Banking and Reading Sessions

Monday, the 16th, started off with Marlin taking us to the bank to exchange our travelers checks for yen! That was a new experience I`ll never forget! Ha! To make a long story short, we were first told we`d have to fill out an application to exchange the monies and it would take two days to approved. Yes, new right? But after looking at the checks, they decided we could exchange them right away. Great! No one will ever steal from this bank as those check, our American bills, and our information was checked at least 5 or 6 times by different people. We finally got our yen. Oh, the exchange rate was different for the travelers checks and regular old paper money.

Anyway, we were thankful to have Marlin with us.

Our true excitement came when it was time for our readers to start arriving! Phyllis is here with her first reader. I could hear them from sitting across the room. They made a great connection. The first day is mostly just getting to know each other so the comfort level is set.







And here`s me and my first reader (Naoto). He was very nervous and shy at first, but he came right around and started telling me all about his life. We will do our actual first reading in the Luke book today at 2;00.


Look at Phyllis cleaning up the table after our snack break. The fruits are very expensive so when we found a little basket of miniature strawberries on sale for 125 yen, we bought them as our snack.


One of Phyllis`s other new readers has such limited English that she had to tag team read with him with Marlin`s help since Marlin is fluent in Japanese. Marlin will take this man on as a readers because of the language barrier.



Yes, I was shocked to see this little watermelon cost 780 yen which is $7.80! It`s very tiny. No, we didn`t purchase it. Elissa and I took a walk around the block from the church. This is the little discount produce store she loves finding inexpensive fruits and vegetables. This same watermelon would be about 900 yen in the regular grocery store.

We only had 5 readers total today due to some scheduling problems with the readers in their own lives and us taking the first part of the morning to go to the bank. Phyllis and I promised each other we`d do all those type things together. We really didn`t start readers until 1:00 Monday.

Today (Tuesday--17th) is going to be one of our marathon days as we each have 5 readers (l0) coming in today. Our reading sessions don`t start until l0 o`clock each day because we have devotionals at 9:00 each morning. We need this time to share our hearts with God and each other before our readers come. We stop for an hour lunch at 12 o`clock, start back up at one o`clock, stop for dinner at 6:00, then take our last reader at 7:00. Yes, the days will be long but so rewarding for us and the readers.

Phyllis and I want you to know how sweet our new friends are. The desire these people have to learn English is strong. They are very bashful and humble themselves a great deal in trying to communicate. What`s even more special is they are trying to understand why our love for the Lord is so strong that we`d come so far to plant seeds about the kingdom through teaching them English.