T-Minus 45 Hours and Counting

The time is finally here! After nine weeks we're finally being released! We still have two days before we leave, but now it's just one more P-day and one more Sunday. It's actually getting quite sad. Last week we just did regular Training Resource Center and my companion and I taught a super super sweet Nihonjin lady. It was the first 40 minute lesson that we taught (all the others had only been 20) so it was a little bit of a struggle filling up all the time. But we just kept asking Sister Suzuki if she had anything to share or comment on and she was great because she just kept on talking and telling experiences she had had. This past Wednesday we were able to do Skype TRC again and it was quite an interesting experience. We got to our computer and the monitor said we were going to talk to Andy Wilson from Mexico City. We asked the tech people if that was really our person and the guy was just like "I don't know, let's find out!" and he pushes the call button so we throw on our headphones and wait for an answer. A woman answers the call and apparently she speaks Japanese! I have no idea if she was Japanese herself, because the video never ended up working. She was super nice and I still have no idea what her name was because Japanese is difficult to understand, and through a computer it's even more difficult. Overall, it was much better than our last Skype TRC session. This week, we had to say goodbye to all of our investigators. It was pretty depressing. I think I'm going to grow to hate the song "God be with you till we meet again" because we only ever sing it for sad goodbyes. The hardest goodbye was for Toshi. We've been teaching him this entire time pretty much and he was coming along so great! When we told him we were getting "transferred" he was so upset. He just kept asking why and talked about how terrible it must be for missionaries to change areas so often. We were able to have a super great last lesson though and we just asked him where he was with his testimony and what he really believes. He said that he still feels guilty a lot of the time because he thinks he's a bad person. We explained repentance to him more and asked him if he had ever actually asked God for forgiveness. After he thought about it, he said he hadn't really. He only ever said sorry for the bad things he's done. When he said the closing prayer he asked God if he could be forgiven for all the bad things, and it was just the sweetest and most sincere prayer. After he finished, we asked him how he felt and he looked so happy and said that he felt like God had forgiven him a little bit. It was such a cute moment and I'm sad to leave behind these investigators, despite the fact that they weren't actually real. Yesterday, we had in-field training. It's basically when everyone that's leaving this next week goes to a nine hour long ordeal about working with members, finding people, setting goals, and all that jazz. I actually really enjoyed it! It was super weird though because everything was in English haha. We did a few different role play activities and it was quite hard to talk about the gospel in English and I kept on saying words in Japanese accidentally. It was also pretty funny because there were tons of people there that had only been in the MTC like 9 days and they were leaving the same day as us! It's always so amusing to hear the English speakers complain about the food or the schedule and we just sit here like "I'd like to see you try it out for nine weeks" haha. As excited as I am to leave the MTC, I'm also a little sad to see it go. It's truly been such an amazing experience here. I've learned so much more in 2 months than I ever thought possible. Not even just about Japan or Japanese but also so much about the gospel and how it can change lives and also about how to learn to love other people for what they are and what they aren't. I can't wait to get to Japan so that I can start helping real people with struggles in their lives. I know that this gospel can change anyone's life for the better and I'm so excited to share this knowledge with other people. Thank you to everyone truly that has been here to support me! Pray for me as I travel to the foreign land of Japan and pray that I will be able to find the people that need to hear my message. I love and miss you all and I'll see you in 16 months! Ai shite Imasu! Wells Shimai

日本あいしています！

This week was quite eventful. To begin, WE GOT OUR TRAVEL PLANS! :) We leave August 26th which is next Monday at 6:00 a.m. Which means we have to leave the MTC by 2:30 a.m. Fun right? Then we fly to Dallas, and from Dallas we fly to Tokyo, and from Tokyo we fly to FUKUOKA JAPAN!!! We'll arrive in Fukuoka Japan Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m. So we basically have a full 2 days of traveling. And the time zone difference is something like 15 hours so we're all super excited for that jet lag. It's gonna be great. Other exciting news of the week is that we finally got to hear an apostle speak! Tuesday night at the devotional we were all just sitting there waiting for the speaker to come, and no body knew who was coming. Then everyone down in front began to stand up. We stand up and squint into the distance to see who will be speaking to us and in walks Richard G. Scott! You could literally feel his presence as he came in. In all our 8 weeks of being here this was our first time hearing from an actual apostle. Before he even sat down, half of us had tears in our eyes. He spoke to us all about prayer and it was exactly what we all needed to hear. He also bestowed an apostalic blessing upon each of us there that was trying to learn a language. He said that he blessed us with the ability to be able to speak and learn our languages if we would have sufficient faith. He said this twice during the devotional too! It was just what we all needed to hear. With our departure date coming so soon, we've had a lot of nerves and frustrations with the language and lack of confidence in ever being able to speak it once we're in Japan. Elder Scott's words really boosted our spirits and gave us the motivation that we needed during these critical last days here. This past Wednesday, our district was assigned to host the new missionaries coming in. It was such a fun experience! Also somewhat nostalgic and sad as we got to watch these brand new missionaries say goodbye to their families. We were able to host some of the international missionaries as well and I hosted a super cute girl that was from England. It was super funny because she wanted to get a drink of water before she went to class so I took her to a vending machine. A water bottle was $1.20. She pulls out her money and some coins and then looks at me and says in her English accent "This might seem really dumb, but I have no idea how much these coins are worth." Haha it was funny because I had never even thought about little things like that. I just can't wait to be in Japan and be the one asking silly questions. Our Sister Training Leader assignment ends tomorrow! I'm a little sad, but also grateful that I'm going to again have some time at night to actually write in my journal and things like that. It's been a but of a struggle these past three weeks. Also I'll probably have to start packing my suitcases this week! It's still so surreal that we're actually going to be leaving to Japan. Sometimes we get little glimpses to the outside world. Like this week one girl in my district got a package from her friend and it had hostess donuts in it! Haha we were all just so shocked that hostess is back in business and making food again! Little things like that remind us of how much of a bubble we really do live in here. This past week we all got an email from the mission home saying that they're making our Japanese name tags this week and that we needed to send to them how we wanted our names to be. I made mine ウエルズ姉妹 which will be pronounced "oo-e-ru-zoo shimai" If you say it the first part really fast it almost sounds like Wells haha. It was as close as I could get. Translating English to Japanese is always a struggle because they just don't have the same sounds that we do. All L's turn into R's and V's turn into B's and everything just starts to sound funny. Anyway, just holding out for 9 more days until we fly to Nihon! Thanks once again everyone for all the love and support! Sayonara!

Life at the Top of the Food Chain

Konnichiwa Minasan! So this week we got rid of our oldest group of missionaries and recieved 2 new districts full of missionaries. Which means that we're officially Daisenpai and are the next ones to leave! Crazy to think that I'm not just going to be stuck in this bubble forever and that I'm actually going to go to Japan soon! On Tuesday, we taught one of our investigators his second lesson. His name is Ryan and he's 17. (He's actually Wilkes Sensei without a tie on, but that's beside the point.) We were just teaching him from the first lesson about how God loves him and how the gospel can bless him and his family. He asked how he could be happier and what he needed to do to recieve blessings and before we knew it, we had a baptismal date! August 24th! It was really quite exciting. :) We had a missionary from Brazil come in this week that's part of our zone. Since he's international, he arrived at the MTC a day early, and the zone leaders and the Sister Training Leaders (us) got to take care of him until the rest of his district arrived the next day. His name is Elder Pessoa and he's actually called to speak portuguese in Japan, but he's here learning Japanese. Not exactly sure how that works. We hung out with him and showed him around on Tuesday night and the people told us that's all we needed to do because he had a schedule of things to do Wednesday before everyone else arrived. Wednesday morning we see him at breakfast, and ask if he knows where he's supposed to go etc, and he says he's just fine so we let him be and say Ja mata! (See you later) A few hours later, an official looking man comes to our classroom and says "Do any of you know where Elder Pessoa might be?" We all look at each other and respond that the last time we saw him was at breakfast. Apparently our new international missionary had gone missing! We said a prayer as a district and hoped that he was ok. So now we're all wondering what on earth we did and where he might have gone. I was convinced that we freaked him out the night before and he decided to ditch the MTC. When we go to lunch we see his name on the TV and it tells him to come to the front desk as soon as possible, so obviously he was still missing. The man came back another time and asked if we still didn't know where he was, and we still had not seen him. We felt like terrible zone leaders and sister training leaders. Later that day, we see Pessoa Choro walking down the hallway without a care in the world. "Where in the world were you?!" We ask. "What do you mean? I was just in the computer lab doing what they told me to do" he responded. Apparently he had always been where he was supposed to be. It was slightly anticlimatic, but relieving at the same time. Wednesday night we had our first TRC skype session with someone in Japan. It was.... interesting to say the least haha. Usually our visits are only 20 minutes and we usually teach people that know english as well as Japanese and can help us out when we're terrible at speaking Nihongo. This time, however, we had to teach a 40 minute lesson to someone who spoke practically no english whatsoever. Our volunteer was an old man who lived in the Nagoya mission boundaries who's name has escaped me. He was really nice and friendly, but he just spoke so fast! And with so many words that I had never heard before. It was long, painful, frustrating, and also super humbling. It was a good experience though because in just a matter of weeks we're going to be in Japan with people like that. Although it made me realize how terrible my Nihongo still is and made me want to just work harder so that I can actually somewhat communicate in Japan when I need to. The next two weeks, we'll being doing Skype for TRC once again so hopefully the next two weeks will give me more hope :) Wednesday night we also got to welcome all the new Kohai to the MTC and give them a tour. That was a fun experience. It's just funny to be with missionaries on their very first day at the MTC and see how they're doing. So many of them just have a dazed-what-did-I-get-myself-into-? kind of look on their face. Others just look exhausted. While there's those few that are just excited about life and want to know every little bit of Japanese that I've ever learned. I brainwashed all the new kohai into thinking that 4 square is the coolest thing ever here at the MTC. It might have been a mistake because on Friday when they came to gym EVERYONE was playing 4 square and the line was miles long. But it was still fun and I really like the new missionaries :) Well, my timer is running out once again, but the MTC is a wonderful place to be, Japanese is a wonderful language to learn, and the people that I'm here learning with are some of the most amazing people I've ever met. Love you all! Wells Shimai

Senkyoshi for Life

So last Sunday we're eating breakfast and I'm thinking to myself "Hmmm, I think they're going to call new Sister Training Leaders today, I wonder who it'll be..." We walk out of the cafeteria building and on our way back to the classroom Willis Kyodai (A member of our branch presidency) is just standing there waiting. He looks at me and my companion and says "I need to see you two." Shimata. (Japanese for dangit) He says with a big smile on his face "You two get to be our next sister training leaders!" The thing about being a missionary, is that you don't get callings, because you're calling is a missionary. But you get assignments and you're expected to do them without question. So what does a sister training leader do exactly? I wasn't exactly sure myself at first. Turns out, we have to go to meetings on Sundays with the branch presidency and zone leaders. We have to interview all the girls in the zone whenever we have free time, which is literally a joke, because at the MTC, free time doesn't exist. We have every minute of every day scheduled for us. So free time just has to be during our additional study. Also, each night we have the opportunity to go say goodnight to all the Shimaitachi in the zone and make sure everyone is doing well. There's 30 Shimai in our zone if I counted correctly, so this usually takes about 20 minutes every night. Then we have to be in bed my 10:30 every night, which is quite the struggle with our new responsibilites. Let's just say my journal entries have consisted of about 1 line for the past week. We also get to check out the Daisenpai when they leave at like 3 in the morning on Sunday. They said we can do it the night before though, thank heavens. ALSO we get 2 districts of new Kohai this week and we're in charge of their orientation on Wednesday night along with the zone leaders. As if being a normal missionary wasn't already enough. But I will admit, that I've really liked this responsibility. I've gotten to know a lot of the girls in our zone much better than I otherwise would have. I'm convinced that this assignment is going to help me more than I'll be able to help anyone else. Even though I've had a lot less time for myself to study Japanese and prepare lessons and things, I don't feel like I'm falling behind. I know that God provides a way for us to accomplish the things He asks. I've been somewhat ill for the past couple of weeks and I started developing a cough on Tuesday. Of course, the only time that I've ever started coughing uncontrollably had to be during the choir musical number at the devotional tuesday night. Literally seconds after we all began singing I started hacking up a lung. I could not stop for the life of me and I was just hunched over coughing throughout the entire song. After the devotional our Chorotachi (elders) were like "That was you!? I thought someone was dying!" So that night Willis Kyodai (The member of our branch presidency) basically forced me into having a blessing. It was definitely a good thing, and I'm really glad that he's the one that performed it. He's probably one of the most perfect people I've ever met. He's actually Gordon B. Hinkley's cousin. Not joking. I'm convinced that he'll be translated any day now. It's weird that we're almost the Daisenpai. That means that we only have about 3 more weeks! Which is really exciting, but also really scary. We started teaching each other as investigators this week. It's actually been a pretty neat experience. I really like being on the recieving side of a lesson. It makes me think about how an investigator might think about our message and I think it makes me want to know more about the gospel and study my japanese more so that I can answer people's questions effectively. Next week, we have a skype session scheduled to teach actual Nihonjin (Japanese people). I have no idea if they'll be able to speak any English whatsoever, so this could be really interesting. If all else fails, I know how to bear my testimony in Japanese and hope that they can get something from it! Whenever I start to think that I might be getting better at understanding Japanese, I learn something new and realize how far I still have to go! It's really been a great experience though. I enjoy learning and I'm having fun just throwing random Nihongo words into my daily life. The MTC is funny that way because you've got a bunch of people here learning a bunch of different languages so everywhere you go you hear things that don't make any sense. Also, in Japanese, the word "Hai" means yes. So if I'm ever talking to someone going to another mission, I'm in the habit of just saying "hai" instead of yes. People always give me the look like "Why on earth do you keep saying Hi to me?" because that's what it sounds like. The funny Nihongo mistake of this week happened to a Shimai in my district. They were teaching one of their investigators about the word of wisdom and telling him things that he can do besides smoking. One of the girls was trying to say that she likes to visit her chuch member friends. But the verb to visit is "homon suru" and the verb to excommunicate is "Hamon suru". Apparently she used the wrong one and told her investigator that she likes to excommunicate people haha. Also theres the mistake of calling people carrotts (ninjin) instead of humans (ningen). It's always an adventure in the life of a Japanese Senkyoshi. Well, time is running low and I've got plenty that I need to get done on this junbi no hi (P-day). Hope everyone back home is doing well! Kono Kyokai wa shinjitsu to shitte imasu. Kamisama no imashime ni shittagaeba shukufuku o ukeru koto ga dekimasu! Sayornara!