Thursday September 17th 2009
We started the day at home just working on our house and studies. Around 3:00pm we went to the church building. Obata-san had spoken with a few children and they wanted to meet us. 
And a lot of other children come by the church on their way home as well. This is part of our outreach to talk to the kids and Obata-san always leaves the building open for kids to come by and learn bible stories or play. While we were waiting we found a little visitor.
A nice praying mantis! We took a few picture because we didn't see them every day in the US. And here we’ve seen 2.
This time we could see it in the daylight. Obata-san decided to pick it up. I’m guessing he knew what he was doing, because he already 
had leather work gloves on. As soon as he picked up the big green bug it started biting him over and over on the finger! 
Ewww. I’m glad I never tried to pick one up. Soon the kids started coming by and we put our little green friend down so he could play among the garden killing bugs.
We saw quite a few junior high and high school students. They usually look very surprised when we say “Konnichiwa” which means good afternoon. A few younger boys stopped they had some kind of project that had 
built and they showed it to us.
A l A little later a few young girls that come by and talk to Obata-san showed up. Nana-chan and Mirai-chan stayed to hang out with us. (Their names are Nana and Mirai, but when talking to a child or someone of lower status or a good friend you add “chan” to a girl’s name and “kun” to a boys.)They are about 10 years old. Very cute and funny. It was interesting to see how they acted together. Just like any American 10 year old girl and her best friend would. All giggles and falling on the floor when they started laughing too hard. They came in and we shared a few snacks we brought with us from the US and then they wanted to read a story. Some times they read stories
to Obata-san. The church has a few bible stories on big poster board. So they read us one today. It was really funny. The sounds that they make are just a little different. For example a baby crying we will say “waaa waaa.” But in Japanese they have different sound effect words that conform to their language. The girls would say “Yeww, Yeww” for the baby. After the girls read the story they wanted to hear it in English. So Paul and I had fun reading it for the girls. Of course Paul put on his best puppet voices and 
made it funny for the girls.
Soon it was time for the girls to go home. And we need to clean the building. Because Saturday we would be driving to Mito for a meeting.
No comments:
Post a Comment