Monday, July 22, 2013

Laptops and Google Maps

So this was quite the week. I feel like there is a lot to say but also not sure what to say but I will do my best. So Monday was the day of doom, we became Tokyo mission. There could be heard wailing and gnashing of teeth as the Niigata zone missionaries woke up. Then we just went about our day normally which included a nap which was WAY nice! Anyway we headed to the church that night. I had my interview with President B which was fine, he is VERY different than president R, much more business man. And then from there I tried to leave to go out and work but the assistants had already learned too much so they told me to set up all the laptops before I left. After 5 minutes I had it all over. So time for me to nerd out here. So we have these pretty old laptops that are falling apart which is basically what I expected and of course they gave our zone the garbage. Then they have 4G Mobile HotSpots (I said nerd out right?) So put simply they pump through money like no ones business. Anyway. That made it for Monday. Oh and President B basically told me Elder K is training next transfer, there are so many missionaries coming and only a few Japanese missionaries to begin with. Poor K-choro.But anyway. So the next day was zone conference which turned out to be different than I expected. It was basically the same 6 hour talk that they give new missionaries coming in. Which I think is kinda brutal to make them go through but is fine because they have minds for molding. When you take in another mission you cant treat them like new missionaries because, well they aren't. I realize normally the senior comp teaches a lot of the practical stuff but that's not the luxury we have here. Up until now there has been no districts in Tokyo mission, this is their first one and I don't think they quite understand. When Elder M went to Tokyo for meetings this week he said President B was in awe of the stats. No babies, basically no Aaronic priesthood, 4 member branches, etc. Sigh. Anyway life goes on. The joke that I always tell Elder K when he is complaining about something is, "well I go home in a month so..." he never finds it funny. :-) The rest of the week was super humid and rainy, I miss my arid Utah. Feels like we have spent the whole week wet. I also ended up teaching Eikaiwa alone because all the other missionaries were in Tokyo for meetings. Oh yeah and then the new sister that came with me to Niigata got suddenly transferred to a spanish branch(yep, Tokyo has those) because she can speak spanish. Met again with H-san. Again he came to the lesson whiskey in hand and as we were kinda chatting before the lesson he told us he had looked up the church online and he asked us if we really didn't drink alcohol. So the lesson changed to Word of Wisdom. By the end up the lesson he said he would rather go to the Terrestrial kingdom than give up his whiskey. How depressing is that! His real problem is he has no faith so to be honest he has no reason to follow. He thinks that drinking alcohol is perfectly healthy. We will give him a little more time considering he is the only thing we got right now as far as investigators go. The laptops are cool. There is only one in our apartment so its kinda a pain to try have 4 people use. K-choro doesn:t even touch it. Yesterday I was showing him how to work on the online area book (I seriously wanted to shout halleluah when I heard that existed) and he told me that it was the first time he had touched that computer. It isn:t as stripped down as I thought it would be but still....yeah. Although I was able to put all the LAs and Active members on a Google map within like 15 minutes of work which we had been planning to put pins in a map we have on the wall for awhile but it would have been like a 72 hour project and this map you click the marker and it shows you all the details about that member. I:m kinda super prideful of it. Just saying. Yesterday we went home teaching with the district president who may have become my favorite member. He is way funny. He was talking about these mission meetings that he will need to go to from now on and he was talking about how the mission president, stake presidents, temple president, etc will all be there. All old men with there big old man glasses on and then the way he explained it it sounded like he would be in the corner kicked back in his chair as the 35 year old punk kid and as he put it *Keyless* *everyone has keys but me!* Ha. probably his favorite phrase. *I don:t have keys* We were praise him for being such a great leader and he would respond with *Its easy. Branch president is hard, they have keys!* Ha. I feel like I will use him in a talk someday when I need to talk about priesthood keys. Just not quite sure what I:m suppose to learn from his talk. Well talk to you next week

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