June 2010

June 7th email: -Merci pour les corrections, et oui, j'ai compris qu'est-ce que vous ditez. Je sais aussi que vous etes mes parents mais comme un missionaire, je droit utiliser le vousvouyer.
That last bit was probably bad french too, anyway.
It has been a really good week, we made most of our weekly goals for starters and have four new investigators!! YAY!!! Today we did have fun stuff planned, we went to the castle YAY!!!! So I can now say I have been in a castle, it was really cool and the masterpiece of it was this huge tapestry of the book of revelations, amazing stuff. I bought a book on it so I can study.

The weather here is going crazy too, Saturday it was burning hot out but then it rained big thunderstorms that night and cooled down a lot, and now it is just overcast and supposed to get rain. But we will see, it is good weather except that I wore a suit out in the rain and the jacket got ruined a bit, so I need to take it in to see if they can fix it. It is my suit I bought from Mr. Mac back in April of last year or whenever that was.

Things are going a lot better than before and the work is picking up, partly because we are working more, funny how that works... The district leader is my companion Elder Gohier, so each week I get to do exchanges with another elder in the district so he can go visit them all. Last week we both went to Cholet and I forgot my quad there, but should be getting it tomorrow from them at Zone Conference. Zone Conference is once a transfer but usually it is just in Angers for my area, the only reason it was in Paris last time was because we had a 70 with us. Or something like that. French is going good, I beg to differ but my companion, members at church, and Grant Emery (my MTC teacher who was visiting Angers last week) say it is good, so I guess it is. I can understand a lot, but my speech is still not very strong. Makes it hard to talk in rendez-vous and on the street. I don't talk much over the pulpit, but I got to when I got here and will again when I leave. It is a hard mission, but we do find a lot of good people to teach and talk to. Like the two drunks on the street who decided to say that Jesus never said to dress up in costumes (white shirts and ties, suit is called a costume) and preach his word to people, that and other stuff like that. No fight but got to talk to them for a good 30 minutes after a good rendez-vous.

This week we had a really good experience with member referrals actually. So if you don't know, they are the best way to find people and this is why. We have a Chinese Recent Convert, Long Long, that we invited to come to our Saturday Ping Pong and Pancakes along with his friend Huai Xi, they both came and Long Long brought two of his friends that we are now teaching. They had a good time so we talked to them about coming to church and they both came and liked it. It was really cool to see new investigators that we didn't even plan on coming to church. Hopefully more news on them. Now we are teaching 4 chinese (Huai Xi and Long Long's friends, I think named Cheng and Fei, ---Huai Xi's GF Lei actually moved to Paris sudddenly so that was sad--, and trying to teach Wei Wei) 1 Angolese lady, and her Portuguese Husband. And no french people. It is very interesting. Never expected to teach that diverse to be honest.

June 14th--

Things are going good here. Had a zone conference with President last tuesday that was really good, all about putting off the youthful lusts. Kind of a rough subject to talk with a bunch of missionaries, but it was really good. His wife gave a good lesson on pride and how we need to get rid of all our pride.It was a really good conference. We also had stake conference on sunday with a broadcast from Elder Bednar and Packer. I understood none of it because they had it translated and no room for just english, but I got the shorthand notes from my comp after...I do have problems with going slow, but I am getting slower with each day and trying to relax. I learned that you can speak slow and no one will bite your head off, I always just tried to talk fast like a frenchman so i'd blend in. But I realized I can talk slow. I am stumbling and stuttereing a lot less though which is good.

Thanks for the package and I will keep my eye out for it, should only be about a week or two, so I shouldn't be gone by that time. And I'm going to try to stay in Angers for one more transfer, just going to tell my DL to put on the report that I want to say and president puts that into consideration when he moves people, but you can't change the Lord's will in anything, so we will see.

Missionary work is going really good, we actually have 4 new investigators, well 3 now since one moved on Sunday, so that is fun. Two are friends of a recent convert (one that left) and the other two are a husband to a lady we teach (the angolese) and someone from our area book we called (Chinese girl named Jing). So it gives us more lessons a week and it is all good and fun. We actually were sad this week because our best investigators Huai Xi and Lei moved to China and Paris respectively. Huai Xi will be back in three months, but unless I spend 5 transfers in Angers, I won't see him again. Was kinda sad but it's life. We are doing good with the lessons and trying our best to get our investigators to progress, but it is hard sometimes. We did go see the castle last week but besides that we haven't been able to see many others.