Japan 13 months 1 week-66

My best friend Watabe Choro had his birthday. It was a great day.

Kamenosuke! The lady and her turtle.

I pet a turtle. I never thought that would happen.

For P-day we decided to go hiking.

Gettin artsy

Bahahahaha! Trying sooo hard.

So we saw these two rocks and wanted to go hiking by them. We walked around the shore line for about 3 miles.

Gollem. My hero.

close up.

About a mile into walking we realized we were walking on the set for LOST

It was pretty freaky.

With a rock like this you have to do Ariel poses.

We found a cave! It was so cool! We couldnt go in though because there was water. #no swimming

We wanted to go it soooo bad.

I drank. It was gross.

On Saturday we found a huge slide.

These bees can kill people. It is huge.

Tips on how to stay away from strangers. It is on Soda machines througout the city.

Ended pictures and the week with housing in an area with no houses.

Womens Volleyball

Everytime the week starts over I get super excited to go out and teach as many people as I can. On Monday last week we had a few more investigators that we decided to go visit. We visited them and all of them dropped. "when you first heard that families can be together forever what did you think?" "It didnt influence me at all" "Do you want to live with your daughter forever?" We asked this question to a mother who was holding 10 year old daughter in front of her. We didnt get a response... That was a very sad lesson for me. Testified about Eternal Families and left. Out teaching pool is now down to one. BUT our one investigator is progressing terrifically.

We had an activity this Saturday where we made strawberry tarts. Higaki san comes every Saturday and was really excited to come this week. We got a text from her on Saturday 10 minutes before it was going to start saying that she is coming with a friend who wants to hear out message! YES! We ate so much sugar, fat and strawberries then stuffed our souls with sprituallity. The lesson was very good and the spirit was very strong. Both of them showed up to church yesterday as well. There are no young people in Abashiri branch so they only have a really confusing sunday school class. The members (literally every single one of them) came up to us and said, "this class is too hard for Higaki san and Kado san. Go teach them in that classroom!" So with 20 seconds to prepare an hour lesson we taught a lesson on God. It was so much fun. I felt like I wasn't even teaching. I was just opening my mouth and words were coming out. I love those moments. Higaki san is getting really close to baptism. Her date is in two weeks and I really think she will make it. Her friend, Kado san, is listening to the messages, but is still a little weak, but we will do our best to keep meeting with her.

Because of our lack of investigators, our time was naturally filled with a lot of finding. Sadly we did not find a single person to teach during this whole week, but we did meet a ton of funny people. We now also play womens volleyball every Wednesday with 17 women. An Eikaiwa student invited the missionaries to go play soft volleyball with her and her friends. (I really wish I took pictures. There will be some next week, just wait) I thought maybe it would only be 30 minutes and just a fun little game. I was severely mistakened. They are intense. There is a woman there whos nickname is "man". She kills people. The oldest woman that comes is probably in her 70's and the youngest is in her 30's. They are serious about their volleyball. They love us because we can jump high and spike hard. They love to yell "ATTACK!!" After we finished playing they invited us to go out to eat with them, but because I didn't understand the Japanese we ending up leaving while they were changing and they sat their waiting for us haha. We found this out because later that day while we were housing we found one of the Volleyball ladies. We found her right after we came out of a house with a grandma who has a pet turtle named Kamenosuke. He wanders around the house like a dog. (I have great pictures) The volleyball ladies don't have that much interest in the message (or at least they think they don't) but they love us. We made it a goal to find all of them and teach them. So far just from housing this week we found 5 of the 17.

Abashiri is a very beautiful area. It is a slow area. Most of the people here have either lived under a rock their whole lives so they have never met the missionaries, or they have met the missionaries 200 times. We are working our hardest to find the prepared people that we know are out there, and even if we don't find them we are still having fun and loving the opportunity to share the most amazing and true message this world has to offer. I love you all so very much. Be excellent to each other!

And father, Happy Fathers day.

-Mecham Choro

p.s. Grandpa you look amazing on your water jet-pack thing. Happy Fathers day.