Allergies!! (6/26/17)

Hey Everyone! Sorry this might be a short e-mail this week too. I have been dying from allergies and probably from all the crappy Japanese medicine I have been taking this week. But the highlights of the week are nice. Mostly everything that happened this week happened on Sunday. Overall it was a busy Sunday just talking to various members.

Elder Bachman and I are working hard on building relationships with members this week and I talked to a bunch of people. We even got a new dinner appointment out of it.

We also had a super long meeting on the new English class that we will be starting up pretty soon. All the rest of Japan started forever ago but Hokkaido is a slow place. Probably because of the effect of the cold weather or in other words a frost debuff. Anyway, It was pretty much decided that we will continue the regular Eikawa class on Tuesdays but will have the addition of the new Eiken course (a huge and super popular test taken by Japanese High Schoolers to show that they are smart and know engrish). We are going to have to advertise a ton for this but hopefully we can hand out 3,000 flyers in a week. We also expect to get a lot of members because of just how well known Eiken is. Whether it be young kids or older people it will probably attract them all.

Then we had a super long meeting with Bishop Ota. It was super nice because we got a lot better vision of his goals and vision for the ward. We also got a lot of support from him in our ideas and what we brought to the table. He is by far one of the best Bishops in Hokkaido. He also probably knows a lot more because of his leadership background and also being the ward mission leader once. (It was a really successful ward at that time.) 

Lastly We had a dinner appointment that night which was awesome. I made a banana cake the night before which was gigantic. I used almost 3 pounds of bananas on this thing. Even though we had us (the elders), the sisters, the kikuchi family (family of 5) and one YSA member we only made it a little past halfway through the cake. It was a ton of fun being over at their house and I feel I built a lot more trust between that family and the YSA member.

All in all this week has been pretty nice. Now that I am off all the Japanese medicine I should be back and hitting the streets like none other. I hope you guys all had a fantastic week!

Love,

Elder Harvey

(Side note:  Zach sent home a video answering a lot of questions.  I wrote to him and told him that I could hardly understand him because of accents, speaking style and how he kept throwing in Japanese words and phrases.  He replied:

Hahaha yup! It's simply because I use it (English) so little and the people I use it with (e.g. my companion) are even worse than I am. Mostly because they are older missionaries or they are Japanese. It is really embarrassing when you forget how to spell a word in English when you are teaching a bunch of Japanese people and then they correct you. I am hoping for a bean (brand new missionary) soon though so I might have some practice, and have more Japanese practice too.)