Another week here in Kiryu!

Another week here in Kiryu! It is so beautiful here. I am going to take some pictures and send them to you. Its weird because Its almost December and like the leaves are just barely changing colors. Kiryu is awesome it's like in the mountains but it's weird because it's not like the mountains that we have in Utah it's just beautiful.  if you get the chance look it up on google maps and you can look at the kiryu ward house my church is pretty big actually!!

Well lets see. The weeks are going by so fast but I feel like they are so long. SO I know exactly what you mean when you say that mom. I miss you all so much. Its weird not being home for thanksgiving. I am actually kind of missing you all. It doesn't even seem like the Holiday seasons. I doesn't even seem like Christmas is coming up. Its just weird, I don't know its hard to explain it. I bet Brandon and Josh can kind of understand it a little. But I just have to keep telling myself to focus on what things are important. Thank you so much mom and dad for your advice I really needed to hear it. Tomorrow we have our interviews with president budge so that is going to be good. I am really looking forward to those.

The mission conference was great! It was just what I needed it really made me think about somethings and made me feel so much better about that I am here doing and what not. Some thing that I have been trying to focus on is my prayers. Some of the things I learned are:  Am I really praying with real intent and I being thoughtful in my prayers. am i praying for things that i really should be praying for. With that being said I have also been working with my faith. And knowing that god is listening to me and he does hear the things that I am praying about. and having faith and hope that he does answer my prayers. One of the hardest things to do in a situation is to trust in the lord. Ether 3:11 "And the lord said unto him: Believest thou the words which I shall speak." The words which I shall speak." Do I have faith in the lord, enough faith to not only believe the words he says now but the things which he shall speak.

Also I learned that Its important to serve the lord but in doing so. Don't ask for more time to serve for example coming home from a mission don't say I wish I had more time or things like that. ALWAYS ask for more service.  When you are serving the lord and serving him according to his will the lord will be with you at all times he promises you that and that there will always be ways to do more. 

SO now that I am a missionary i look at how i attended church and participated in things. I was a terrible ward member. I am sorry. Please do all that you can to help out the missionaries. The most successful way to gain new members is through member referrals. Having members help is so important!! We cant do it on our own.

GUESS what I spent my Saturday morning doing?? Yep that's right I spent all Saturday morning doing service here in kiryu. I put up Christmas lights up for over 3 hours haha needless to say. I have a few ideas for things that we can do when I get home! hahaha 

So food wise I eat lots of yogurt and fruit and RICE so much rice i am getting some cute rice cheeks. we do like a stir fry for almost every meal so i am doing pretty good with eating i think. I really miss peanut butter they don't have that here. we have oatmeal but i haven't really eaten that. I am trying so hard not to get sick. But i have been very blessed the lord is watching over me that's for sure. AHH I drink so much hot chocolate.

OHH one more thing next week is temple pday!!!! we are going to the temple on Tuesday. so we will be staying in shibuya again on Monday night but we are going later that night. not so early pday is technically Tuesday. SO i am not really sure how emails are going to work out and if i will even get the chance to email. So yeah I am very excited to go to the temple :) and yeah. SO please email me still and hopefully I will be able to email you!! :) I love you so much and I am so glad that I have been called to serve here!! Japan is amazing and I can't wait for all of you to finally come here too!!!

Stay warm this thanksgiving tell the Fosters I say hello!!!

I love you all so much and the church is true

And yes i can ride a bike. Do you even know how to walk??

XOXO

ブラウン姉妹

Going to the city!!‏

Ahhh Things sound so good back home!! I sure miss you all. I am pretty sure mom that you have been in my dreams the past several nights! haha let me just say.,. ever since I have been on a mission my dreams have been crazy. Like really I am always dreaming about weird things and I always remember them in the mornings too.. and like I guess I sleep talk almost every night.. Also I feel so bad. One of my companions snores sooo loud every night and she has been a little sick too like coughing and such and like it makes it impossible to sleep. Well I don't remember this but I guess the other night I sat up and was like will you be quiet! and I said it all loud to her and I sounded all mad... awkward.

 

I hope that the snow works out and you get everything worked out so all the lights can be up! I am going to miss seeing them. Yesterday we were on the train and drove past a stop and it has some of the coolest Christmas lights, so hopefully I will be able to see some this year. I am not going to lie... its hard this time of the year. I miss you a ton but.. the people here are so nice, that makes it all so much better. I am really glad that I am serving a mission. The only thing that would make it better was if I could talk to someone. haha.

 

I am glad for granny and grandpa. A mission is awesome and the mtc is pretty great too!! I miss it there hahaha. They are going to be great missionaries. How long are they called for?? Tell them I say hello and I wish them all the best of luck!!

 

Sounds like its going to be fun over Thanksgiving!! Ahh thats going to be so much fun. I love Brad and Sam and Audrey!! Sam and Brad are so cute. It will be fun not having the house be so lonely and empty :) haha Tell the whole Foster family I say hello and hope that all is well.

 

Well this past week, went by pretty fast but at the same time it seemed like it took forever. I  think time flies when things are going good and are not too hard. So my bike..... awkward. I think its fixed now.. or its even more broke I haven't decided yet.. only time will tell. So the other day I crashed on it. which was super embarrassing like I wanted to die. haha I almost did die but after I got up from crashing on it.. like my chain wasn't doing that stupid thing anymore and it seemed to be working better. It still is having a little hard time with changing gears but it seems to be doing better haha. Well even though my Japanese is still terrible I finally memorized the first vision so I am pretty proud of that! wahooo hah its like forever long in Japanese. Its starting to get pretty cold here, The wind it is terrible. Its like being back in Cedar City. Its so hard to ride your bike in the wind. oh and cool story.. not really though. guess who has already gotten two skirts stuck in her bike so now they have stupid little holes in them. Yep you guessed right. THIS GIRL. So annoying haha I am so over this whole bike already.. good thing I still have like 15 months of it left... 

 

We had zone conference last Friday and that was cool.  I got to see Owens shimai. so that was great! I miss her so I am glad that I got to see her!!  Well housing this week was funny we knocked on one door and they answered, turns out they were having a funeral..... at another door we asked a guy if he wanted the book of Mormon he said yes and then as soon as we were handing it to him he slammed the door shut in ours faces haha we were getting on our bikes one night in a little street and this lady comes out telling us to come to her house and she seems super excited I am like so excited because I have never seen this lady before so that was awesome and we go over to her house and like start walking in and she has a picture of the Temple and the Prophet and I am just like thinking. Oh this is going to be awesome!! she has just been waiting for missionaries for so long... hahaha nope turns out she is an active old lady in our ward it was just dark on the street because there are like no street lights and I didn't recognize her until I saw her face in the light. 

 

So the train ride to Tokyo isn't on a super fast train :( It's like just a normal subway train and we have to like stop and change trains like 3 or 4 times. Hopefully I can attempt to talk to some people while on the train. hah we will see how that goes... hopefully it goes well. it probably won't considering the fact that I don't know how to hold a conversation with anyone... Oh so I played the piano in church on Sunday... THAT WENT TERRIBLE. I am so bad at it like really. I screwed up so much i vow never to do that again because it was so bad.  Like I'm never going to forget that moment....

 

Thats about all that i can think about right now that happened this week! I am very excited to go to Tokyo today and I am excited for the mission conference!! I miss you all so much But I am also so happy to have all of your love and support!! I hope you had such a great week and be sure to email me :) I love you!!

 

XOXO

Sister Brown

 

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE NOOOOOOOONOOOOONOOOO

(Name that movie quote) hahaha

 

Cat Pizza Restaurant

Well lets see my week has been so good and so so crazy! I am glad that you were able to hear from the mission president! Him and his wife are so dang cute!!

Last week we went to this sushi place!! Yay the first sushi I have had in Japan! Its great. Dad you would have died and probably you would too mom. SO like you sit down and the sushi is on a revolving table and the food just comes around and around and you just pick what sushi you want haha and if you want something special you can just order and then like 5 minutes or something here it comes down the littler convaier belt to your table! (sorry my spelling is really terrible...) We also went to dinner at a pizza place too!! ahh it was sooo good. The pizza crust was like a brown rice crust so it was gluten free and it was delcious!! The only thing that makes it crappy... The lady that owns the restaurant has 3 cats that are in the resteraunt while you are there and like they are all over the place they are up on the counters and such, like one of the climbed over and got on our table!! IT WAS CRAZY. Besides the fact that that was really gross... haha the food was really good. 

 

So the bathroom at my place is awesome and so are the ones at the church they have this thing called the warmlet!! haha like a heated toilet seat. Pretty much the greatest thing in the whole wide world.  Usually I am so opposed to having a warm toilet seat, like usually it means someone just got off of it and had been sitting on it for a really long time! but this is different. It feels amazing and I love it so much!! haha nothing better then waking up on a freezing cold morning and sitting on a nice warm toilet seat. And yes they have squatters here but I haven't used them yet. They had them at the train station and they had them at the cat pizza restaurant haha. and the shower is like a room haha its so awesome. I am really lucky and have such  a cute nice little apartment. We have a bedroom and a kitchen and a little living room. We eat every meal on the floor kneeling or something.

 

SO I am a disaster riding a bike.  It is terrible you only have like 12 inches of space to ride here.  Mom, you and Karen would have some serious problems.  My bike already is broken it's so annoying. Hopefully we can get it to the back shop to get fixed. its something with my gears and such it like stalls and catches when ever you peddle its scary when you are going up a hill. I'm pretty sure we biked up a hill that was like going to Brighton ski resort. 

 

The other day we visited with an investigator that reminded me just of grandpa Wayne it made me miss him.  Please pray for Nakayamasan. He is so close to baptism he is a self referral. We met him my first Sunday I was here and he is amazing he has a date for baptism set for Dec.1. He has researched so much about the church and what not and its awesome. He is so strong and he like teaches us so much! and yesterday at church we had 4 investigators and one less active member come. There is so much potential here!

 

So we are cool and now twice a month we are doing a radio eikaiwa lesson. So we are teaching English over the radio here for about 20 minutes two times a month. Its 77.7hm Kiryu radio haha its also on fm radio  I am not sure what the exact dates and times are though.

 

The other night we were trying to find a house and we couldn't find it and it was starting to get really dark. and then all of a sudden this car came down the road and it was a lady from our ward and she asked us what we were doing and we said we were trying to find a certain house and she said well I can show you were it is, I am heading there right now! its was such a tender mercy. we needed that help for sure!  I really like housing  because you never know what you are going to get. the other day a lady answered the door in a towel haha and we went to an apartment complex and pretty sure everyone that lived there spoke a different language and Japanese was not a language that was spoken.

 

BRANDON AND HALEY  how cute I hope all is well with them. I love everyone. I am so glad that Lizzy helped with putting the Christmas lights up! I want to see some pictures. Its starting to get really cold here!! but its all good!  I am so grateful for everything that you are doing for me!! I love you so much!  I would actually really like to have a conference ensign please send me one and also I sent home those gym pants the black ones.. maybe could you send me those.. I don't need them for the winter but I am going to want them for the spring so no rush. I just would love like anything in the mail! haha anything from you would be awesome! Maybe some candy or something the food here is good and I have been trying to be really good with eating the right things. All the candy has like cookies in it.. and they don't have anything with peanut butter in it haha so no good stuff but i stilll love it here!! 

 

WE go to the temple every transfer :) we go the week before transfers and next week we have a huge mission conference with the Tokyo south mission.  Some huge person is coming to talk to us on the 20th or something.  Next Tuesday we are going to Tokyo. So hopefully i get to email next Monday.  It will probably be really early though because we are leaving here like 8 or 9 because its 3 hours on train to Tokyo and we want to spend our pday in Tokyo!! well I LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH. the mission is really hard but I am very glad to be here serving the Lord!!

XOXO

SIster Brown

Japan

Well well well

 

I am finally here in Japan. It doesn't seem real at all. I am very excited to be here.  Thank you so much for all the emails it really meant a lot to me. I miss you all and I love hearing from you.

 

Alright so now all the good stuff:

 

So the flight from LAX to Japan took like forever!! I am not even joking I almost held me breath so that I wouldn't  pass out. I had the seat next to the window which was nice but it was really hard to get up. the person sitting next to me, I think was recovering from a hang over. He slept the whole time and he smelled gross haha but someone told me that is how Japan smells... so great.. haha but then the lady sitting next to him was pretty nice. She asked me what all of us were doing so we talked for a little while. She was going to Thailand to teach English or something I can't really remember. Those days are kind of a blur.  When we landed it was raining, of course but it's all good! The mission president and his assistants picked us up and then we had  like a 2 hour car ride to the mission home. The mission home was right next to the church so that was pretty cool! It was fun being so close even though we were only there for like 1 day. I was so tired when we got there. I almost fell asleep in my dinner haha I then went straight to bed. The mission home was pretty big there were enough beds for the sisters but not room for the elders so they slept in the church on futons. I was lucky and I got the room where the General Authority's  sleep when they come so I had a huge kind size bed to sleep in. SO the food we had on the airplane was really good it was just like normal American food and the food that I ate at the mission home was really good to it was like normal American food also so that was nice.

 

The first day we just did training. Nothing really exciting. The mission president is a great guy he seems really awesome. I am very lucky to have him as a mission president. You could say he pretty much spoils us so that's really nice. So Thursday came the day of finding out where you are going to be going. They had us all in the gym and then all the trainers and companions all came into the gym as well. It was like being in harry potter like everyone cheered and stuff.  It was pretty cool. They would say an area and then the companions would come up and then they would call a name. I was one of the last sisters to get called!  So I am in a place called Kiryu. It's like the country side. It is cool here it is very green and I am sure it will get cold this winter. It's not really hot here but it hasn't been too cold. It's been a little raining today so that kind of sucks but oh well.

 

So in the ward here there are maybe like 20 members that go every week. It is really small here but the members are very strong so that's really cool. The bishop is cool he has a wife and three little girls they are like the only kids in the whole ward so i bet that is probably a little hard. I don't know. It really breaks me heart seeing how few people are here and how many are back home in our ward. Its just crazy. I bore my testimony yesterday. I don't think anyone understands a single thing I say so that is really hard. I hardly understand anything anyone says to me.  I really miss home haha I miss our ward. Seeing the Bishop here just made me think about dad and such.  I know that the Gospel is the same no matter where you are so that's a huge comfort to me. 

 

I bought a bike its like a pretty legit bike I think it cost me like $500.00 I am not really sure. I wish bishop Goddard was here I would have loved to buy a bike from him!  So every meal we eat here we eat with chop sticks and lets just say I am terrible at them!! haha like it takes me forever to eat anything but oh well like last night we ate soup with chopsticks!! WHAT THE HECK!!! Who does that. IT was soooo hard!!!  

 

There are some really awesome investigators here that i really am hoping can be baptized!! This transfer we have a goal of baptizing a family. So please pray that we can find a family that will be baptized. We have a few that are investigating so i am keeping my fingers crossed. We also teach Eikaiwa. that's English lessons which those are always fun. I love speaking English. hahah I am really good at it.

 

My companions. I am in a trio.  Sister Taketomi. SHE IS LIKE MY HERO. She is the one training me. She is from Okinawa. I am really glad that I have her. WE get  along so well. She speaks pretty good english too. She also really loves David Archuletta. She almost fainted when I told her that I was friends with him haha I think she almost cried!! It was really funny. So both of us are new to this area. She came from Shibuya. that's  like the time square of tokyo. SO its been lots of fun trying to get to know this area together.

 

Sister Cheney.  She is very kind. She is really nice. I am tyring my hardest to love her. I have to pray about it everyday. I think its hard because we have NOTHING in common like I am telling you nothing. The only think we have is that she is from Alaska and thats where Mike is serving. Other than that there is nothing.  Bless her heart. She like really makes fun of my japanese and doesn't really help me with it  haha but whatever I am trying my best. She is really good at cooking so thats really nice too. She is really good at art...

 

I miss everyone so much. these past days are really hard. I have a hard time being here. Its really hard because we sit inside a lot during the day. We do the companionship study then language then lunch for an hour and then 12 week program study and then we can go out and do work. It is really nice being able to go outside that's when I feel the most joy. That's when I know I am doing what I am suppose to be doing. I love studying but sometimes i find my self distracted thinking about things and that's when I think negatively. I think of reasons why i shouldn't be here and why I should go home. I find lots of doubts and mistakes in myself. Its really hard and frustrating but i know that that it is just Satan trying to tempt me. However it is awesome because  in just a few short days I have already seen so many miracles here I am very excited for the work I am going to be doing!!

I know that this is where I am suppose to be even though it is really hard. I love the gospel and I just want everyone else to love it tooooo

OH yes please send me mail!! I LOVE LETTERS!! Even if they are just short and sweet. Send them to the mission home and then the mission home will send them to me and with packages if you ever send any just send them through the normal mail. that's what they told us to do.

 

I LOVE YOU SOOOOOO MUCH

XOXO
SISTER BROWN

in front of the church

eating out for the first time

my desk

 

Jake and me before I left the MTC

 

Sister Brown is off to Tokyo

E left the MTC for Tokyo on Monday October 28.  Because my children are rule breakers Josh, Britt, Lizzy and Alisa went to see her at the airport.  They were there bright and early at 6:30 a.m. sad to say E was not.  Her group of missionaries were given the wrong time to be at the travel office and so they were quite late in getting to the airport.  Poor Josh and Britt had to leave the airport without seeing her to get to their jobs on time.   Finally the missionaries arrived, Lizzy and Alisa got to give E a quick hug and a good luck and send her on her way.

She also got to see Trent Anderson who was on his way to Toronto for business and of course our airport guru Kirk Pace.  He always looks out for our missionaries.

Maybe E should get a job at Delta when she gets home!

We talked to her for a few minutes on the phone while she was in Salt Lake.  When she arrived at LAX she called and had more time to chat.  She sounded great and was so excited to get to Japan.

We received this email on Tuesday Evening:

Dear Parents,

We just want to send you a quick note to let you know that your missionary arrived safely in Japan last evening.  President and Sister Budge met them at the airport, fed them, visited shortly, and then sent them all to bed for a much needed rest.

Today they will receive training and will soon meet their new companions who have been chosen to train them.  We will take pictures at that time, and within a few days you will receive another email with these pictures attached, and our mailing address.

Thank you for entrusting your missionary to us in the great Japan Tokyo Mission.  We so appreciate all you have done to get these missionaries to this point in their lives!

Sister Harrison

Japan Tokyo Mission Secretary

Yay she is safe and sound and we are "patiently waiting" to hear more news!