Monday, March 10, 2014

Beautiful Martinique

Bonjour à tous!

So I guess this week I kinda need to explain Martinique.  To start off, there was Carnival this week, and we were advised to stay indoors Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday unless we had scheduled rendez-vous. Sadly, A lot of our plans fell through so we did a lot of studying and planning at home... not so fun. The coolest thing happened though, even though we got almost nothing done the first half of the week, we were able to meet most all of our goals for the week on how many lessons we were going to have and how many people we were going to meet.  I found that to be a tender mercy of the Lord this week.

à part de cela, Carnival was very cool, for the beginning.  It turns out that all the stuff I saw going on up to this week was just "practice".  But especially Mardi Gras and Wednesday, were crazy.  There were parades all over in the main towns and little spray painted cars zooming around honking their horns all day.  We could hear the drums all week from our house and we weren't even near a major city.

The island of Martinique itself is beautiful.  I can't get over it.  This morning we went on a hike around the peninsula of Trinité, starting at Tartane.  It was fun, but long... haha the members here are great.  In our area we have the Coiné family, an older couple that really love the gospel and Fr. Coiné loves to come help us teach.  Whenever we see them Sr. Coiné always has some kind of food to give us, and she makes good food.  We have about 70 members coming regularly, including the Group held in Trinité.  We don't have a chapel, church is held in a building above a garage outside of Fort-de-France . The Group is held in the apartment of the Elder Lever and Elder Dayton.  Also in our area is the Martial family, we play soccer every other Wednesday with their kids and Sr. Martial usually bakes a cake for all of us afterwards haha! Missionaries love food!

We found a couple new investigators this week.  Friday we had a good day of finding and we got a couple lessons with some.  One man Olivier that we met at his door was very open and took a Book of Mormon planning to read it.  Then right after we left his door, we met his next door neighbor who let us in to teach him, we should be seeing them both again on Wednesday.  There was another lady that we have been trying to see for a while now but she had always been busy, but yesterday we got in and shared the Restoration. She is Catholic but seems to have some doubts about if it really is as good as it used to be.  She showed me all her paintings she made and also her little workshop on the balcony where she makes her own dresses, she's super cool.  I was wondering if you could email me some pictures of my paintings and my unfinished sculpture?

Some of the investigators we're working with are Muriel, whose daughter got baptized in December, and the Family Manuel from Cuba.  Muriel loves the church but has a few doubts about the restoration and hasn't recognized any answers yet.  The Family Manuel is awesome, we just can't get them to church!

Sister Jean-de-Dieu is a member that is not in our area, but she really loves to feed ALL the missionaries. We now have rules on how often we can eat at her house haha!

Zone conference is in Guadeloupe so next transfer I'll fly there for Zone conference.  Elder Dayton is the district leader here.  There is one district, one zone, with all ten missionaries.

I love you all STILL, I know, its a shocker... Have a great weekend!
à bientot!

avec amour,
Elder Call


Today's p-day adventure