January 13, 2014

Whoops!

Totally just ran out of time last week. Sorry.

But in any case, je suis bien arrivé en I arrived safely in  Guadeloupe (I'll be interested to see how that is translated, because I can't think of how to express that thought in english). I'm with Elder Tolman, the other Zone Leader, who is from Idaho. He's actually a really cool guy. Very good missionary, and I'm learning a lot. I don't know how or why, but the best part is that we've been together for like two weeks now, and we just haven't really had any problems. Like we had our companionship inventory this week, and we were just like "it's kinda weird, but I honestly haven't had anything that I've been upset about". So that's going well.

Being in a big zone like this is way different, and it keeps us running, but I've been experiencing a weird phenomenon ever since I've gotten here-I've been super tired every night when I go to pray, but at the same time I've just been really happy about nothing in particuliar. It's an unusual, but pleasent feeling.

There's so many people here that I'm probably not going to get to introduce all of them, except as they appear in stories. A lot of new missionaries here, which means that a bunch of the elders in my zone I had never met before coming here. French side it's a weird thing. I got to go on surprise exchanges with two of our younger missionaries this past week, which was a good chance to get to know them a bit more.

We've got Zone Conference coming up next week, so I'll get to participate in planning one of those for my first time. A few days after that, we'll have a new senior couple arriving in Guadeloupe from Tahiti, and hopefully we'll be able to transfer a lot of responsabilities to them and focus more on the missionary work part of things.

Speaking of which, things here are going pretty well. A few finding miracles this past week have been good for the morale, but the best story comes from Sister Afoy.

Oh! Speaking of which, do you remember a while ago, when I was talking about our investigators Dominique and Boris? Well now that I'm back here, they are brother and sister Afoy. Dominique teaches the gospel principles class, Boris is a ward missionary and home teaching companion to the district president, Kenan is baptized, and Nathan had his eighth birthday yesterday-his baptism is on Saturday. I love this family so much. I'm happy to be with them.

Anyhow, Dominique called us last Tuesday and said "hey, we're going to baptize my cousine. Come over at 4 to teach her!" Well, with Dominique's diligent follow-up efforts, Sister Hamel has read the first 14 chapters of the book of mormon, had spiritual experiences with it, and came to church yesterday. Seriously, when a member loves an investigator enough to get involved, things just happen.

Alright, well that's about it for now. I love you all!  I love you both!

-Elder Santos