Week 61!

Hello! 

  

We haven't done a ton of training yet but the stuff we have done he catches on really quick!  Yes he will be my new companion for the next week and a half or so. He is from St. George Utah! 

  

Man it always feels like I just emailed you Guys!  

  

Oh ya. Japan doesn't have day light savings or anything. It gets dark around like 5:00 and then it gets really bright outside around 4 am. Kind of weird! The new missionaries, when they come, they always wake up at like 4:30 because of the time difference and they always think that we let them sleep in until 10 because it's so bright outside!  

  

I started training Elder Bateman this week! He has a lot of experience with computer programming so he catches on really easily.  

  

So Elder Loftus and I have been working  on this stats excel spreadsheet for a couple weeks now. We sat down for like two hours today and went through every single stat in the mission and checked our formulas and compared them with the numbers in the church website. We found that our numbers were right when we got solved the duplicate rows problem. But in the church website the totals for each key indicator were displaying wrong numbers. So our numbers are right and the church numbers are right but the church's way of displaying it is wrong. But then the problem was finding a way to be able to do it all automatically with formulas. Elder Loftus took a couple hours searching the internet but finally was able to figure it out! So now an hour long process only takes about as much time as it takes to download a spread sheet from the website and paste it in our spreadsheet. It was way cool! 

  

Now in our apartment is Elder Battaglia, Elder Matsumoto, Me, Elder Bateman, Elder Hattanda, Elder Mori, and Elder Uemura. It's kind of crammed.  

  

Elder Uemura, Elder Battaglia and I drove to Machida to pick up Elder Bateman's bike. There was this huge hill that we had to drive up. It was for sure steeper than San Francisco. But it was the only way up. We're in like a little minivan too. We're doing good and then BOOM! Just kidding there was no BOOM. But we got to the steepest part at the top and for some reason Elder Uemura slammed on his brakes. If he let go of the brake to push on the gas then we rolled backwards. Finally he just let go of the brake and slammed on the gas and we pealed out for a solid 5 seconds before gaining traction and shooting us up the hill and around the corner. It was terrifying.  

  

I went on companionship exchanges with Elder Sumsion! He is a transfer one missionary and amazing! We had many good talks on missionary work and baptism and how to be who the lord wants us to be. Even though he is only a transfer one missionary we spoke Japanese probably more than half of the time! It was way fun! We mainly just did finding. We had one lesson appointment but it fell through. It was very fun to learn so much from him! I haven't really focused on finding families like in the streets but he was so bold and just started talking to them! It made me feel so much joy to tell this young family that they can be together for eternity. I want to focus on families! 

  

A member took all of the missionaries to a local restaurant that they have been going to for like 30 years and it was just so special and fun! I love kichijoji Ward so much! I never want to leave here but I know I will have to. I'm also pretty excited to find out where I will go!  

  

I love you all so much! 

  

ドレーパー長老