Doing the best you can with what you have.

Yesterday I had the privilege of hanging out with this little lady (below) for a short while after a lunch gathering. The lunch gathering, or takidashi, was hosted by a local church and included a time for hanging out with local residents, playing bingo for prizes, and eating bento lunches. The takidashi started off as a necessary emergency response to provide people with food immediately following the tsunami, and it has since become a time for residents to hang out and talk and get a nice lunch. 

Noeru-chan!

Even with my limited Japanese, I was able to play with her for a little while as we waited for people to pack up and leave. She took my camera and took pictures of pretty much everything in the immediate vicinity. It was adorable. She also took a bunch of pictures of the trash and the bathrooms which was significantly less so, but it was a fun time nonetheless.

The rest of my day consisted of finishing up some flooring in the main house as gospel music blasted in the background. About halfway through our work, my friend Jeremy and I noticed an older man walking around the flooring we installed, as if he was inspecting it somehow. He looked our way and asked something in Tohoku-ben (or Tohoku dialect, which is conveniently very difficult to understand) and we had to shake our heads and tell him that we didn't understand. He smiled and closed his eyes with a shrug and shuffled back out the front door. A few floorboards later, I noticed him sitting alone on the retaining wall by the house and a few more after that, I saw him in the same place. The man looked over to me and waved for me to come over.

After much too much talking to figure out what he was trying to tell me, I realized he wanted to use one of our buckets that had been left on his property for a while. I said that I thought it was fine and then somehow, in a manner I don't well remember, the conversation slipped seamlessly into something more personal. I figured he was either bored or he wanted someone to talk to so I was perfectly fine with that. Between my broken Japanese and his heavily accented Tohoku-ben, we somehow ended up talking about his life and travels as a tuna fisherman, sports he used to play, and the volunteers that come in and out of the Grace Mission Tohoku house neighboring his. He asked where the volunteers came from and hopefully I said this intelligibly, but I tried to communicate that even though we come from all sorts of places around the world, we all came to Ishinomaki because we love the people here. The man nodded with what appeared to me to be understanding.

This is one of the masterpieces Noeru-chan took. My apologies for any nightmares this may cause.

In a perfect world, my Japanese would be flawless. Then again, a lot of things would be very different in a perfect world. The fact of the matter is that my communication in Japanese, at least for now (and let's hope it's only temporary), isn't quite so seamless and I'm coming to terms with that fact. As I think about it more and more though, it's encouraging to know that I can still be of some use during my process of learning the language and that I don't have to have perfect understanding of Japanese to show love for the wonderful people here.

I was thinking about connecting this example to the greater example that we don't have to be perfect to be used by God, but for now this post is much too long and my eyelids are getting a tad too droopy for my liking. 

Thanks for reading. :)

-Spencer