OMF Blog
Week One in Sapporo
fmzero Hokkaido - Saturday 14 July 2007Day eight in the fmZERO team and week two has officially begun. It feels good to have week one behind us and to begin to feel like we’ve found our feet slightly with regard to what we’re here to do and just generally getting out and about in Japan. Here’s a little taste of week one’s highs and lows.
Richard’s work in Japan is to build a student work for the many thousand students in Sapporo, many of whom currently have very little access to student focused ministries. He’s starting from scratch and is just a few months into the initiative so we are here right at the beginnings. Our job is to make contacts: To get to know people and to invite them along to one of the three main funnels into the student ministry; The Wednesday Night student meeting, the youth work at the Church Richard is a member of and the special English Programme that we are running as a team (it will no doubt worry many of you to know that we are being let loose on poor unsuspecting Japanese people to teach them English, luckily Alice is with us to keep us on the literary straight and narrow…not sure how helpful that is for language learning though!).
On all fronts we’ve had great encouragements – Alice, Alex and Goody have all had opportunities to meet up independently of any meeting with students they have got to know through societies and Church. We hope that these friendships might continue to grow and bear fruit. Wednesday saw some exhausting but thrilling first contact activities. Armed with camcorder, scones and frisbee the intrepid team headed off onto the Hokudai campus to meet Japanese students and invite them along to the Wednesday night meeting. It was tiring and scary stuff, but really eye opening and actually once you got going, quite fun to be meeting new people who live in a world in many ways very different to ours.
Though Wednesday’s endeavours didn’t reap any new people at the Wednesday Night meeting, we plan to spend Tuesday to Friday next week doing similar things at Hokudai in the morning followed by an organized English lunch open to anyone (luckily Alice and Rachael have perfected scones, flapjacks and cakes now so we’re well away!) building up to an event explaining the claims of Christianity on Friday evening. We hope that this will be a really rewarding way to spend the mornings and early afternoons next week…you never know we may even learn some more Japanese!!
Tonight we are holding a BBQ for youth living in the area around the Church Richard is a member of. So far 7 or so have said they’re coming and bringing friends so we’re expecting about 15 or so…watch this space for how it goes…youth work in Japanese, terrifying!!!
That’s all for now, we will keep you posted…
Enoch
Saturday 14 July 2007