Hello Family!
We went to the temple after I emailed you guys and it was amazing! I had so many insights but no one likes thinking about that stuff like I do and I can't figure out the answers to my questions which is driving me nuts but I'm living somehow. It was a great session! The day after last P day, we all woke up and were soooo tired. It was the worst. Our day off took the most out of us! It was great to here from Abbie and Liza, I totally remember how Abbie feels, but we have 16 hour days every day of the week so just think of me every time you don't want to get up. I'll try to write Abbie and Liza a letter this week, we have such busy days and only an hour to email on p day so it can be hard! Please thank Nora and the Bunches and George and Liz for me. Getting Tessa's weekly update was awesome, it's fun to read about things I can look forward to! I loved hearing from Nora and want her to know I learned from the best. Her! The Bunches' survival kit was a huge life saver last week, my thanking them got lost in the depths of the emails I sent last week I think. I've been bring Siracha to every meal and everyone loves it. It was great to see pictures of the cousins and get the update from Liz! It was also pretty good to hear from Lisa I guess. Just kidding, it was great! She's such a great speaker that it doesn't what time she has to speak, she'll do great! Thanks for telling people about DearElder, it's seriously the best thing ever.
My Nihongo is really coming along! I have my Hiragana down, i'll attach a picture in the next email I send, i'm afraid to attach it to this email because of what happened last week. I can write them all out in order from memory which is super satisfying. We can also sing hymns for the most part, the fast ones are really hard but we're getting there! As always, I'm a step behind Elder Erickson. He is crushing it in every department, he can write all the Hiragana faster than me and is a flashcard machine. He does like 30 every day and I struggle to do ten. It's a motivator though, it's great that he's competitive and it really helps that he can help me! Our district is doing super well, everyone is either up to plan or ahead of it. We all get along really well, and everyone helps each other. I am 100% sure we are in the best zone in the MTC. Our Sempai rock. They help us all the time and are so nice and easy to get along with. They still come in every night to aishtaymas us. We also have the best schedule in the MTC. We have gym right when we wake up which is awesome because you don't feel stir crazy all day and you only have to shower once. There are some ballers in our gym time. Cannon Choro, one of the guys in our district, is unreal. He's like 5'6 but impossible to stop and is ambidextrous so he has incredible touch around the rim. He's super strong and knows how to use his body. He's fun to guard. I'm getting to know the guys in our gym well, they're all great guys and fun to play with. There's a companionship going to South Korea who we bump into all the time and they're great. Elder Brown and Elder Baker. Elder Brown is like 6'4 and plays ball with us too. They're way nice and fun to talk to.
It's been a pretty normal week class wise. Yuki, our first investigator, moved back to Japan according to Watanabe Shimai, but she totally lied. He turned out to be our second teacher! We knew all along but pretended to be surprised. He's a great teacher! He isn't nearly as affectionate as Watanabe Shimai or Olson Kyodia but he's a wonderful teacher. He only writes in Hiragana which is hard but it is forcing us to learn faster. On Monday, we did this thing called TRC, where they bring in real Japanese people or return missionaries who are all members and you have to teach them a lesson. It's tough because they are only supposed to speak in Japanese. We had to teach two lessons, and the first one was a train wreck. We taught a RM named Brittany, and she wouldn't speak any English. We read a scripture after apologizing that we can't read in Nihongo yet, and she was like, "Oh I didn't understand any of that," even though she totally did because she's from Las Vegas. We ended up sitting in silence looking for things to say because we burned through our lesson because she just said yes to our questions and nothing else. The second lesson WAS SO GOOD. We taught a woman named Irre, and she is Nihongen! She was so incredibly nice and easy going and spoke to us in English as best she could as we spoke to her in Nihongo as best we could. It got me so excited to go to Japan and teach the people there! I'm getting less and less apprehensive to leave and more and more excited!
We also got two new investigators, but all of our investigators are our teachers pretending to be people they taught. Watanabe Shimai is Oozeki Son, a super nice lady who wants to find out how she and her family can be more happy! She asks like a million questions per lesson which is great but they can be hard to answer sometimes. We taught her about Christ like attributes and how having charity can make her more happy and draw her family closer together, and she said that it worked! It was great. Our second new investigator is Iwamoto, a 60 year old man who drinks, smokes, and gambles and is recently divorced. He wants to be happy and thinks the church can help him, and I know it can! We teach him later today for the first time and hopefully it will go well.
I have run into a few people I know this week, which has been way fun. I ran into two EFY friends, Kayla Stockwell and Grace Hendricks. Kayla is hoping that Kim will send her Jewel's contact info, especially his email address so she can email him. She was in the EFY group with me, Cam, Jordan, and Jewel. Maybe Kim could DearElder me the info or send it to you and you could send it to me so I can give it to her? Grace was friends with the people I hung out with at my first ever EFY, I don't think she recognized me because I've become so much more handsome, but it's ok. Jared Nickerel, my buddy from that same first EFY group, was in Elder Erickson's ward at BYU! Small world. Maybe Dad could facebook message him for me and tell him, and that I'm thinking of him? Maybe you could give him my email address too and ask him where he's going. I haven't talked to him in forever! And last and definitely not least, I saw Karen Fuller! She was walking behind me on the way to the mail room and I didn't recognize her until I saw her name tag. We had a good talk and I forgot to take a picture, but it was super fun to see her. It's crazy that she's in Rome now, but she'll be great! Hailey Kennedy got here on Wednesday and I haven't seen her yet, but I'm keeping my eyes open. It's going to be way fun to be at BYU with all these people.
That's about it for this week's report, I am loving it here! Despite the hard things, the Spirit and the love that are present here make everything worth it. I also think I had such low expectations about the MTC that everything is better than I thought it would be, which helps a lot. It actually isn't being locked in a class room for 8 hours at a time, which is great! I'll send pictures from this week and hopefully they'll send this time, fingers crossed! I love my companion, I love my district, I love my zone, I love the MTC, I love my teachers, I love this church, I love the gospel, I love Christ, I love you guys!
Until next week,
Calhoun Choro
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