Weekly mission letter

Our companionship is great! Elder Miyaki takes care of all the cases
of extremely hard-to-understand old or quiet Japanese people, and I
take care of all the rare English people that we occasionally see.
Then it's beautiful when we both contribute to conversations!
It's interesting to see how much more Japanese people open up to a
Japanese elder than one from America. You can reach the same level of
trust, eventually, but it comes much faster with a Japanese companion.

We had a small earthquake while I was cooking. That was fun.

I broke two glass jars trying to make jam (note to self--buy
plastic!!). I did, in the end, manage to successfully produce the
semblance of a half a batch. Yay!

There's a bit of a power struggle going on around here. Each of us wants to confer the role of leader to the other because we're too polite to seize all the power for ourselves. It looks like I'm losing this battle; someone's gotta step up or nothing will get done! 
Update: It's getting better. We just discuss everything and probably think a little too hard about it before deciding. 

Oooh yakiniku is indeed the best! Got to try it all-you-can-eat style, sided with things like make-your-own-salad, make-your-own-miso, curry, ice creams and puddings and parfaits and jello, and even American soda! The favorite meats were definitely liver and sardine, although the fat pieces of bacon were also scrumptious. 

Thanksgiving Day; it wasn't like a sit down feast or anything, but we did get to eat some pretty good food. Sorry, I forgot to snap a picture. Some Matsumoto members made donburi, with sides of salad, small pizza slices (Japanese are very conservative), and assorted fruit cup topped with vanilla ice cream. Later, we filled ourselves with tofu over rice, then for dessert we splurged and ate Mr. Donuts. Not bad. 

It snowed! It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas; everywhere you go. Actually most of it melted within the day. 

We have small power outages whenever we try to keep warm. We only have so much capacity so running the heater and dryer at the same time kills everything. Silly dryer. 

We avoid using half of our apartment at all costs. One half warms to a toasty, livable temperature--the other remains in the solid confines of Arctic imprisonment.  Literally drops 20 C crossing the border. 

You know those days that are false? Where the sun is shining and the flowers blooming, you go outside to enjoy it all and it's zero degrees? We have a lot of those. 

Elder Miyaki really likes to spend time studying his scriptures; he's also very diligent in learning English from a book he has. He also likes to clean. 

We had two events this week that went swimmingly. The first was Eikaiwa on Wednesday; we only had one person show up, so we sat down, ate sweets, and just talked for an hour in a mixture of broken English and Japanese. Since it was Thanksgiving,  we each told what we were grateful for and the guy immediately said his wife and two daughters! So of course we taught about families, the church, and what we do as missionaries for a bit. Count your many blessings; I'm pretty sure this guy can be baptized, and it's all thanks to nobody else showing up. 
Then on Saturday something similar happened for a church sponsored Thanksgiving party. Nobody showed up. So we talked with Brother Wakabayashi for a while and learned a lot about the area. A point that was punctuated was service. There're definitely a lot of opportunities for service here, especially being Christmas time. We may see a small shift in our schedules for a bit.  

愛しています！最近マースタ聖句が変わってしまいました！見ましたか？一つの新しい聖句は最高です。2NE28:30. 永遠の命を得るために、ぜったいキリストの教えを勉強やめないでください！私の証は教えが一派すぎるなので、続かなければなりません。止まられません。毎日新しいの情報を探しに行ってください。キリストの御名によって、アーメン。

カードん長老 ٩(๑❛ᴗ❛๑)۶


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