Mom and Dad,
It's crazy how quickly the time goes. April is almost here and David
Andrews is back from his mission? Wow! That's やばい! Yabai is kind of slang-ish
now that I think about it. I should probably avoid using it. Since I've had
Ni-Hon Jin companions I've picked up more Kansai-ben (dialect) and slang than I
probably should. Hopefully being with a Gainjin (American) now will help me
clean things up. Dad, what kind of dialects did you run into on your mission?
Did you ever run into Kansai-ben while in Japan? Or was it all Okinawa-ben? I
got to hear some Okinawa-ben from my last district leader. All of the consonant
and vowel sounds are the same as Japanese but the intonation is also much more
varied than standard Japanese, so it sounds like a completely different
language.
The weather feels quite similar to the way it did when I got to Toyooka
last fall. The evenings getting close to unpleasantly cool, but still nice and
the days climbing up to about 15-18 degrees and absolutely lovely. It's been
quite nice lately, but I expect it will work back into the rain every other day
groove like when I first got here.
Elder Nelson is one solid man. He's from Springville, Utah, so I've
enjoyed some hometown talk and such. He's an awesome missionary and just a
super chill and fun guy - we get along great. He's 18 years old and has been in
Japan now for about 7 months (in his 6th transfer). It's been absolutely great
working with him these past few days, and I look forward to working with him for
the rest of the transfer. He's new to being a Zone Leader, but he's doing just
fine and I expect that he'll continue to do great. It's been nice to work with
Elder Nelson for a change. It's a lot easier for me to just relax and dendo
(proselyte) with him. Over the past few days we've found a lot more solid
potential investigators than I have in a while.
They do in fact have Youth Conferences in Japan. The youth from a pretty
large area (probably all of the youth from the Kobe Mission area) get together
somewhere and do stuff. I don't know many details about what specifically they
do. Our investigator enjoyed it a lot though, and he seemed to learn plenty of
really good things. I think they have these big Youth Conferences yearly.
I love Toyooka, and I'm excited and happy to be here for another transfer.
Thank you for all of your love and support.
Love,
Elder Kyle Hutchings
PS. I was going to send more pictures today but I forgot my camera.
Sorry, I'll try to not forget next week.
