Elder Callahan in Japan

So we only had like 3 days to actually do missionary work this week. Kind of lame but you know. On Tuesday we headed down to Nagoya to drop off Elder Schuh to head to a new area. I stayed overnight down there and then Wednesday I picked up my new companion from the mission home. His name's Elder Crippen and he's from Elk Ridge, Utah, like 20 minutes from my house. Pretty funny. He's straight out of the MTC so I've been speaking most of the Japanese which has been kind of rough haha but it's been way fun to work with him for the last week. He's an actor and I'm a show off so we're pretty obnoxious together. It's awesome. We rolled back into Suwa just in time for weekly English class.

The next day we had an awesome day planned. We were going to see a bunch of less actives, visit a lot of members, and teach a lot of lesson. We headed out to meet the first less active, and he wasn't there. Decided to walk down to the post office, talk to people on the way, grab money, and come back. On the way we talked to one guy, who was nice-ish, but then he went and talked to a police officer, who came over and talked to us. We weren't doing anything wrong so he couldn't do anything, but it was definitely kind of a worrying experience haha. Luckily I understood most of what he was saying. Then Elder Crippen's loaner bike broke down and we spent the entire afternoon trying to get it running so we could at least visit somebody. We finally got it working after a lot of repeated failure (the stupid tire was too big for the frame) and had time to visit one investigator. We knocked on his door and he came out to tell us the he was being hospitalized and didn't want to see us anymore. So that was a pretty good end to the day haha. The next day was good though, we saw and taught a lot of people.

We spent all of Saturday and most of Sunday at the District Center watching conference. It was super super good. I loved the Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning sessions particularly. I always love the spiritual punch in the face that General Conference provides.

Today the branch president called us up to ask if we wanted to go visit a less active with him. That turned into a five hour adventure in which we visited a less active, three members (including one at work) and a very old woman with Alzheimer's that the branch president works for. That last visit was a super fun experience. She started talking really fast in old person Japanese (which is a completely different language than actual Japanese) and then asked me if I understood two words, "kitchen" and "rude" and when I said I did, she said "wow, you're awesome, you understand everything!" I didn't tell her that those were the only two words I understood out of her whole discourse. Then she randomly asked if either of us could play the accordion. We both responded that we did not, unfortunately, play the accordion, so she went into the back room, got her accordion, and told us that she couldn't either. She then proceeded to play the accordion for like half an hour. It was pretty fun. She was trying to get us to sing these traditional Japanese songs that we definitely did not know so the branch president just ended up singing for her. Pretty funny stuff. Then we came back to the church and I learned, while translating an email for the branch president, that my English is becoming Japanese-ified. Everything I translated my companion had to fix so it sounded like an American wrote it. And now I'm writing this email.

We taught our investigator with a baptismal date, Mori, once this week about prophets and the restoration this week. It went way well! He basically taught us the Lehi's dream story in simpler terms using prophets as what you have to hold on to stay on the road back to God. He's way smart and understands everything so well. We just have to get him to stop smoking. And stop believing in reincarnation. One step at a time.

Love you all, hope you had a great week and have another good one.

Elder Callahan