Living in the Land of Many Hills

Ohayho Gozaimasu! Being on a mission is definitely like a roller coaster ride. You have the highest moments and the lowest moments each and every day. But no matter what happens, you always end the day with a smile on your face ready to ride again tomorrow! I just wish that I could write about every single miracle we see every single day but theres just too many to count! But first, I'll start out with just a little bit of the weird cultural things about Japan that I've noticed. First of all, there are absolutely NO AMERICANS HERE besides us missionaries. People literally stare at us all the time. Sometimes, people will see us and then get all excited and grab their friends and point to us and laugh. It was the weirdest thing to get used to. Sometimes people come up to us just to ask us what we're doing here or where we're from or just to try out their English. That's another thing, everyone LOVES to speak any English they know to us. People love to impress us with words like "awesome!" or "great" or "hello" or "thank you" except it sounds more like "sank you" because they don't have a TH sound in Japanese. Being in Nagasaki has been really a humbling experience because we've had a couple of times meeting with older people that tell us about their experience when the genbaku (Atomic Bomb) hit here. It's crazy that it really wasn't even all that long ago. Some of these people here were kids or teenagers when it happened. The miracle of it too is that nobody holds a grudge whatsoever. They have all completely forgiven us Americans and are completely open to talking to us about it. The Japanese people are truly some of the most humble and kind people on this earth. The food here is quite different as you would expect. However, I have not had sushi yet, and I don't eat rice every day for every meal. They do eat quite a bit of fishy tasting food and plenty of noodles and different types of soups. A lot of it is super good, but I will admit, I've gotten pretty good and just not breathing when I eat things I don't like so that I can't taste them as much. It's a good skill to have. Also, they all drink some sort wheat based tea called mugicha that tastes a bit like licking an ashtray. I hear it's an acquired taste, though I have yet to acquire it. Nagasaki has TONS of hills. Lucky for us however, the steepest hill that we bike every day is the hill just before our apartment! Literally, We've probably gone up it 3 times every day since I've been here and I've only actually made it on my bike 4 times total. I end up walking pretty much every single time. I'm slowly improving though! Now for some miracles of this week: I did a contact all by myself for the first time on the bus this week! Don't get overly excited for me though, the lady spoke tons of English haha. It was still really exciting. She's a really devout Catholic who was super shocked to hear that we Mormons are Christian. I talked to her for a solid 15 minutes in broken English and broken Japanese and in the end, we exchanged phone numbers and I gave her a Book of Mormon! She wants to meet with us in October and offered us homemade strawberry jam and rum. We said yes to the Jam and no to the rum. Don't worry :) We found 2 other new investigators this week. On Friday we were out finding and weren't having any luck, so we decided to just sit a moment and pray together. After our prayer we walked for literally 3 minutes before we ran into a young girl who we talked to and she totally wanted to come to church! We gave her a Book of Mormon, told her we'd meet her at the bus stop to walk to the church with her and exchanged phone numbers. It was super awesome! However, then she called us just a few hours later, and told us that her mom wouldn't let her come to church. It was really sad. We're hopeful that we can still meet with her sometime though because she really wanted to learn more! Every single day we see little miracles and its truly amazing. Japan is so prepared to hear this message and I can't wait to find the people searching for the truth! Thanks again to everyone for all the love and support and prayers. See you all in 16 months! Wells Shimai