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