted to talk about the Word of Wisdom. I wanted to punch him in the face. We hadn’t gotten to any of the commandments yet with Suzuki so it was all a surprise to her. She didn’t freak out or anything and in the end she said it was fun (I don’t know how sincere she was). Luckily before she left the bishop’s daughters went and talked to her and tried talking to her son. They are really upbeat so it was good. People were really friendly so that was good as well. Suzuki actually knew the bishop because they both work at the same company but she didn’t know he was a member. I bet he feels pretttttty embarrassed about not giving her to us as a referral a long time ago. Anyway, it was good in the end. Hopefully she will be willing to come again.
So Sunday we visited a potential investigator that we’d been talking with. He started to bring up the fact that he remembers World War II and I thought “ah crap this can’t be good.” He says he remembers the bombs going off and I jumped in the conversation and asked “so how’s your car? You said before you were working on your car. Is it almost done?” I wasn’t quite so abrupt but I did try to naturally change the subject fast. I really did ask that though.
I saw a poster of Jack Bauer today and cried a little. I went up and hugged it. I don’t know if it was for the newest season or if there are already advertisements for the movie but it looked way sweet and reminded me of the good old days.
We saw a pizza dude get in a weird argument with someone that lives in our apartment. I guess the pizza guy kept bugging this family for reasons that we know not. He would just stand outside the door and ring the doorbell every so often. Then finally a guy walked out and just started walking away. The pizza guy followed him for I don’t know how far. They were just yelling at each other. The dude kept telling the pizza guy to just go away. Elder Wilson and I were standing outside watching the whole thing. They both left. The pizza guy came back and got on his moped and left. Then this really old guy came out of the apartment and kept asking us if the guy and left. We assured him that the Pizza guy was gone and asked if we could do anything to help. He just muttered a bunch words and then went in the same direct as the first guy that left. It was all really weird. He was nice to us though and I think he likes us. I want pizza.
Anyway, I hope everyone has a good week. I’ve still got some emails to read. Thanks to Katie and my friends, I got lots of letters this week it was great. I sent Alec a birthday package kind of late but can I get an email next week letting me know if he got it or not? I’m worried that no one might ever see that package again. Alec I didn’t put a letter in it. I’ll send one some other time. Yeah some friend I am.
Love Elder Hooton
August 29, 2010
Dear Family and friends,
I wonder if this internet place wonders why they make less of a profit on Mondays because they have to refill the ice cream machine so much. Even though I’m stuffed, I refuse to pay money to email at a place that has free ice cream and not eat as much ice cream as my physical body can handle (my non physical body never gets tired of ice cream. I claim that it’s good for my soul). I have already eaten a bunch today which I will get to later. I’ve decided that carbonated drink with ice cream is probably too unhealthy for me so I poured natchan into my ice cream instead. It’s like the Sunny-D of Japan but it’s not caffeinated and its logo is just a creepy smiley face with a leaf for an eyebrow that is winking at you. It gives me the shivers but oddly enough makes me want to drink more. I’ll get back to you on how Sunny-D over ice cream tastes. I’m still not sure.
I’m sorry I’m emailing so late today. A member took us up to Mt. Fuji this morning. We left pretty early and we drove up to the fifth climbing marker. It’s the highest point you can drive to. It’s against the mission rules to go above six. So he dropped us off and said I’ll be back in an hour, go climb around and have fun. We climbed up to the sixth point in record speed. We cut the estimated time in half and I was even unprepared enough that I was wearing my dress shoes. I can now agree with that eccentric man at Dillards and swear by these shoes. Maybe it’s the injected whatever that he kept on raving about, but they are durable shoes. They just have a little dust on them. They didn’t even get scuffed up and we were going through tons of crap. People were giving us weird looks since I was in slacks and dress shoes but we were still booking it up the mountain. We estimate that it would take us two hours to climb the whole thing. It takes most people 3 or 4 hours to get up and about the same to get down. I will say going down was harder but still if I had proper shoes it would have been a cinch.
So after that we drove back down the mountain. I was reluctant to leave the cool climate at 7,800 ft. Now we are back down in the muggy hot climate. On the way back brother Mochizuki took us to Ideboku. Look it up. It’s the best ice cream on the whole dang planet. I had it the other day when we went with a member to an appointment close by (one of our investigator lives on Mt. Fuji essentially). I will stand by the statement that it’s the best soft serve on the whole planet. Now dad don’t let the term soft serve deter you. It’s sooo good. It comes straight out of the cow with sugar added. I’m pretty sure it’s really famous. You should look it up online and let me know. It’s super good. Some people say “oh I could eat pizza for the rest of my life.” Those people are not anchored in reality and obviously crap like jiggling fat will make it go away. But I will say that I could eat ideboku ice cream for dessert for the rest of my life. It’s soooo good.
Anyway after that we went to a Chinese restaurant. They are nothing like ones in America. It’s pretty much just Japanese food. I had some meat with rice and some sauce that was kind of like sweat and sour sauce but of course it’s not called that. Brother Mochizuki ordered the drink for us so I swore that I’d get his money’s worth so I decided I’d go for the Melon Fanta (you don’t have it in the States but I love it so). I was super sick before I even got my food. I then ate that and decided that I might die. I went to the bathroom and tried to free up any space I could by urinating. Then I just sat on the toilet writhing in pain. after about 5 minutes I felt like I could at least go back out. From there I slowly started to feel better. Oh I also drank 2 cups of vegetable juice. It was way delicious though.
So some good things happened this week. We ended up teaching Suzuki San all of Lesson Two. It was way great. We were just going to teach her a little lesson but we ended up teaching her and her son the whole lesson. It was cool because we gave her Alma 40 to read because both of her parents passed away when she was younger so we wanted to emphasize that families can live together forever. She ended up reading 40 and 41. It was so a great feeling when I heard that. An investigator that actually cared enough to read more on their own. We started to teach and she was understanding everything and re-explaining it to her son so that he could understand. I made a little mistake though because we needed a map of the plan of salvation so I pulled out the Lesson Two pamphlet from a case in my backpack. The case was left by the missionary that I replaced and he went home so he left all of his stuff so I just took his pamphlets and stuff. Suzuki San was having a hard time understanding the names of all of places and in Japanese they might not understand a spoken word but if they read it then they fully understand it. It makes explaining words like “Apostasy” much easier. We were wondering why she was having such a hard time. Then the son was like “hey is this Chinese?” I flipped it over and realized that I couldn’t read anything on the front of the pamphlet (I can read some kanji now). Turns out it was Chinese. I was impressed that they understood about 50 percent of it anyway. The kanji explaining the Plan of Salvation did look a little weird to me. I just thought. “oh wow I’ve forgotten a lot since the MTC.” Anyway, once we got that all straightened out I was reading a scripture to her and all the sudden this giant beetle smacks right onto my scriptures right in front of my face. I thought it was going to poke my eye out or something. The mom freaked out and got angry at the son (it’s his pet) for letting it out. It was kind of funny but it scared me.
I’ve learned a lot this week about preparing someone to go to church. At first it can seem weird, especially to someone that doesn’t have a grasp on Christianity. A couple observations are that we sing a lot, pray a lot, and we seem to randomly raise our hands. Suzuki San came to church and we forgot to mention those things. So it seemed a little strange to her. Every time we sang she looked over at me for the page number. I was like “lady he just said it in Japanese, I don’t speak Japanese you do.” I guess the vocab we use during sacrament meeting is difficult so I just showed her the page number and hoped it didn’t make for a bad experience. She caught on that the numbers were on the wall but only when it was time to sing our rest hymn when we all stood up. So that probably seemed weird and there wasn’t a slot for a rest hymn and I wasn’t listening so I had to ask someone next to me what the number was.
Elder Wilson bore his testimony and so did some of the youth (they do that every sacrament meeting). Then we had brother Nonaka give a talk. He is a convert and a good member so I was excited. He was aware that we had an investigator so I was hoping he’d try to help us out a little. His talk turned out to be on obedience. He then continued to say that he wanted to talk about the Word of Wisdom. I wanted to punch him in the face. We hadn’t gotten to any of the commandments yet with Suzuki so it was all a surprise to her. She didn’t freak out or anything and in the end she said it was fun (I don’t know how sincere she was). Luckily before she left the bishop’s daughters went and talked to her and tried talking to her son. They are really upbeat so it was good. People were really friendly so that was good as well. Suzuki actually knew the bishop because they both work at the same company but she didn’t know he was a member. I bet he feels pretttttty embarrassed about not giving her to us as a referral a long time ago. Anyway, it was good in the end. Hopefully she will be willing to come again.
So Sunday we visited a potential investigator that we’d been talking with. He started to bring up the fact that he remembers World War II and I thought “ah crap this can’t be good.” He says he remembers the bombs going off and I jumped in the conversation and asked “so how’s your car? You said before you were working on your car. Is it almost done?” I wasn’t quite so abrupt but I did try to naturally change the subject fast. I really did ask that though.
I saw a poster of Jack Bauer today and cried a little. I went up and hugged it. I don’t know if it was for the newest season or if there are already advertisements for the movie but it looked way sweet and reminded me of the good old days.
We saw a pizza dude get in a weird argument with someone that lives in our apartment. I guess the pizza guy kept bugging this family for reasons that we know not. He would just stand outside the door and ring the doorbell every so often. Then finally a guy walked out and just started walking away. The pizza guy followed him for I don’t know how far. They were just yelling at each other. The dude kept telling the pizza guy to just go away. Elder Wilson and I were standing outside watching the whole thing. They both left. The pizza guy came back and got on his moped and left. Then this really old guy came out of the apartment and kept asking us if the guy and left. We assured him that the Pizza guy was gone and asked if we could do anything to help. He just muttered a bunch words and then went in the same direct as the first guy that left. It was all really weird. He was nice to us though and I think he likes us. I want pizza.
Anyway, I hope everyone has a good week. I’ve still got some emails to read. Thanks to Katie and my friends, I got lots of letters this week it was great. I sent Alec a birthday package kind of late but can I get an email next week letting me know if he got it or not? I’m worried that no one might ever see that package again. Alec I didn’t put a letter in it. I’ll send one some other time. Yeah some friend I am.
Love Elder Hooton
I wonder if this internet place wonders why they make less of a profit on Mondays because they have to refill the ice cream machine so much. Even though I’m stuffed, I refuse to pay money to email at a place that has free ice cream and not eat as much ice cream as my physical body can handle (my non physical body never gets tired of ice cream. I claim that it’s good for my soul). I have already eaten a bunch today which I will get to later. I’ve decided that carbonated drink with ice cream is probably too unhealthy for me so I poured natchan into my ice cream instead. It’s like the Sunny-D of Japan but it’s not caffeinated and its logo is just a creepy smiley face with a leaf for an eyebrow that is winking at you. It gives me the shivers but oddly enough makes me want to drink more. I’ll get back to you on how Sunny-D over ice cream tastes. I’m still not sure.
I’m sorry I’m emailing so late today. A member took us up to Mt. Fuji this morning. We left pretty early and we drove up to the fifth climbing marker. It’s the highest point you can drive to. It’s against the mission rules to go above six. So he dropped us off and said I’ll be back in an hour, go climb around and have fun. We climbed up to the sixth point in record speed. We cut the estimated time in half and I was even unprepared enough that I was wearing my dress shoes. I can now agree with that eccentric man at Dillards and swear by these shoes. Maybe it’s the injected whatever that he kept on raving about, but they are durable shoes. They just have a little dust on them. They didn’t even get scuffed up and we were going through tons of crap. People were giving us weird looks since I was in slacks and dress shoes but we were still booking it up the mountain. We estimate that it would take us two hours to climb the whole thing. It takes most people 3 or 4 hours to get up and about the same to get down. I will say going down was harder but still if I had proper shoes it would have been a cinch.
So after that we drove back down the mountain. I was reluctant to leave the cool climate at 7,800 ft. Now we are back down in the muggy hot climate. On the way back brother Mochizuki took us to Ideboku. Look it up. It’s the best ice cream on the whole dang planet. I had it the other day when we went with a member to an appointment close by (one of our investigator lives on Mt. Fuji essentially). I will stand by the statement that it’s the best soft serve on the whole planet. Now dad don’t let the term soft serve deter you. It’s sooo good. It comes straight out of the cow with sugar added. I’m pretty sure it’s really famous. You should look it up online and let me know. It’s super good. Some people say “oh I could eat pizza for the rest of my life.” Those people are not anchored in reality and obviously crap like jiggling fat will make it go away. But I will say that I could eat ideboku ice cream for dessert for the rest of my life. It’s soooo good.
Anyway after that we went to a Chinese restaurant. They are nothing like ones in America. It’s pretty much just Japanese food. I had some meat with rice and some sauce that was kind of like sweat and sour sauce but of course it’s not called that. Brother Mochizuki ordered the drink for us so I swore that I’d get his money’s worth so I decided I’d go for the Melon Fanta (you don’t have it in the States but I love it so). I was super sick before I even got my food. I then ate that and decided that I might die. I went to the bathroom and tried to free up any space I could by urinating. Then I just sat on the toilet writhing in pain. after about 5 minutes I felt like I could at least go back out. From there I slowly started to feel better. Oh I also drank 2 cups of vegetable juice. It was way delicious though.
So some good things happened this week. We ended up teaching Suzuki San all of Lesson Two. It was way great. We were just going to teach her a little lesson but we ended up teaching her and her son the whole lesson. It was cool because we gave her Alma 40 to read because both of her parents passed away when she was younger so we wanted to emphasize that families can live together forever. She ended up reading 40 and 41. It was so a great feeling when I heard that. An investigator that actually cared enough to read more on their own. We started to teach and she was understanding everything and re-explaining it to her son so that he could understand. I made a little mistake though because we needed a map of the plan of salvation so I pulled out the Lesson Two pamphlet from a case in my backpack. The case was left by the missionary that I replaced and he went home so he left all of his stuff so I just took his pamphlets and stuff. Suzuki San was having a hard time understanding the names of all of places and in Japanese they might not understand a spoken word but if they read it then they fully understand it. It makes explaining words like “Apostasy” much easier. We were wondering why she was having such a hard time. Then the son was like “hey is this Chinese?” I flipped it over and realized that I couldn’t read anything on the front of the pamphlet (I can read some kanji now). Turns out it was Chinese. I was impressed that they understood about 50 percent of it anyway. The kanji explaining the Plan of Salvation did look a little weird to me. I just thought. “oh wow I’ve forgotten a lot since the MTC.” Anyway, once we got that all straightened out I was reading a scripture to her and all the sudden this giant beetle smacks right onto my scriptures right in front of my face. I thought it was going to poke my eye out or something. The mom freaked out and got angry at the son (it’s his pet) for letting it out. It was kind of funny but it scared me.
I’ve learned a lot this week about preparing someone to go to church. At first it can seem weird, especially to someone that doesn’t have a grasp on Christianity. A couple observations are that we sing a lot, pray a lot, and we seem to randomly raise our hands. Suzuki San came to church and we forgot to mention those things. So it seemed a little strange to her. Every time we sang she looked over at me for the page number. I was like “lady he just said it in Japanese, I don’t speak Japanese you do.” I guess the vocab we use during sacrament meeting is difficult so I just showed her the page number and hoped it didn’t make for a bad experience. She caught on that the numbers were on the wall but only when it was time to sing our rest hymn when we all stood up. So that probably seemed weird and there wasn’t a slot for a rest hymn and I wasn’t listening so I had to ask someone next to me what the number was.
Elder Wilson bore his testimony and so did some of the youth (they do that every sacrament meeting). Then we had brother Nonaka give a talk. He is a convert and a good member so I was excited. He was aware that we had an investigator so I was hoping he’d try to help us out a little. His talk turned out to be on obedience. He then continued to say that he wanted to talk about the Word of Wisdom. I wanted to punch him in the face. We hadn’t gotten to any of the commandments yet with Suzuki so it was all a surprise to her. She didn’t freak out or anything and in the end she said it was fun (I don’t know how sincere she was). Luckily before she left the bishop’s daughters went and talked to her and tried talking to her son. They are really upbeat so it was good. People were really friendly so that was good as well. Suzuki actually knew the bishop because they both work at the same company but she didn’t know he was a member. I bet he feels pretttttty embarrassed about not giving her to us as a referral a long time ago. Anyway, it was good in the end. Hopefully she will be willing to come again.
So Sunday we visited a potential investigator that we’d been talking with. He started to bring up the fact that he remembers World War II and I thought “ah crap this can’t be good.” He says he remembers the bombs going off and I jumped in the conversation and asked “so how’s your car? You said before you were working on your car. Is it almost done?” I wasn’t quite so abrupt but I did try to naturally change the subject fast. I really did ask that though.
I saw a poster of Jack Bauer today and cried a little. I went up and hugged it. I don’t know if it was for the newest season or if there are already advertisements for the movie but it looked way sweet and reminded me of the good old days.
We saw a pizza dude get in a weird argument with someone that lives in our apartment. I guess the pizza guy kept bugging this family for reasons that we know not. He would just stand outside the door and ring the doorbell every so often. Then finally a guy walked out and just started walking away. The pizza guy followed him for I don’t know how far. They were just yelling at each other. The dude kept telling the pizza guy to just go away. Elder Wilson and I were standing outside watching the whole thing. They both left. The pizza guy came back and got on his moped and left. Then this really old guy came out of the apartment and kept asking us if the guy and left. We assured him that the Pizza guy was gone and asked if we could do anything to help. He just muttered a bunch words and then went in the same direct as the first guy that left. It was all really weird. He was nice to us though and I think he likes us. I want pizza.
Anyway, I hope everyone has a good week. I’ve still got some emails to read. Thanks to Katie and my friends, I got lots of letters this week it was great. I sent Alec a birthday package kind of late but can I get an email next week letting me know if he got it or not? I’m worried that no one might ever see that package again. Alec I didn’t put a letter in it. I’ll send one some other time. Yeah some friend I am.
Love Elder Hooton
August 22, 2010
Dear Family,
Hey, well this week was alright. It’s getting pretty tough though. Before I forget, can you be sure to thank Grandpa Hooton for his letter. It was really great. It helped a lot.
So we went and visited a woman last week who was a referral that we found out had been taught by missionaries 20 years ago and disagreed in a lot of ways. Now she is studying the Bible with some JWs. She wouldn’t even touch a Book of Mormon. Luckily she listened to us when we read out of it though. She threw the usual stuff at us about how the Book of Mormon goes against the Bible and we just explained how we get that a lot and then we explained how it agrees with the Bible. She wasn’t being very cooperative so we just bore testimony and gave her Moroni’s promise and left. It felt good to just bear testimony and promise her an answer and leave it up to her. We will probably go back sometime this week and just check to see if she’s read it. If not then we’ll put her in the area book and have some other missionaries another 20 years down the road see if she has changed her mind.
Wednesday I had an exchange with the Zone Leaders. I was in Fuji with the Japanese one. It made communicating a little difficult but it was a good experience. I knew I was treading on thin ice because Elder Wilson had dropped an investigator right before I came here. The Zone Leader I was with, Elder Furukawa had found that investigator a year ago when he was in Fuji. So the first thing we did was to go and visit him. Elder Wilson had dropped him because his interest and commitment was minimal and was only sparked when food was involved so he was sort of freeloading. We went and had an hour and a half lesson with him (3 lessons) and he said he’s only eating rice and he can’t focus on feeling the spirit if he is hungry. I felt bad for him but I was a little suspicious of some of the things that he said. We set up a time for Elder Wilson and I to go back the next day. I was scared to tell Elder Wilson that we had the appointment because he wasn’t going to be happy about it.
The next morning Furuwaka Choro and I were riding to the train station and we were a little early so he asked if we could go to a convenient store. I said sure. He bought a bunch of little meal things and I thought they must be out of food in Shizuoka so for some weird reason he is buying food now since he has time. Then I realized that he was buying it for the investigator. We dropped it off at his door. I was pretty upset. It’s rewarding this man for just saying he has interest. I am completely fine with giving him food as if he really needs it. The Church does it all the time. I just don’t want a handout to be correlated with us teaching him. I want him to progress as an investigator solely based on his feelings and not based of if he gets food. So I told Elder Wilson later that day and he was furious. We taught a lesson that night and it went alright. Then yesterday the investigator came to our night sacrament meeting and showed up late (for the closing hymn) and then got up and left right after. There were only 7 people there but he literally ran out of the chapel. We didn’t get to talk to him at all. It’s a weird situation. I hope he is genuine but with the way he’s been acting I’m finding it hard to believe.
I haven’t been mentioning this but in this ward they have a missionary talk every week. So I have to give a talk every other week. It’s been stressful to say the least. Unfortunately I don’t know if I’m getting any better at it. My talk yesterday was pretty sketchy. Jason, Dad, Quincy, anyone, if you have any ideas for talks on “missionary work” (the topic every week), feel free to write. I’m all out of ideas and I think I’ve shared every story from every missionary in the Book of Mormon. Does anyone have any good talks from their missions? So yesterday the member of the Bishopric that was conducting said, “Thank you to sister Yuriko for your talk on being worthy to enter the temple and the youth speaker for his talk on obedience and Elder Hooton for...well whatever the crap he talked about. We’re still trying to figure that one out.” Not really but he did mention everyone’s topic but mine. He just said my name and said thank you.
We have this member named Higa that I’ve talked about. We sometimes go to the church with him on Saturday nights and play a game, make food, and share a message. Well, when I was on the exchange we went and visited him and I set up an appointment (he didn’t say a word he just shook or nodded his head). Then Elder Wilson and I were at the mall watching something going on and he walked up behind Elder Wilson and started playing with his backpack. We turned around and tried to talk with him but he just walked away. Then we were trying to do missionary work on the trains but just taking trains back and forth talking to people (worked out alright) and we ran into Higa on the train. He only said a couple words. Then we had the appointment with him and only got him to talk a little. He’s pretty good at Jenga. Together we got the highest one I’ve ever seen. It was 13 blocks crisscrossed. No doubles. It was sweet. Elder Wilson thinks that Jenga is more technical than Operation. I told him he’s crazy. Then I talked with Higa about coming to teach and praying and stuff and he wasn’t being very receptive. So we left (the cake we made was good) but then Higa came to church the next day. It was awesome. I was so happy when I saw him slink in with his ridiculously long pink tie and sat down behind us. Then later that day we saw him on the street and he actually answered our questions instead of just shaking his head. So he is progressing. It was way cool that he came to church.
Hey thanks to my friends for sending letters. I got some good ones this week. It was way exciting. I got a little Betty Crocker brownie thing. It was super good. I loved it. Thanks Abby. I don’t know if I told you but a couple of weeks ago our gas bill wasn’t sent in so we had to go two days without gas. I now appreciate electric ovens in America a little bit more (unless the electricity goes out). Our main food this week was eggs, bread, rice and curry. I’m turning into a Japanese missionary finally. I’ve given up and now sometimes I’ll just eat rice. I never thought I’d see the day. I showed Elder Wilson a picture of me from when I was in Takaoka and I guess I’ve lost a lot of weight. He said my face is much, much skinner now. I look like a fat blob in the picture. My cheeks like jiggled and stuff.
We were trying to talk to high school kids that were on the beach last week. It was interesting. I’ve decided that you can’t contact guys here if there are girls around. They get super defensive and just try to make fun of us and act stupid. They are okay if they are by themselves. They feel like we are a threat if girls are around (frankly because we are). Their instincts kick in and they try to be the alpha male. I think it’s one of the main reasons why there are so many more women in the church in Japan. They will come and talk to us. They are more open, (more spiritual), and they aren’t defensive against us. It was way funny though because Elder Wilson and I came from behind a bunch of giant cement jacks (like the game jacks where you have to bounce the ball and grab the little rubber things) that are used to break tsunamis and both of us had bloody elbows and I guess my backpack was wide open and we were dripping sweat. I’m sure it was quite the sight. We just meandered out of the jacks, two weird foreigners.
It’s so weird being at these internet places where there are people reading comic books and stuff. I want to yell, “You’re a grown man! At least go play pool with the last bit of dignity that you have left.”
I’ll send this off for now and try to think of some more things after I get some ice cream. By the way for whoever might be wondering, I am six foot four or if you use the metric system that’s 192 cm.
Love,
Elder Hooton
Hey, well this week was alright. It’s getting pretty tough though. Before I forget, can you be sure to thank Grandpa Hooton for his letter. It was really great. It helped a lot.
So we went and visited a woman last week who was a referral that we found out had been taught by missionaries 20 years ago and disagreed in a lot of ways. Now she is studying the Bible with some JWs. She wouldn’t even touch a Book of Mormon. Luckily she listened to us when we read out of it though. She threw the usual stuff at us about how the Book of Mormon goes against the Bible and we just explained how we get that a lot and then we explained how it agrees with the Bible. She wasn’t being very cooperative so we just bore testimony and gave her Moroni’s promise and left. It felt good to just bear testimony and promise her an answer and leave it up to her. We will probably go back sometime this week and just check to see if she’s read it. If not then we’ll put her in the area book and have some other missionaries another 20 years down the road see if she has changed her mind.
Wednesday I had an exchange with the Zone Leaders. I was in Fuji with the Japanese one. It made communicating a little difficult but it was a good experience. I knew I was treading on thin ice because Elder Wilson had dropped an investigator right before I came here. The Zone Leader I was with, Elder Furukawa had found that investigator a year ago when he was in Fuji. So the first thing we did was to go and visit him. Elder Wilson had dropped him because his interest and commitment was minimal and was only sparked when food was involved so he was sort of freeloading. We went and had an hour and a half lesson with him (3 lessons) and he said he’s only eating rice and he can’t focus on feeling the spirit if he is hungry. I felt bad for him but I was a little suspicious of some of the things that he said. We set up a time for Elder Wilson and I to go back the next day. I was scared to tell Elder Wilson that we had the appointment because he wasn’t going to be happy about it.
The next morning Furuwaka Choro and I were riding to the train station and we were a little early so he asked if we could go to a convenient store. I said sure. He bought a bunch of little meal things and I thought they must be out of food in Shizuoka so for some weird reason he is buying food now since he has time. Then I realized that he was buying it for the investigator. We dropped it off at his door. I was pretty upset. It’s rewarding this man for just saying he has interest. I am completely fine with giving him food as if he really needs it. The Church does it all the time. I just don’t want a handout to be correlated with us teaching him. I want him to progress as an investigator solely based on his feelings and not based of if he gets food. So I told Elder Wilson later that day and he was furious. We taught a lesson that night and it went alright. Then yesterday the investigator came to our night sacrament meeting and showed up late (for the closing hymn) and then got up and left right after. There were only 7 people there but he literally ran out of the chapel. We didn’t get to talk to him at all. It’s a weird situation. I hope he is genuine but with the way he’s been acting I’m finding it hard to believe.
I haven’t been mentioning this but in this ward they have a missionary talk every week. So I have to give a talk every other week. It’s been stressful to say the least. Unfortunately I don’t know if I’m getting any better at it. My talk yesterday was pretty sketchy. Jason, Dad, Quincy, anyone, if you have any ideas for talks on “missionary work” (the topic every week), feel free to write. I’m all out of ideas and I think I’ve shared every story from every missionary in the Book of Mormon. Does anyone have any good talks from their missions? So yesterday the member of the Bishopric that was conducting said, “Thank you to sister Yuriko for your talk on being worthy to enter the temple and the youth speaker for his talk on obedience and Elder Hooton for...well whatever the crap he talked about. We’re still trying to figure that one out.” Not really but he did mention everyone’s topic but mine. He just said my name and said thank you.
We have this member named Higa that I’ve talked about. We sometimes go to the church with him on Saturday nights and play a game, make food, and share a message. Well, when I was on the exchange we went and visited him and I set up an appointment (he didn’t say a word he just shook or nodded his head). Then Elder Wilson and I were at the mall watching something going on and he walked up behind Elder Wilson and started playing with his backpack. We turned around and tried to talk with him but he just walked away. Then we were trying to do missionary work on the trains but just taking trains back and forth talking to people (worked out alright) and we ran into Higa on the train. He only said a couple words. Then we had the appointment with him and only got him to talk a little. He’s pretty good at Jenga. Together we got the highest one I’ve ever seen. It was 13 blocks crisscrossed. No doubles. It was sweet. Elder Wilson thinks that Jenga is more technical than Operation. I told him he’s crazy. Then I talked with Higa about coming to teach and praying and stuff and he wasn’t being very receptive. So we left (the cake we made was good) but then Higa came to church the next day. It was awesome. I was so happy when I saw him slink in with his ridiculously long pink tie and sat down behind us. Then later that day we saw him on the street and he actually answered our questions instead of just shaking his head. So he is progressing. It was way cool that he came to church.
Hey thanks to my friends for sending letters. I got some good ones this week. It was way exciting. I got a little Betty Crocker brownie thing. It was super good. I loved it. Thanks Abby. I don’t know if I told you but a couple of weeks ago our gas bill wasn’t sent in so we had to go two days without gas. I now appreciate electric ovens in America a little bit more (unless the electricity goes out). Our main food this week was eggs, bread, rice and curry. I’m turning into a Japanese missionary finally. I’ve given up and now sometimes I’ll just eat rice. I never thought I’d see the day. I showed Elder Wilson a picture of me from when I was in Takaoka and I guess I’ve lost a lot of weight. He said my face is much, much skinner now. I look like a fat blob in the picture. My cheeks like jiggled and stuff.
We were trying to talk to high school kids that were on the beach last week. It was interesting. I’ve decided that you can’t contact guys here if there are girls around. They get super defensive and just try to make fun of us and act stupid. They are okay if they are by themselves. They feel like we are a threat if girls are around (frankly because we are). Their instincts kick in and they try to be the alpha male. I think it’s one of the main reasons why there are so many more women in the church in Japan. They will come and talk to us. They are more open, (more spiritual), and they aren’t defensive against us. It was way funny though because Elder Wilson and I came from behind a bunch of giant cement jacks (like the game jacks where you have to bounce the ball and grab the little rubber things) that are used to break tsunamis and both of us had bloody elbows and I guess my backpack was wide open and we were dripping sweat. I’m sure it was quite the sight. We just meandered out of the jacks, two weird foreigners.
It’s so weird being at these internet places where there are people reading comic books and stuff. I want to yell, “You’re a grown man! At least go play pool with the last bit of dignity that you have left.”
I’ll send this off for now and try to think of some more things after I get some ice cream. By the way for whoever might be wondering, I am six foot four or if you use the metric system that’s 192 cm.
Love,
Elder Hooton
August 15, 2010
Dear Family,
This week was alright. It went by way fast but unfortunately we didn’t get a whole lot accomplished. It was probably the lowest lesson count of my mission so far. That even includes the time that I was in the apartment most of the day when Elder Howells injured his ankle. It was really too bad. Once again no one was home or they were too busy to meet with us.
So Elder Wilson and I found a giant bottle of pasta sauce that looks really good. Monica, can you send me the recipe for those noodles that you make? It’s pretty easy right? It would be an awesome meal to eat here.
This last week we had to do a lot of stuff because Elder Wilson is District Leader. We had to go to Shizuoka for District Leader training. It’s about an hour away and then another 20 minute bus ride. I made a recording that has a little story about it. During the training I had to go do some housing (even though everywhere within 20 minutes of the Zone Leader’s church has been housed a million times) with another Japanese missionary. It was good to be able to talk some Japanese with him and have him answer some questions that I had. That took must of my Tuesday.
Wednesday we met with Brother Iwasaki. That was good. I gave my little lesson thing and he just kind of ignored it and asked about repenting after this life. He thought that after this life you either go to hell or heaven. We told him that people who don’t know the gospel can still repent. He wanted to see scriptures about certain types of sins and if you could repent of them after this life if you didn’t know the gospel. We told him we would find them for him. They were some weird questions. We didn’t want him to get any ideas about being able to just repent after this life. So Friday we actually met with him again and cleared this up for him but then he had more questions about plural marriage and stuff. We had to then clear that up for him. He said he read some of this stuff on the internet. That really worries me. It’s easy to see why Paul had to write so much of the New Testament because a lot of what he wrote was just trying to get people to understand the doctrine of the Church. It is especially hard here because the Church is rather new.
Friday was also spent doing finding activities that yielded no results or even ended with us talking to anyone. Saturday we had our big push to get investigators and inactives to church since their excuse of “I forgot” doesn’t hold as much water when we visit them on Saturday. It went all right and we ended the day doing some housing which just makes me feel good on the inside because I’m actually talking with people. Unfortunately we finished our giant apartment complex and we didn’t find anybody with interest.
Yesterday we finally met with Suzuki san. She said she will come to church on the 29th and that we can try to visit her whenever and if she is home then we can talk but if not then she is to busy. That was kind of stupid but she says she doesn’t know what hours during the week she will be working so it’s just random. It makes it kind of tough on us though. We got two good referrals this last week. One from Temple Square and the other one is a guy that the Tokyo missionaries talk to in a train station in Tokyo and he said he met with some missionaries 20 years ago and he would like to meet again. We went to meet him yesterday and only his wife was home. She said we could come back again but she didn’t seem too happy about the whole thing. We also visited an old referral from a couple of weeks ago who had just never been home. I was standing in the wrong spot and so when she opens the door I was the one that was standing there. So I asked if she was the name that we got and she said yes. She then said some Japanese I didn’t understand and then said it to Elder Wilson. As we walked away we passed her husband who came out of the garden and gave us a mean look. I guess she said that she couldn’t talk because her husband is home and she asked us to not come back anymore. It’s so sad because she is a member actually and she served a mission as well. I wanted to punch the guy when I found out that she said, “I can’t talk my husband is here.” What kind of dirt bag would say something like that to his wife?
Well your Rexburg trip sounded like fun. I wish I could have gone on it. It would have been fun to go play tennis at the college and stuff. Just to be back at college would be nice. Are classes still going on there? When does the semester end? Yellowstone sounded good. I’m glad no one got eaten by bears. I showed some members my driver’s license yesterday and it has those bears on it and they asked if we had bears in Montana. I told them that actually we had one that just ate a person. They freaked out. Japanese people will go crazy if you eat the skin of potatoes. The word in Japanese actually means poison (when it is in soup or something). I’m glad everyone is where they need to be safely and getting settled in. Mom if you sent me sun block I still wouldn’t use it.
At that dinner that I was at last night when I talked about the bears, Elder Wilson was showing them a picture of his driver’s license because he’s lost a bunch of weight. They were like wow you are a lot skinner. They then looked at my picture and said I was just as skinny. I was like “score!” then one of the bishop’s daughters said that I look like Joseph Smith. I was like “well that’s weird.” I then asked if he was a good looking guy. They said yes. So I’ll talk it as a complement. It’s mainly just because I have a big nose and blue eyes.
I’m sorry but that’s pretty much all I did this week. I don’t know what else to talk about. I’m sorry I don’t have any funny stories. I was sitting in our massage chair yesterday morning trying to wake up in the wee hours of the morning and it dawned on me that I’m not funny anymore. It was very discouraging. I’m not witty or funny. It’s too bad. I was going to try to write my emails like Tom Hanks since he seems to get some laughs out of people with his emails but then I remember he hates Mormons and decided the less funny route might be better. Hopefully my audio clips will be better. Everyone have a great week.
Love,
Elder Hooton
This week was alright. It went by way fast but unfortunately we didn’t get a whole lot accomplished. It was probably the lowest lesson count of my mission so far. That even includes the time that I was in the apartment most of the day when Elder Howells injured his ankle. It was really too bad. Once again no one was home or they were too busy to meet with us.
So Elder Wilson and I found a giant bottle of pasta sauce that looks really good. Monica, can you send me the recipe for those noodles that you make? It’s pretty easy right? It would be an awesome meal to eat here.
This last week we had to do a lot of stuff because Elder Wilson is District Leader. We had to go to Shizuoka for District Leader training. It’s about an hour away and then another 20 minute bus ride. I made a recording that has a little story about it. During the training I had to go do some housing (even though everywhere within 20 minutes of the Zone Leader’s church has been housed a million times) with another Japanese missionary. It was good to be able to talk some Japanese with him and have him answer some questions that I had. That took must of my Tuesday.
Wednesday we met with Brother Iwasaki. That was good. I gave my little lesson thing and he just kind of ignored it and asked about repenting after this life. He thought that after this life you either go to hell or heaven. We told him that people who don’t know the gospel can still repent. He wanted to see scriptures about certain types of sins and if you could repent of them after this life if you didn’t know the gospel. We told him we would find them for him. They were some weird questions. We didn’t want him to get any ideas about being able to just repent after this life. So Friday we actually met with him again and cleared this up for him but then he had more questions about plural marriage and stuff. We had to then clear that up for him. He said he read some of this stuff on the internet. That really worries me. It’s easy to see why Paul had to write so much of the New Testament because a lot of what he wrote was just trying to get people to understand the doctrine of the Church. It is especially hard here because the Church is rather new.
Friday was also spent doing finding activities that yielded no results or even ended with us talking to anyone. Saturday we had our big push to get investigators and inactives to church since their excuse of “I forgot” doesn’t hold as much water when we visit them on Saturday. It went all right and we ended the day doing some housing which just makes me feel good on the inside because I’m actually talking with people. Unfortunately we finished our giant apartment complex and we didn’t find anybody with interest.
Yesterday we finally met with Suzuki san. She said she will come to church on the 29th and that we can try to visit her whenever and if she is home then we can talk but if not then she is to busy. That was kind of stupid but she says she doesn’t know what hours during the week she will be working so it’s just random. It makes it kind of tough on us though. We got two good referrals this last week. One from Temple Square and the other one is a guy that the Tokyo missionaries talk to in a train station in Tokyo and he said he met with some missionaries 20 years ago and he would like to meet again. We went to meet him yesterday and only his wife was home. She said we could come back again but she didn’t seem too happy about the whole thing. We also visited an old referral from a couple of weeks ago who had just never been home. I was standing in the wrong spot and so when she opens the door I was the one that was standing there. So I asked if she was the name that we got and she said yes. She then said some Japanese I didn’t understand and then said it to Elder Wilson. As we walked away we passed her husband who came out of the garden and gave us a mean look. I guess she said that she couldn’t talk because her husband is home and she asked us to not come back anymore. It’s so sad because she is a member actually and she served a mission as well. I wanted to punch the guy when I found out that she said, “I can’t talk my husband is here.” What kind of dirt bag would say something like that to his wife?
Well your Rexburg trip sounded like fun. I wish I could have gone on it. It would have been fun to go play tennis at the college and stuff. Just to be back at college would be nice. Are classes still going on there? When does the semester end? Yellowstone sounded good. I’m glad no one got eaten by bears. I showed some members my driver’s license yesterday and it has those bears on it and they asked if we had bears in Montana. I told them that actually we had one that just ate a person. They freaked out. Japanese people will go crazy if you eat the skin of potatoes. The word in Japanese actually means poison (when it is in soup or something). I’m glad everyone is where they need to be safely and getting settled in. Mom if you sent me sun block I still wouldn’t use it.
At that dinner that I was at last night when I talked about the bears, Elder Wilson was showing them a picture of his driver’s license because he’s lost a bunch of weight. They were like wow you are a lot skinner. They then looked at my picture and said I was just as skinny. I was like “score!” then one of the bishop’s daughters said that I look like Joseph Smith. I was like “well that’s weird.” I then asked if he was a good looking guy. They said yes. So I’ll talk it as a complement. It’s mainly just because I have a big nose and blue eyes.
I’m sorry but that’s pretty much all I did this week. I don’t know what else to talk about. I’m sorry I don’t have any funny stories. I was sitting in our massage chair yesterday morning trying to wake up in the wee hours of the morning and it dawned on me that I’m not funny anymore. It was very discouraging. I’m not witty or funny. It’s too bad. I was going to try to write my emails like Tom Hanks since he seems to get some laughs out of people with his emails but then I remember he hates Mormons and decided the less funny route might be better. Hopefully my audio clips will be better. Everyone have a great week.
Love,
Elder Hooton
Friday, September 3, 2010
August 8, 2010
Dear Family,
This week was an all right week. It was super tiring though. Last Monday we ended up just buying food and then trying to visit our most promising investigator. We’ve been trying to get a hold of her several times a week for the last two weeks and finally met her on Saturday. We were praying so hard she’d say she could come to church because she had said that she would if she had time. Unfortunately this week is a Buddhist holiday where the dead revisit earth. So she had to drive to some family member’s tombs yesterday. It was too bad. We had found out that President Baird was coming to our sacrament meeting so we really wanted an investigator there so we didn’t look like bums and so that they could listen to President Baird. So Suzuki fell through but we were still hoping for Sakaguchi would come and she had already said that this last Sunday would work but then when we called to confirm she backed out and said she was busy. It’s so frustrating.
Tuesday we woke up at 6:00 am to get ready to be picked up at 7:00 to go up on Mount Fuji to go to the scout thing. He called at 6:15 and said he’d be there at 6:30. So it started off as a rough day. We drove up to a gas station type place. In Japan at gas stations you just get gas. If you want snacks or low grade food you go to a “conbini” which is Japanese for convenient store because they can’t say the v sound. So it was a conbini we went to. When we got there we met two men in scout uniforms that told us to get into their car. Since we aren’t serving in Eastern Europe we just did what we were told. One guy asked us how long we had been in Japan (in Japanese) and I said “what?” because I couldn’t hear him and he jump to the conclusion that I couldn’t understand the simple Japanese that he spoke so from then on he thought our Japanese was terrible. He said it in English and I answered in Japanese. From then on he wouldn’t talk to us in Japanese so we had to put up with his crappy English. It was so frustrating. Japanese people think that if we ask them to repeat themselves because they don’t speak very loud then we must not understand.
So we went to our little tent thing that we didn’t know we had and it had a bunch of church materials in it and a bunch of Book or Mormons. There were these way weird posters that I don’t think are church approved because they had some weird pictures on them. I’ll send you a picture. We then had the English speaking guy explain what we would be doing. He was very vague. We were kept in the dark on everything so it was quite frustrating. At this point we found out that the two guys we were with are members (that would have been nice to know before hand). Then a scout guy came a told us some things (which were translated into English for us which made it even harder to understand because we just wanted the Japanese).
Then we were told that the Prince of Japan was going to show up for a bit. We started to fix some fallen pictures around the tent and make it look nice. We then realized the two members were gone. We decided that’d we’d go find a bathroom before we had people start to come. We couldn’t find one and I decided I could just hold it for a while. We went back to the tent and the two members asked why we didn’t follow them to go see the prince. They said they told us but we were too busy trying to make the tent look like it wasn’t put together by 4 year olds. It was frustrating. Then kids started to come and the members were teaching a weird lesson about Jesus and his life and then had them pray. It wasn’t what they should have been teaching. Our unique message is the restoration. There were other tents that were teaching the exact same thing as us so we should have been teaching the restoration. We were at the tent all day and it was pretty boring. We went home exhausted.
Some kids came up to us and wanted to take a picture so there were a couple people with cameras and Elder Wilson and I gave our cameras to the guy that we had the previous conversation with and I wasn’t paying attention and they took the pictures and I got my camera back and there wasn’t any new pictures. It was the same with Elder Wilson’s camera. Then another group came and said the same thing. The dude went to take our cameras and then when he said he was taking the picture I looked and his finger wasn’t even close to button. He just held the camera, counted, and then said he took it. I had to go explain to him that you have to push the button. It was super weird. I guess the most technologically advanced country in the world can’t even produce someone over the age of 50 that can use a camera.
Wednesday we tried to visit some people and get some work done. Thursday I was hoping would go a little better. I prayed a lot that Elder Wilson wouldn’t just sleep the whole time in a chair at the back of the tent like he did on Tuesday. We had to give that talk in front of a couple hundred kids, along with two members of the Area Seventy. It was funny because the institute people there had a bunch of different pictures of Jesus and did their same little bit about stuff that was all over the place and then the two Seventy members taught lesson 1. It was very nicely done and they spoke simple plain Japanese. Elder Wilson started to give his little thing on scouting and I had a couple things I was going to say. Then one the Institute Directors who I like a lot (different guy than who I’ve been talking about) told me to just do mine in English and have someone translate. I then had to swallow my pride and have the English speaking institute guy translate my talk for me. It ended up going alright.
After that though we asked the institute director if we could do our own thing and try to talk to people in the ways that we want to while the other guys just handled the stuff in the tent. He said it was a good idea. From then on the thing was great. We talked with several hundred kids. They wanted to take pictures with us and then wanted to shake our hands. We gave them pamphlets and the numbers of all the different missions they were from. We felt like rock stars. They asked us to sign their shirts and their hats. I probably gave out 200 signatures. I still feel weird about signing that kid’s face (just kidding). We ended up getting tons of referrals that I sent in today. It was really good. Overall it was fun and a good experience.
I did get a terrible sunburn on my face that decided to start to peel yesterday when president Baird came to our sacrament meeting along with a different member of the Seventy. It was weird because I sat next to him at a meal after sacrament meeting and it didn’t even click that he was a member of the Seventy. I just talked to him like him was a normal guy. He was super nice and loves missionaries a lot. He was really upbeat and happy like I’m assuming most general authorities are.
So you could actually see Mt. Fuji for a couple hours this last week. It was pretty cool. Also, two week ago I forgot to mention that I beat a legit Japanese person in ping pong. Let’s just say it came down to a tie breaker and it ended with me running around the room with my hands in the air screaming “katta.”
We found a legit mall last week. It’s way cool. Now we know where people go on the weekends. It’s cool try be around tons of people and try to talk to them. Hopefully we can start to find new investigators again. It’s been kind of slow this last week. Is 3D TV as huge in America as it is here? It’s huge here. They have tons of displays at electronic stores and stuff. It’s way cool. I saw a little clip of the latest star wars movie and it was 3d without glasses. I’m not sure if I liked it though. It made it seem like it was some history channel reenactment or something. It seemed more corny than usual. I think it might have been some cool new LCD thing where they have the primary colors and yellow as their liquid crystals. The glasses ones are still sweet. They had some nature scenes in 3D and then a camera that actually took 3D video. It was way cool.
After we ate tacos last week Elder Wilson couldn’t handle the feeling he had in his stomach so he made himself throw up. I think he should now do public service announcements for teenage girls. He said it was a pretty bad experience. I was telling him the names of all the different things he discovered at the back of his throat. Turns out he got his finger back pretty far.
So I can’t do the audio thing today. I bought a cheap microphone and it doesn’t work so I’ll have to bring it back and find a new one. I really want to do it to send home audio things but I decided it would be most useful to speak Japanese into and then be able to hear myself. My biggest hang-up right now is my ability to sound like a Japanese person. I can’t get my intonations right and my pronunciation is a little weird I guess. I think it will be helpful to listen to myself and maybe record a Japanese person reading a scripture and then me trying to imitate it. I’ll try to get it going next week though so I can send something home. Just through email probably.
I looked up the word leadership in my electronic dictionary to use at the scout thing when I was talking to people. I’m glad I ended up doing it in English because I looked up the word later in a different dictionary and turns out it means a person who incites a riot. I guess that is a type of leadership but not quite was I was looking for when talking about how the church has taught me a lot in my life.
Well I found Mr. Miyagi (karate kid dude). A couple of weeks ago we rode past an old guy with an awesome beard who had a giant bottle of Japanese sports drink (it’s called pacari sweat). If you ask me, any drink with the word sweat it in just sounds gross but the people here like it. This old guy was just going to town smashing his hand against a cinder block, just a nice slow pace of whacking it. I rode by last week and saw him punching a brick wall. I can just picture his wife yelling out the window “Are you still hitting that stupid brick. When are you going to give that up? Your glory days are over.” and he just mumbles something about her not understanding him. It was something similar to Dad when he would be writing some sort of debate frontline imagining himself ripping into someone in a 2NC. This guy was imagining himself sinking his wrinkly old fists into someone’s face.
Well this last transfer it turns out two more missionaries that are on the same transfer as me and training, including my MTC companion. All the leadership is young. I think that President Baird doesn’t want new missionaries to be corrupted by the older ones. He is waiting for all the older ones to finish. President Baird’s new goal is 2000 baptisms by the time he leaves. We were the highest mission in Japan last year with 162. There are a lot of older missionaries that say that it’s crazy and impossible but us younger ones totally think its possible and not only that but that it’s going to happen. My trainer got pulled out of being a Zone Leader and is in a regular area and President Baird says that he is being called to perform a miracle of 20 baptisms in that area. On the train ride to his area he found someone that wanted to hear a lesson right then so then took him to the church and gave him lesson one and then committed him to be baptized. Then the next day Elder Insch found another person that already has a baptism date. I have the faith that we will see that many baptisms. The trick is just being obedient and right now our mission is having some trouble with that.
Will you thank grandma and grandpa Hooton and Miller for me. I love their letters. Thank you for your prayers. My Japanese is getting a lot better. I’m very thankful for that. I love you all.
Tyler
This week was an all right week. It was super tiring though. Last Monday we ended up just buying food and then trying to visit our most promising investigator. We’ve been trying to get a hold of her several times a week for the last two weeks and finally met her on Saturday. We were praying so hard she’d say she could come to church because she had said that she would if she had time. Unfortunately this week is a Buddhist holiday where the dead revisit earth. So she had to drive to some family member’s tombs yesterday. It was too bad. We had found out that President Baird was coming to our sacrament meeting so we really wanted an investigator there so we didn’t look like bums and so that they could listen to President Baird. So Suzuki fell through but we were still hoping for Sakaguchi would come and she had already said that this last Sunday would work but then when we called to confirm she backed out and said she was busy. It’s so frustrating.
Tuesday we woke up at 6:00 am to get ready to be picked up at 7:00 to go up on Mount Fuji to go to the scout thing. He called at 6:15 and said he’d be there at 6:30. So it started off as a rough day. We drove up to a gas station type place. In Japan at gas stations you just get gas. If you want snacks or low grade food you go to a “conbini” which is Japanese for convenient store because they can’t say the v sound. So it was a conbini we went to. When we got there we met two men in scout uniforms that told us to get into their car. Since we aren’t serving in Eastern Europe we just did what we were told. One guy asked us how long we had been in Japan (in Japanese) and I said “what?” because I couldn’t hear him and he jump to the conclusion that I couldn’t understand the simple Japanese that he spoke so from then on he thought our Japanese was terrible. He said it in English and I answered in Japanese. From then on he wouldn’t talk to us in Japanese so we had to put up with his crappy English. It was so frustrating. Japanese people think that if we ask them to repeat themselves because they don’t speak very loud then we must not understand.
So we went to our little tent thing that we didn’t know we had and it had a bunch of church materials in it and a bunch of Book or Mormons. There were these way weird posters that I don’t think are church approved because they had some weird pictures on them. I’ll send you a picture. We then had the English speaking guy explain what we would be doing. He was very vague. We were kept in the dark on everything so it was quite frustrating. At this point we found out that the two guys we were with are members (that would have been nice to know before hand). Then a scout guy came a told us some things (which were translated into English for us which made it even harder to understand because we just wanted the Japanese).
Then we were told that the Prince of Japan was going to show up for a bit. We started to fix some fallen pictures around the tent and make it look nice. We then realized the two members were gone. We decided that’d we’d go find a bathroom before we had people start to come. We couldn’t find one and I decided I could just hold it for a while. We went back to the tent and the two members asked why we didn’t follow them to go see the prince. They said they told us but we were too busy trying to make the tent look like it wasn’t put together by 4 year olds. It was frustrating. Then kids started to come and the members were teaching a weird lesson about Jesus and his life and then had them pray. It wasn’t what they should have been teaching. Our unique message is the restoration. There were other tents that were teaching the exact same thing as us so we should have been teaching the restoration. We were at the tent all day and it was pretty boring. We went home exhausted.
Some kids came up to us and wanted to take a picture so there were a couple people with cameras and Elder Wilson and I gave our cameras to the guy that we had the previous conversation with and I wasn’t paying attention and they took the pictures and I got my camera back and there wasn’t any new pictures. It was the same with Elder Wilson’s camera. Then another group came and said the same thing. The dude went to take our cameras and then when he said he was taking the picture I looked and his finger wasn’t even close to button. He just held the camera, counted, and then said he took it. I had to go explain to him that you have to push the button. It was super weird. I guess the most technologically advanced country in the world can’t even produce someone over the age of 50 that can use a camera.
Wednesday we tried to visit some people and get some work done. Thursday I was hoping would go a little better. I prayed a lot that Elder Wilson wouldn’t just sleep the whole time in a chair at the back of the tent like he did on Tuesday. We had to give that talk in front of a couple hundred kids, along with two members of the Area Seventy. It was funny because the institute people there had a bunch of different pictures of Jesus and did their same little bit about stuff that was all over the place and then the two Seventy members taught lesson 1. It was very nicely done and they spoke simple plain Japanese. Elder Wilson started to give his little thing on scouting and I had a couple things I was going to say. Then one the Institute Directors who I like a lot (different guy than who I’ve been talking about) told me to just do mine in English and have someone translate. I then had to swallow my pride and have the English speaking institute guy translate my talk for me. It ended up going alright.
After that though we asked the institute director if we could do our own thing and try to talk to people in the ways that we want to while the other guys just handled the stuff in the tent. He said it was a good idea. From then on the thing was great. We talked with several hundred kids. They wanted to take pictures with us and then wanted to shake our hands. We gave them pamphlets and the numbers of all the different missions they were from. We felt like rock stars. They asked us to sign their shirts and their hats. I probably gave out 200 signatures. I still feel weird about signing that kid’s face (just kidding). We ended up getting tons of referrals that I sent in today. It was really good. Overall it was fun and a good experience.
I did get a terrible sunburn on my face that decided to start to peel yesterday when president Baird came to our sacrament meeting along with a different member of the Seventy. It was weird because I sat next to him at a meal after sacrament meeting and it didn’t even click that he was a member of the Seventy. I just talked to him like him was a normal guy. He was super nice and loves missionaries a lot. He was really upbeat and happy like I’m assuming most general authorities are.
So you could actually see Mt. Fuji for a couple hours this last week. It was pretty cool. Also, two week ago I forgot to mention that I beat a legit Japanese person in ping pong. Let’s just say it came down to a tie breaker and it ended with me running around the room with my hands in the air screaming “katta.”
We found a legit mall last week. It’s way cool. Now we know where people go on the weekends. It’s cool try be around tons of people and try to talk to them. Hopefully we can start to find new investigators again. It’s been kind of slow this last week. Is 3D TV as huge in America as it is here? It’s huge here. They have tons of displays at electronic stores and stuff. It’s way cool. I saw a little clip of the latest star wars movie and it was 3d without glasses. I’m not sure if I liked it though. It made it seem like it was some history channel reenactment or something. It seemed more corny than usual. I think it might have been some cool new LCD thing where they have the primary colors and yellow as their liquid crystals. The glasses ones are still sweet. They had some nature scenes in 3D and then a camera that actually took 3D video. It was way cool.
After we ate tacos last week Elder Wilson couldn’t handle the feeling he had in his stomach so he made himself throw up. I think he should now do public service announcements for teenage girls. He said it was a pretty bad experience. I was telling him the names of all the different things he discovered at the back of his throat. Turns out he got his finger back pretty far.
So I can’t do the audio thing today. I bought a cheap microphone and it doesn’t work so I’ll have to bring it back and find a new one. I really want to do it to send home audio things but I decided it would be most useful to speak Japanese into and then be able to hear myself. My biggest hang-up right now is my ability to sound like a Japanese person. I can’t get my intonations right and my pronunciation is a little weird I guess. I think it will be helpful to listen to myself and maybe record a Japanese person reading a scripture and then me trying to imitate it. I’ll try to get it going next week though so I can send something home. Just through email probably.
I looked up the word leadership in my electronic dictionary to use at the scout thing when I was talking to people. I’m glad I ended up doing it in English because I looked up the word later in a different dictionary and turns out it means a person who incites a riot. I guess that is a type of leadership but not quite was I was looking for when talking about how the church has taught me a lot in my life.
Well I found Mr. Miyagi (karate kid dude). A couple of weeks ago we rode past an old guy with an awesome beard who had a giant bottle of Japanese sports drink (it’s called pacari sweat). If you ask me, any drink with the word sweat it in just sounds gross but the people here like it. This old guy was just going to town smashing his hand against a cinder block, just a nice slow pace of whacking it. I rode by last week and saw him punching a brick wall. I can just picture his wife yelling out the window “Are you still hitting that stupid brick. When are you going to give that up? Your glory days are over.” and he just mumbles something about her not understanding him. It was something similar to Dad when he would be writing some sort of debate frontline imagining himself ripping into someone in a 2NC. This guy was imagining himself sinking his wrinkly old fists into someone’s face.
Well this last transfer it turns out two more missionaries that are on the same transfer as me and training, including my MTC companion. All the leadership is young. I think that President Baird doesn’t want new missionaries to be corrupted by the older ones. He is waiting for all the older ones to finish. President Baird’s new goal is 2000 baptisms by the time he leaves. We were the highest mission in Japan last year with 162. There are a lot of older missionaries that say that it’s crazy and impossible but us younger ones totally think its possible and not only that but that it’s going to happen. My trainer got pulled out of being a Zone Leader and is in a regular area and President Baird says that he is being called to perform a miracle of 20 baptisms in that area. On the train ride to his area he found someone that wanted to hear a lesson right then so then took him to the church and gave him lesson one and then committed him to be baptized. Then the next day Elder Insch found another person that already has a baptism date. I have the faith that we will see that many baptisms. The trick is just being obedient and right now our mission is having some trouble with that.
Will you thank grandma and grandpa Hooton and Miller for me. I love their letters. Thank you for your prayers. My Japanese is getting a lot better. I’m very thankful for that. I love you all.
Tyler
Sunday, August 8, 2010
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