Saigo made Taeshinobu (Endure to the End)

Hello everyone! It was a wonderful week!

Cooking class.  We made tempura!

First off, we had transfers and Sister Kaneko transfered to none other than my bean area...NAHA!!!! Which is seriously a miracle and HUGE blessing because she can help Oohama Shimai, who is the sister I saw baptized in Naha last July, get to the temple!!

So Sister Mueller, who is going home with me at the end of this transfer and also served in Naha, and I have had this master plan for a while to go through the temple with Oohama Shimai our last day in the field because it will be almost exactly one year to the day since she was baptized. I wrote Oohama Shimai a letter a while back asking her what she thought and she finally wrote me back this week! She said she has been thinking about when to go, but was planning on going to the Tokyo temple instead of Fukuoka since she has friends there. However, she said because of our pleas she might reconsider and get back to us before July 20th! Which means, if a miracle happens, I`ll be able to help the very first woman I saw baptized go through the temple! Doesn`t that sound amazing? I don`t want to get my hopes up too high...but....

My amazing area of Fujisaki

From here on out its just me and my green bean Takabori Shimai. We are having fun doing a special 12 week training and taking extra time to practice teaching everyday, which is really helping her and especially me to improv teaching ability. We are missing Kaneko Shimai but this transfer is going to be amazing! We had a special meeting with the bishop where we heard about what his vision is for the ward, and then took the next day to fast and pray together to know what we should do. The result was that we all felt like concentrating on the area right around the church for finding, etc. will be really effective. We`re planning all sorts of fun activities to get the ward members involved in going finding after church on Sundays, too! We also want to throw some kind of carnival or fair in the church parking lot to get the people living right around the church over to meet the members.  

We also found FOUR new investigators this week. Two of them, Hirata and Kyoko, are long-time Eikaiwa students. The other two are these 11 year old girls, Rika and Marina, who keep coming to hang out at the church whenever they see our bikes in the parking lot. They are so incredibly cute. They came by after church the other day and asked if they could help us hand out flyers, so we took them with us finding! After that we gave them a tour of the church and read about the creation of the Earth from that Bible children`s story book and they loved it all! We even made baptism dates for July 14th with both of them. We still need to meet their parents and get permission to actually teach them so cross your fingers!

Hisada San`s bedroom.....the place where I`m sitting is where she is apparently sleeping at night. I have no idea how she even breathes in there!

Ok, if you don`t want to read about another incredibly dirty house I`m cleaning then please skip this paragraph. We met this lady on the street the other day who was limping and carrying some heavy groceries, so we offered to help and she let us into her apartment. I know this is the third or fourth time I`ve talked about cleaning a hoarder`s house, but this one was like no other I`ve been to. It wasn`t so much filthy as there were just piles and piles and piles and piles and piles of papers, receipts, wrappers, etc. This woman is literally a a pack-rat in every sense of the word. She basically begged us to come in and help her organize. We were a little hesitant because we were on the way to visit a member but when we looked into her bedroom and saw that she had literally 5 ft. of space on her floor, in her entire house, where she had a little blanket and was sleeping we decided to stay and maybe widen that space a little. She has some sort of sickness where she can`t move her arm which is her excuse for not having organized for 7 YEARS but after oranizing a while and having her hover over me, not letting me throw away anything but old tissues, I realized the real problem, haha. It is so sad. I convinced her to throw away a bunch of wrappers and stuff and we put them next to her front door so she could take them out for garbage day the next day...but when we went back a few days later to help out again she had emptied out the bags I had sorted and put everything back exactly where it had been before!!!!!!!! I was literally in shock, haha. Anyway, I don`t think there is anything we can do to help this lady clean her house but we gave her a Book of Mormon and taught her how to pray. Hopefully once she starts learning and living the gospel she will realize she needs to throw stuff away...or something. Haha.

There was a lot more I wanted to write in this email but I forgot my planner today where I wrote everything down! Oh well. I`m sure we will have another great week ahead with more adventures and interesting stories to tell. The gospel is SO true and I am so happy that I get to go out with my companion everyday, testifying and talking to dozens of people! It is seriously so much fun! Having a companion who just came straight from America and is obsessed with pop culture has been an interesting change...haha. I`ve been in a little shock hearing about recent movies, books, music, etc. but it is probably all helping me come back to reality so I`m not a total weirdo when I get home!

Love you all!

Love, Tingey Shimai