Typhoons Destroy Plans...and lead to miracles

Ushiku Transfer 11 Week 4

Konnichiwa!

It has been a wonderful and rainy week here in Ushiku! As you may have heard, we had a pretty big typhoon hit us on Sunday, but don't worry, we are all safe. There was just a lot of rain and there are some really strong winds right now so we are staying inside just to be safe. :)

Dinner with the Tobes

Yesterday the rain was getting so bad though that the Bishop came in and told everyone to leave during the 3rd hour, so everyone left pretty quickly and all of a sudden all of our plans for the day were canceled. Granted, when we made our plans for the day we didn't know that a typhoon was coming. We were still able to have a fairly effective day preparing for our big Talent Show on Wednesday and going to a dinner with a few less actives and the Tobes. Yay!!!

As for the rest of the week, this was the week of miracle Kubarikais!!!!!!! I don't know what a kubarikai is in English...handing out flyers? Because of the rain, a lot of our plans got canceled so we ended up doing quite a few kubarikais and they were really successful! We are trying to build up our Mission School in Ushiku and we have a new class starting next month, so we've been trying to advertise it to young people especially.

Just a few miracles:

Sakura water drain in Tokyo

A ridiculous number of High School boys would walk past us and be super interested in English so we handed out a lot of flyers to them. I don't know where all the High School girls went, but the boys seemed to have a lot of interest. Please bring your girl friends!!!!! Or girlfriends....either or ^^

One day we only had 15 minutes. It was ridiculous. But we decided that this was going to be the most miraculous 15 minute kubarikai ever. And it was! With only a few minutes left, I spotted an American man walking past and I just said "Hi" because clearly he didn't need a flyer. Well, he stopped and came over and started talking to me about what we were doing and I explained that as missionaries we are doing service and teaching free English. He told me that he was an English Teacher at a nearby high school and that a lot of his students are looking for an English class to practice and improve. He then told us that we should come back from 7:00-7:30 in the morning to catch all the students on the way to school. It was so helpful and it gave me a lot of hope that all those students I'd been giving flyers to really did have interest and wanted to come. We are going to try that early time next week and hopefully we will be able to help a lot of students. Yay!!!

Mei-chan and Ryouka-chan

Another fun thing from this week was that we went with Ryouka-chan and Mei-chan (two college student PIs that Sister Honda and I met) to their school festival. It was raining pretty hard so there weren't a ton of people, but we got to listen to Mei-chan sing in her acapella group! She was so good! And she said that she is going to come preform at our talent show too (perfect since we didn't have many people lined up to preform). Yay!!!! We walked around and talked a lot and it was great, but then we sat down to eat some of our food and they invited us to come to their English Circle at their school. They really want to practice speaking with native speakers and Mei thought that it would be perfect to ask us if we could come. I want to go so badly!!!!

Zone Conference

It was so sad, I asked what they normally do at English circle and she said that around holidays they will try to search on the internet for things about the holiday and try to do their own presentations about it. They really really try, there just aren't many English speakers to help them. This is perfect though! We are so excited to help them out!!!!!

Also, another fun thing about the school festival. We were at a pretty small college so everyone knew each other and they were all freaking out because "THERE WERE TWO AMERICANS" walking around and speaking English and Japanese. So many people called out "Hello!!!" And there was even a girl who wanted to take a picture with us. We got to start a lot of conversations with people in English and I'm sure we made their day. Haha, it was so cute! I've never been stared at so much in my life :)

Kimiko-san

Those are just a few of the highlights from this week. We were also able to do a lot of work with members and we had several members come up to us asking if they could help with anything. For example, Sister Tobe had a friend from Russia come and stay the weekend and she really wanted to help us dendo, sadly because of the typhoon and terrible weather in general, it didn't work out, but it was so nice of her to want to help!

Biking with Anna

We also taught Anna-chan how to ride a bike!!!! She is a Young Woman who moved here from Mexico a few months ago and will be staying here until March at least. Because almost everyone in Japan has a bike, I thought that it might be nice to give her mine when I leave and she was so excited! The only catch? She didn't remember how to ride a bike, so we helped her. Yay!!! She is so cute!

That's all from this week! It's just been a great week of dendo and we are loving Ushiku and all the miracles here.

Have an amazing week!!!!!

Love,

ブラック姉妹
Black Shimai