HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 👻🕸🎃

October 30, 2017

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 👻🕸🎃

Long time no weekly! ごめん！ Quite a lot has happened since I came to Tsu, but I am short on time so I will stick to the highlights. First, an update on my new area. It's pretty awesome. Don't get me wrong, Toyohashi will always hold a special place in my heart, but Tsu is pretty amazing as far as areas go. Our apartment is on a river and a short 5 minute bike ride from the ocean. The ward is half Filipinos, so I've been speaking way more English. We currently have 20 investigators and 1 is a very promising one. There's a college in the area and we are able to work with a lot of young people. As far as promising areas go, can't get much better than Tsu.

My new companion is also amazing. Inouye Shimai is from Los Angeles, California, and is currently in her 10th transfer (3rd transfer in Tsu). She's a quarter Japanese, went to 2 years at BYU before coming, and was majoring in public relations. She's so dedicated and is a great example to me. We are working hard and it's been a great first two weeks to the transfer, full of laughter and ridiculous adventures. (She's also the Sister Training Leader for our zone, so super prestigious and all that ;) )

Speaking of which, here are the fun stories for the week.

1) We've been using this salt shaker the past 2 weeks with a panda on it. It doesn't have the salt kanji written on it and the crystals looked weird, but I trusted my companion. But after a couple weeks I was pretty sure it wasn't salt. After tasting it and realizing that it definitely was not salt, we looked up the kanji. Turns out it wasn't salt: but was instead a flavor enhancer used in Chinese cooking. Otherwise known as: MSG. So good to know we'vebeen dumping MSG into our food lately. Just the normal life of missionaries in Japan...

2) Last week we were coming back from a lesson in the next town over. We had left our bikes parked at the eki (something I've done every week for the entirety of my mission). We get back and find our bikes, but somethings wrong. My helmet (a white hideous monstrosity) is missing. After scouring the area we finally conclude that someone has indeed stolen my helmet, haha...Why someone needs an ugly helmet like that I'm not sure, but apparently they needed it more than me. I hope it keeps them safe. In the meantime I'm going to buy another helmet so I can actually use my bike again...yay for walking!

3) We have now had nothing but typhoons for the past 2 Weeks. We've gotten really good at finding stuff to do in the apartment and also at dealing with heavy winds and rain. But last week the river we were by almost flooded and we almost had to evacuate. Sadly we were safe, but what a story that would've made!

This last week we had Zone Conference and it was great. I was able to see Porter Shimai and Christensen Chourou. They are doing as amazing as always and it was so fun to joke around with them again! And I was able to learn a lot about being a better missionary through the various trainings.

The Eikawa (english class) here in Tsu is very different than in Toyohashi. They have beginner, advanced and children's all on the same night. And because there are only 4 missionaries, we had to split up to teach. So I now teach the children's eikawa every Thursday by myself. Haha...its been an adjustment to say the least. But the kids are great and we even had a Halloween Party last week. I'm hoping to improve the kids eikawa here and get even more people coming!

Speaking of Halloween, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!! Halloween is my favorite holiday, so go enjoy it for me! We had a party in the branch and it was fun, but not quite the same as American Halloween. Excited to see an American Halloween next year!

Which is crazy! 1 year from today I will be on a plane back to America. The time has really flown by and I can't believe I only have a year left. I still haven't done near as much as I would like, so I need to kick it into high gear and go all out this last year. I don't want to have any regrets at the end :)

To end I want to tell you a little about our promising investigator. Her name is Maegawa and she is 52. She's amazing! A kinjin if I've ever met one. Everything we teach her she just understands and accepts. It's truly amazing. She has a baptismal date set for Nov 19 and I'm so excited to be able to help her come closer to Christ. I'll probably talk a lot more about her over the next few weeks, but wanted to put that in here first.

That just about wraps it up for this week, but hopefully I have more time to write next week. Thanks for all the emails and prayers!

愛しています！

アルマー姉妹
Sister Armour