Some thoughts to consider while I wait for my laundry to finish drying.
We have this program here called TALL that supposedly helps
missionaries learn languages. It is really good for drilling in
vocab and wasting time watching videos on. This last week I spent a
couple hours doing this, and came across a peculiar verb. きらう = to
hate. I spent the next ten minutes sitting and figuring what in the
world hate is. Hate.. HA; TE.. Tooth hand? Like what? Hahaha I was
literally reading hate how a Japanese person would, and making each
two letters a syllable.
When you can't read HA TE... Japanese is really getting to me.
So everyone in our entire residence building had to move to to a
different residence building because there are some whiny construction
workers who don't like to see people walking even close to where
they're working. Like I said last time, pretty sure, the MTC is
renovating the building and surrounding area that we were staying in.
I mean, I'm not saying that it couldn't use the renovation (because it
sure could), but to move everyone around while missionaries are still
in the building sounds dumb to me. We have Senpai that are having to
pack, unpack, then pack again one week from going out. That's kinda a
pain.
So we did that this morning. We are now enjoying our early morning
sack breakfast and early morning laundry because of it. Our district
decided for some reason to move starting at 5:00 AM (-.-) so tired
right now. On top of that, our district leader decided to do the
entire move in one trip; there's actually a lot of luggage to move,
what with our regular huge suitcases, carry ons, and messenger bags
plus all of the care packages, boxes, snacks, and inheritances from
the Daisenpai to factor in.
Moving all of that in a single trip is a lot of work; it was actually
quite funny. Picture five missionaries wearing their sleeping clothes
throwing messy haphazardly stuffed luggage down the halls over to the
stairwell. We carefully, individually escort the luggage to the door
at the bottom of the stairs and move them outside, then start the real
work. Lashing loose items such as laundry bags, suits, boxes, and
extra bags to our suitcases with belts, we Prep for our journey across
the entire campus. At the time, we lived tucked into the very corner
of the MTC, literally the farthest from everything ever. The
destination is right smack in the middle of the MTC. Don't forget that
we have a couple huge boxes of inheritances, snacks, and necessary
nightly goodies that we've decided to carry across (the really big one
was transported on top several large suitcases in cradle-like
fashion).
Then commenced the Moving races! Everyone had three of four items to
move (enough to keep every hand busy); we start our trek and it turned
into a race. Imagine something similar to Mario Kart where everyone is
putting along and there's the occasional sabotage or mess-up that
causes someone to fall behind everyone else. A laundry bag was
dropped, a suitcase fell over, etc. There was passing and even some
Tokyo drifting involved. It was great!
Hey, shoutout to Brother Messina! I found him. I found your
missionary. He's awesome.
In all my time here I've only seen three (maybe four) other
missionaries going to Nagoya. Nagoya is a decent sized mission, so I
wonder what gives. Maybe it's large geographically, but small in
number because it's mostly rugged mountains or something.
Our district has also gone through some serious renovations this last
week. The saddest thing ever happened; Ballard (Barbie) Choro was sent
home this last week due to some medical issues involving his stomach.
We recently got some updated news that he has stomach ulcers or
something, so he has to start taking medications for the rest of his
life. Before he left he was bedridden and had only bloody diarrhea
when he went to the bathroom. Every time he stood up he had to go, so
you can see what a problem that was. Ballard Choro will be at home
recovering for the next two or three weeks. He's studying by himself
during this time, so hopefully when he come back to the MTC it'll be
before we all leave to Japan on Oct 4, and hopefully he won't have to
spend any additional time at the MTC--he can just rejoin our district.
We'll see.
Our district has suffered from the loss, as Ballard Choro was the
creator of most of all of our jokes. We're a more solemn group now.
Kamae Choro, Ballard's companion, has joined my companionship to form
a temporary trio. He's a little hard to keep track of because he likes
to talk to everyone he sees. He also doesn't study very well, and
likes to have planned out thoughts to use in lessons. It's made our
teaching methods change drastically to adapt to the new personality.
We had a new sister join our district for a couple days. Her name is
Sister Reyes. She was from Mexico, and wanted to transfer branches to
ours because she doesn't speak any English and thus wasn't learning
anything from her class. But when she joined our more advanced
Japanese speaking group, not knowing Japanese very well herself, she
didn't fit in there either. The communication barrier was too great to
overcome. We have a Mexican sister in our district who is also fairly
good at Japanese and can serve as interpreter, but there's too much
distance to cover between all the lessons, meals, and investigators
speaking at such a higher level of Japanese than she can handle right
now. If she switches back out, she'll take Conejo shimai with her and
we'll have an even smaller district than before; MTC has just been
brutal to our district, handing loss after loss in so many ways.
Speaking of losses, we had a room inspection on Tuesday pass 100%!
Except our desks, which had our studying materials our because we have
a short class time before breakfast to do that. We go to breakfast,
and get inspected while at it. So, for having stuff out on our desks,
we were marked down on that one section to Needs Work (on a scale 1-5
that's 3). Everything else was Commendable (5). And yet, our overall
report was marked down to a 3--Needs Work. Seems hardly fair. I swear,
those inspector people literally wait for the most perfect, ripe
opportunity to pound on us. We had our room clean for an entire week,
expecting them to inspect as is required of their job, and they
happened to not come that entire week. Like I said, losses.
Out of time again, sorry! I'll write to you again!
Elder Cardon
Sent from my iPad
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