September 26,2011

Bonjour!

How are you? Sitting on pins and needles from waiting for Chris's call? I mean...not like Im anxious or anything. Thank goodness things in Paris are busy enough to keep my mind off of it....at least as much as possible.

To start the week off we had interviews with the president. It was so good! The zone leaders did a training about spiritual finding and being more committed to talking to EVERYONE. It was a really good training. Soeur Williams and I were so inspired we decided to do some contacting while waiting for our interview times. haha. We chose a random metro stop and got off. However it ended up being in a bussiness area; so we got on a bus and just rode around and talked to people who sat near us. Nothing come of it...till later (yup Im keeping you in suspense). Anyways, so we went back to the church for our interviews with President. They went really well- he talked to both of us about ways we can keep the work going despite our 'ankle situation'. We both have felt really inspired this week to find new ways we can do contacting and keep things going. He also asked how our companionship was going, and after listening to us gush and giggle he asked us if was possible to love each other too much...yup we are that obnoxious. Oops....

So, because of our inspiration from interviews we've been doing lots of contacting this week. We've tried different approaches...like the 'bus approach' or the 'RER approach' (thats a type of train), and 'the bench approach'. Basically, we find ways of just sitting places where lots of people come and go...so that we can contact without Soeur Williams having to walk. We've also been just doing small little bits of street contacting...and as soon as her ankle starts to hurt we stop. Its been working! The night of interviews we were on the metro and started to talking to a lady (ps when people have really cute kids with them...such an easy contact!) and turns out she had just come from the neighborhood we had been contacting in early that day. (ok suspense over...) Apparently we were meant to talk to her one way or another. We also talked to another lady who was actually a really awkward contact. But when we called her a couple days later she said she had been telling her family all about us...we are pretty excited!

But contacting always brings some interesting stories too...this week during district contacting, Soeur Williams contacted a guy who seemed very normal at the time. He had lost his phone so we had no way of contacting him, but we were pretty excited when he showed up at church. Well...we're pretty sure we smelled some suspcious things on his breath...we will just say he and another investigator kept amis sunday school class pretty exciting as they were the only ones commenting about the word of wisdom...and neither one of them have been taught it yet. The poor teacher did a very good job at tying in some random stories about racism and the creation to the lesson. Good.

This week one of the Elders' amie, Cheriff, from egypt made us all an egyptian dinner. Brought me back to my good 'ol Jerusalem days (minus the fact that we didn't actually eat much in Egypt because its all pretty sketchy...so at least now I know what all the meat at those buffets would have tasted like if we had eaten it. Ya...we were missing out for sure) Cheriff's catchphrase is 'Allahs, c'est fini!' haha I think thats Araçais (arabic + french...ya I tried ok)  We kind of use it for everything now. He's become pretty famous here in our little corner of Paris and we enjoyed getting to taste a little bit of his corner of the world.

This Sunday was our big activity that Soeur Williams and I have been planning for the ward. The idea for the activity was to challenge the members to 'set-a-date' in which they would introduce a friend to the missionaries. (ya not original I know...definately stole it from the thousands of missionaries that have challenged our family to do the same thing...but hey its worked a couple times for our family so I thought we could try it here) Anyways, we had different 'stations' that we had the membres rotate between. In the first one we had a recent convert panal, in which the recent converts described the role of members in the conversion process. Then we had a 'jeu de rôle' aka role play...in which we had the members act as non-members, while the members were themselves, and the members had to find ways to bring up the gospel in every day situations. Finally, we watched a conferance talk by Elder Nelson that talked about member missionary work and had a discussion about it. It went really well... at the end the Bishop gave the challenge to everyone to 'set a date' and become more committed to member missionary work. I'm not going to lie...I'm glad it went well...but I'm also kind of glad its over haha. Planning, delegating, and organizing elders (it literally took us 15 minutes to get them all in the same room) is exhausting. I am so grateful to say 'allahs, c'est fini' to the activity. (although we are hoping the results aren't over...)

Phew...but our organizing skills are still needed in Paris for the next concert. Soeur Williams and I have taken to bribing the elders to be on time to practices. Last week we made them brownies...which were apparently so good that Elder Dick was inspired to write a song about them. This week, we wanted to make chocolate chip cookies for them. But FYI french ovens are retarded...so when it came time for practice I had to annouce to them all that we were really sorry, but the cookies weren't working and so all we had for them was a giant bowl of cookie dough...as you can guess they were all ok with that haha. At the end of the night, we were looking for our bowl, when an elder came up with spoon in hand from scraping off the last bits of cookie dough and said 'umm I cleaned it for you..' haha...it was definately 'Allahs, c'est fini'.  Whatever gets them there on time....

The weather here continues to stay pretty nice...so Im enjoying the last warm days before the long, cold winter settles in. And with the sun shining, its hard not to just keep falling in love with this city more and more!

Love you and miss you!
Soeur Smith