Guarantee Forms!

My Guarantee Forms finally came!!!!
Here's what I found out:
I am going to be living in Nagoya, Japan, Rotary District, 2760. It is a large city in the Aichi prefecture and it is sandwiched between the capitol city, Tokyo, and the large sea port of Osaka. In Nagoya, I will be living in the city limits. It will be very different from the American Midwestern countryside that I live in now. It will be interesting to be a city girl for a while.  

I have been told that I will be attending a girl's high school. It is supposed to be one of the best girl's schools in Nagoya. I finally found the school's website and with help from "Google Translate", did some interesting research. The high school is connected to a university and has a new, modern building. They also have numerous after school clubs, which I am very excited about joining. I think I saw the back of the school uniform in a picture. I think it will be sailor suit style with the cute bandanna around the neck.

I didn't have to contact my first host family. They contacted me first via email. I was so excited to hear from them. It has been several weeks since their first email, and they seem so kind and considerate. My host mom has told me a bit about their daily life and some of their hobbies. They have asked me to call them "Otousan" and "Okaasan" which is Japanese for "Father" and "Mother".

Otousan plays golf and a Japanese board game called "Igo". He has promised to teach me how to play it, but I'm not sure how well I will do since it is all about strategy (I can't play any game that requires strategy of any kind. It just doesn't happen.). Okaasan enjoys doing SUDOKU. She said by the time I leave I will be able to solve them. I'll try, but I'm not sure that is possible considering my skill with numbers.

I think this upcoming year will be an interesting and I will definitely learn a lot. I am getting more excited and terrified everyday. I have about two and a half weeks left in the USA. I can't believe it.

The Acceptance Journey: Part 2

About two weeks after my interview, I received a phone call from my District Chairman late one evening.  I was informed that he had loved my interview and had decided that I needed to be boarding an airplane come August. He had done some rearranging and I officially received the status of a 'primary'.


This phone call will forever live in infamy as one of the most exciting events in my life. I managed to keep from squealing in delight, but failed miserably in keeping a mature, composed mannerism. I was scattered brained and breathless from all the excitement. After thanking the chairman, I hung up and bounded upstairs. I told my mom and older brother the news. After congratulatory hugs and exclamations of how amazing the turn of events was, we burst my unsuspecting/sleeping father's room. I received more hugs from my very groggy and slightly bewildered father, before I bounded back out of his room to let him continue his beauty sleep. Such news deserved a celebration with chocolate, so my mom, brother, and I broke out our 'hidden' stash and began our cocoa feast.


After this phone call, the waiting game began. Little did I know that my patience would become less than of a virtue and more of a necessity. I began to check my email every day waiting for news of my country assignment. There was no specific date on which I would receive it, only a vague time frame.

My daily email checks became an hourly occurrence. Soon, hourly examinations left too much time

in between and I began checking my email account every ten to twenty minutes. Sometimes, my obsessive investigations were even more frequent. Hope would flood through me each time I logged into my account to find a new email waiting, but disappointment aways hit hard when I discovered it was not "the" email. I was driving myself insane with the process of checking, rechecking, waiting, and then checking again for "the" email. 

"The" email finally came in December. Because I was visiting one of my best friends at her university, I had decided to put my obsessive email checking habit behind me for the weekend. That night, I went to sleep on the hard dormitory floor without checking my email once. I was terribly proud of over coming my addiction. However, the next morning I had a few spare minutes in which I commandeered my friends computer and gave in to my addiction once again. "The email" from my district chairman containing my country assignment was there waiting for me. I nervously read it, squealed, and then began hopping all around the dorm room. "I'm going to Japan!", I announced to my friends who then joined me in squealing and hopping. What a sight we must have been. To bystanders, we must have seemed like a passel of pigs imitating crickets due to all the hopping and squealing.


I had received my first country assignment choice. My dream was becoming a reality. The hard work my mom and I did filling out the application and preparing for the interview had paid off.  I was could not have been more estatic. Little did I know, more work and preparation was needed before my departure to the Land of the Rising Sun.