Ha, so when I say a missionary is "dying" I mean that he's in his last
transfer. Sorry sometimes I forget that we have our own vocabulary
here... When one elder "kills" another elder, that means that he's the
guys last companion. Hope that clears things up for you. So, to try
and respond to all those question... Yes, I moved houses. I'm in the
Zone Leaders house which is a way good house. Super big. I love it. That was the house with that dog... Good news though. That dog died before I turned ZL... ha. Yes, I'm in a new branch. The Beira 2 branch. We meet in the same place right before the Beira 1 branch. Sunday was super different. I actually went to class and didn't have anything to do. I handed my DL and BP job over to a kid named Elder Connell. He'll do great, but it was still hard to hand it over to him. I trust him but I only trust myself, at the same time. It was a little hard handing it over as I had invested a lot of time and effort into that branch. It'll be good though. Elder Connell is a very capable good missionary. I’m not too far away, so I'll still be able to have my eye on the branch a little bit... It'll be good. The new branch is pretty weak. Elder Udall is in the BP here. The car is wonderful. It’s a Mazda Drifter Truck. It’s so much fun driving. Way different but way fun. Dad would have laughed watching me learn to drive stick shift with the steering wheel on the right hand side and driving on the left hand side of the road. Killed the car a couple of times... I got it down now though, so we're doing well. The ZL thing is way busy. The first couple days of ZL, I think I was more tired than I've ever been in the mission. We've done a lot this week. On Tuesday night we dropped the kids going to Maputo off at the airport, only to find that the airlines had over booked the flight by like 20 people, so we put them on a different flight and had to return later that night. On Wed we did a training on training with the new trainers and that went well and then we went out to the airport to pick up their "children". Thurs. we picked up the transfers coming in from Maputo that morning. We went over to the airport and did personal study there, waiting for the flight. They have this 1 little restaurant at the airport with a little porch overlooking the runway, so we did it out there. It was pretty cool. The sun hadn't burned off yet, and with all of the morning mist it was very misty out. Just looking around, I kept asking myself, where am I? The airport is a little ways outside of the city and if you get any farther than
3 miles outside of the center of the city, it turns in to a jungle, so I was looking out over the runway and surrounding places, looking at this little piece of developed land, in the middle of the palm tree jungle and grass lands. You feel super cut off. Anyway’s, later that day we came back to pick up one final kid coming in from Maputo. So ya, it was a nutty week. Apparently it’s like this all the time. Stuff just comes up. Sat. we had a good training meeting with the DL's. Everything's way different now. As a DL you have the opportunity to work directly with the missionaries in training, and things like that, where as now, with a zone of 30+ missionaries, we don't have that opportunity. We just have to work with the DL's so they can work with the missionaries. All of our DL's are new DL's this transfer, except for 1, so they're all very excited to get to work. Next week we fly down to Maputo on Wed. and return the next day. It ought to be a fun trip. It’s going to be super weird though. The largest challenge for me so far has been the fact that every single district leader in the Zone is older than me in mission time except for one (Elder Nagao who came in with me..) then when I go down for this conference, I'm going to be the youngest by a long shot. The AP's are super old and the two Maputo ZL's are as old as the AP's... and my companion is in his 13th transfer. 4 ahead of me. So I am not going to lie, that’s been a little hard for me. I feel super inexperienced, compared to everyone. Like everyone is judging me because I'm a young ZL. A little bit of pressure to live up to peoples expectations. It’s good though. Because I figure I’ve got two choices. Do it or don’t do it. So I’ve just got to do it. I think I'll grow a lot this transfer. My new comp is Elder Fiallo. He's from Brazil and is a super good missionary. I've enjoyed working with him so far. He learned English on his mission and he speaks really well, so he's helping me with my Portuguese and I'm helping him with his English. It’s different because I went from training, where you do whatever you want and are complete boss, to junior companion being trained. So it’s been a little different of a transition from leading and teaching to following and learning. Me and Elder Fiallo have a lot of ideas that I think will help the zone a lot. I'm excited to work with him. It’s almost 100% that we'll be together for 2 transfers. The Senior AP has 2 transfers left, this one and one more. So we'll probably stay together for this one and one more and then Elder Fiallo will probably go take that AP's spot and I'll be left with a new comp up here in Beira. We'll see, but 2 transfers for sure. I'm excited to go to Maputo. It ought to be great. Abraham is the office elder and is doing great. I get to talk to him a little more, because we work closely. Elder Lundgren got home safe and sound. I got a short E-mail from him today. Well, I'll let you know how Maputo is. I don't think I'll have a lot of time to travel around, but I'm sure it'll be fun. Oh, another interesting fact I forgot to share with you guys is that the President is going to open Angola in a couple of transfers. It’s very unlikely that I'll go over there however, Mozambiquans will be going over for sure, not sure yet if they're going to send Americans or Brazilians. We'll see. I think Americans and Brazilians are having problems with their visas to get into Angola... anyways. sounds like everyone had a fun week. Things are good here. Thanks for the e-mails! Love you all and miss you.

Elder Okazaki