Hello!
So first off, I am in a mid-sized town named Sherbrook. It is
south of Montreal and pretty close to the U.S border. Despite this everyone
mostly speaks French. All the meetings are conducted in French at church, and
all signs, stores, and non-personal interactions are in french. The town has
two universities so there are tons of students here. It also has lots of old
people. There aren't a lot of normal families here.
They did find my bag. Apparently it happens a lot, so the A.Ps
knew exactly what to do. It's weird that delta lost my bags. They are usually
pretty reliable.
As for mail, send it to the mission office or home. Be warned
however, we only get to pick up our mail when we gather in Montreal for
transfers. It will be six weeks before I can pick-up the stuff you send me
:(.
My trainer is Elder Murphy. I forgot my camera today, else I
would send pictures. He is from California and he has been here for a little
over a year. He's awesome. My spoken and written french is coming along okay,
but the darn accent in Quebec is so difficult that I almost never know what is
going on.I have faith that it will come. I've only been here like five
days.
I am not sure how we are going to eat. Sherbrooke has two teams
and we live in one apartment. Three of the four missionaries are knew to the
area, and the previous Elders left the apartment looking like a disaster zone.
There was junk everywhere, and there was just barely enough food for us to stay
alive. We're going to go shopping after this, so I will be able to tell you
more. The members here are wonderful. There is one ward for Sherbrooke and the
surrounding towns, and it isn't huge, but the members are great. We have two
dinner appointments for this week, one tonight at Sister Obando's and one later
with another family that I have forgotten the name of. Elder Murphy says that
two in a week is pretty good for this mission.
It's been hard this first week because the previous Elders
didn't keep good records. The one person they seem to have been close to
baptizing got married to a member on Saturday, so will be on her honeymoon
for a week. The result has been tons of door to door work. We've found that the
well established people living in houses here almost never even let you get
past the word "missionaries" before slamming the door. It's the
people living in the shabbier apartments that will talk with us. These people
are mostly immigrants from South America (Especially Colombia) Africa (Central
Africa mostly) and Middle Asia (Nepal especially). They are very humble and
friendly. Just yesterday we were trying to get someone to buzz us into a large
apartment building and we were let in by this wonderful little Nepali family.
They spoke better English than french, so I was able to play a bigger role in
the discussion. They let us right in, sat us down, the wife gave us glasses of
pineapple juice, and we talked with the husband for a while (the wife didn't
speak much french and no English). We didn't end up getting anywhere in terms
of investigating the church because the family worships Buddha (who actually
never claimed any divinity but I refrained from bringing it up) and believes
that all religions are correct. We had a really nice discussion, but they
didn't really understand the need to study a religion other than their
own.
We also found in our area book a nice family from Rwanda that
had been progressing, but had inexplicably lost contact with the missionaries.
We phoned them up and they were still interested. We set an appointment and
visited them yesterday. The Husband wasn't home so we couldn't come in, but we
talked with Susan, the wife, for a while (she speaks french, the husband only
speaks whatever Rwandan's speak). She found Christianity when she was a young
wife in Rwanda, and has always been searching, trying to find which is the best
way to follow Christ. I was able to talk a little about the priesthood and bear
my testimony. She seemed intrigued by the idea of testimonies. We have high
hopes for her and her family.
We also visited Yves, a young man from here in Quebec who was
baptized a few years ago, but never comes to church. He loves the book of
Mormon and the gospel, but doesn't entirely understand it. He suffers from severe
ADHD, and I'm not sure how much he is capable of. His life has been very hard.
The list of people close to him that have died in the last few years is very
long, including his grandpa (who was his father figure), a girlfriend who
comitted suicide, his sister's boyfriend died in a car crash (which caused his
sister to get into drugs), and a week ago his four year old son (he's unmarried
and 22) died in a car crash when his foster parents took him on a trip to
Montreal. He claims that the gospel is the only thing keeping him going. He
doesn't understand the word of wisdom (he smokes and drinks, but knows not to
drink coffee), and doesn't understand the importance of ordinances and Church
attendance. He is a really nice guy, but is pretty much impossible to teach. He
isn't capable of listening for more than a few seconds, and can't stay on one
subject for more that a few seconds before straying into stories about being in
street-gangs like the Hell's Angels and the Sharks. These are obviously
figments of his imagination (there really aren't any gangs in Sherbrooke) but
his roommate and roommate's girlfriend confirmed that all the stories about
dead people were true. We might keep visiting and trying to help him, but his
ADHD is a huge barrier.
At church we met a guy named John. He was baptized a few weeks
ago. He speaks absolutely no french, but feels the spirit powerfully at church.
This Saturday he went to the temple to do baptisms. He was really nervous to
go, but he said the moment he touched the door of the building all of his fear
vanished. He gave a powerful testimony of the temple, and said that he wants to
go back as much as possible, if even just to touch the house of the Lord. The
bishop speaks very good English, and many of the members have some English. We
also met three teenage siblings, one boy about 13 and two girls around 14 or
15. They were visiting Sherbrooke, but whomever they were with wasn't a member
and wouldn't go to church. So they found the building, found out when the
service was, and came by themselves.
That's just about all the stories I have so far, except the guy
who told us that Christ was the anti-christ, but my time is running short. I'm
glad that the play went well. Did you hear that Ralph Smith is going to the
Bronx?! I'm out of time now. Love you guys. This Church is true. Bye!
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