I've been getting a bit more involved in the local 'International Friendship Association', AIFA, recently. I went to the volunteer meeting for the first time the other day, which was fairly interesting and very challenging. It's basically a group of mostly older people who volunteer to help out with AIFA activities. A lot of them can speak a small amount of English, but nobody is really fluent. Which made for a very interesting meeting, haha. I couldn't fully understand most of what was said, but I caught a hell of a lot more than I used to.

The guys who chair it now, Sekiyama-san and Nakamura-san, are really nice, but nowhere near as active as the previous chair, Yuuka. She was awesome and really pumped it up in the community, organising heaps of events and advertising them. AIFA isn't anywhere near as active any more, but it does still do a few things. I managed to work out that they are having an Indian day (cooking classes, food tasting and so on) in early July, which should be great for the local people. Unfortunately I can't attend as I'm going up to Tajima to play Ultimate, though ;/ The team also wants to do an Australian day, so I suggested a BBQ (including making and cooking damper) and cricket extravaganza down near the Chikusa river! They seemed pretty excited about this :) I had to promise them I would take a recipe for damper to the next meeting, haha.

So all in all it was quite a good experience. It was great to practise my Japanese listening and speaking skills, and I met some really interesting Ako 'elders' (they're mostly in their 60s and 70s but look mid 50s). One of the ladies, Horie-san, has the most amazingly thick, dark hair (like a geisha, seriously) and it turns out that her son runs the local karaoke place we go to sometimes. Small world! I was also glad to meet Myoujin-sensei, who turned out to be an AIFA Japanese lesson volunteer. I haven't made up my mind about him yet, but he seems determined to teach me Japanese, which is great :) And finally, another lady whose name I forget (whoops!) grabbed my contact details and said that one day she would invite me to her house to learn how to make sushi. She hasn't called me yet, which doesn't surprise me given the 'hollow invitations' that are quite common in Japan, so we'll see I suppose :) Anyway, definitely a good night out and hopefully the beginning of a road deeper into the Ako community.