June 17, 2013

Happy ___day!!!

Just because I'm covering multiple happy occasions in this one.

JJ, happy birthday! Sorry it sounds like it probably stunk. You can borrow mine this year if you want a redo.

Nicole, happy birthday! I hope Travis spoiled you beaucoup a lot and Mason didn't cry all day!

Papa, happy father's day! Turns out that mother's day changes for the french, but not father's day. Also, no one really celebrates father's day here. But I love you lots! I'll make you BFD when I get home.

JJ, happy father's day to you too. I'm probably not going to cook for you when I get home.

Mais à part ça... But apart from that

This week has been fun. For informational purposes, the bikes are going a lot better. My butt and legs are still sore, but I don't think about falling and dying in the road as much.

Also for informational purposes (I'm sending a separate email to mom this week, in which this paragraph will not appear. Merci to not talk about it.), our bikes got braquéd this week. We locked them up to a light post before a lesson, and when we came back afterwards they were on the ground, still locked up, but missing one wheel, two seats, two hand grips, and all of our lights. Repairs costed 200 euro. We went around to ask people what they had seen, to great success: we've narrowed down the suspect list to "one big guy in a blue shirt", "two big guys in white shirts", or a 14-year-old boy named Wendy. Hey, what's life without a little adventure?

The other cool part of the week was that on saturday morning we got to do a big service project, going and cleaning up a bunch of nasty crap in this field in Guadeloupe. It was supposed to be an activity for all of the members on Guadeloupe, but we ended up having about as many missionaries as members. Other than church members there were a couple other groups who had some people there, from the community and stuff like that. The cool thing was that it was a televised event-Sunday someone told Elder Sosa and I that they had seen us on TV. Go ahead and try if you're bored:Guadeloupe premier, june 15th, sometime in the evening. The place was called Belle Plaine. The bad news is that I think we might have made ourselves look like an american church (even though half the missionaries that were there are from Tahiti and Europe), but at the end they gave us a "beep beep, les Mormons!" (their version of hip-hip-hooray).

Other than that, we've been working hard to change the way we've been doing things down here. Elder Gammiette (a regional 70 from Guadeloupe since last conference, who was also the mission president here a year ago) came to a zone meeting with us last week, and one of the things that he said was that "The brethren absolutely do not want us to keep doing missionary work in the way that we have been doing it up until now". He talked about how we all know what the better way to do this is-we need to work with the members-but that we have said that for generations and nothing has changed. He asked us "Are we going to be the generation that changes things? Because if we are, then we will lay the foundation for every single missionary that comes after us". So, yeah. After a little bit of reprimandation, we've been spending a lot of time trying to make the change. You guys! Members are EVERYTHING in this work! The work of salvation in Washington is not, in fact, the responsability of the Missionaries with the help of the members. It is absolutely the other way around. And yeah, it takes effort. But since when does the Lord ask us to do easy things?

Anyway, I've got to get better at computer time management. Out of time again!

Je vous aime beaucoup, à plus! I love you much much more!

-Elder Santos