cedric!

salut!

well, just to tell you, i have very little time today to write. we had another 4 o clock start this morning to go to paris and get elder andrus' legality all worked out. so #1, completely tired, 2, got back at around 3 and had to hurry to be able to get everything done we had to, 4 we have a rdv at 6, and now i'm just naming off random things. my head hurts. but anyway, life here in villeneuve is just stellar. everything is going quite well. we're working hard and we have the bags under our eyes to show it haha. honestly i don't think i've ever been as tired in my life. but it's good, we're getting stuff done.

as for this week, this saturday we had a baptism!!! cedric bokiala. he's such a champion. honestly this guy is just great. he was so prepared to receive the gospel. this weekend, there was a big young adults weekend here in lille, so we got it all arranged with them to put the baptism in the program, so at 12 o clock noon, we had all of these JA (young adults) and all of our ward at this baptism. there were about 70-80 people there, so it was a pretty knarly turnout. cedric himself is 30, so after the baptism, he joined in their activities and he's just a stud. after his baptism, he went up and bore his testimony and it was so strong. he talked about how as a kid, he lived in brazzaville, congo in africa, and his parents all growing up told him to watch out for the mormons cause they're a sect (or maybe culte is the word in english? i don't really know, the word in french is sect.) and this and that. so he even had a mormon friend, but he always kinda watched out around him. so then later in life, he starting asking himself some question. he couldn't understand the doctrine of the trinity, he was catholic before, cause it didn't make sense that jesus would talk to himself and all that jazz. so he kinda just figured that since there were so many churches and stuff, it wasn't worth doing anything about his questions, he was just going to stick to believing in god and jesus and call it good at that. so after a little while, he felt something missing in his life, and so he started wondering again, and even started praying to find the truth. and guess who found him?? the missionaries! he was out in valenciennes for a day with his sister, and he got contacted by the missionaries there, they gave him a book of mormon, passed his number to the elders in lille, who later passed him to us cause he was in our area. so at first he was a little sceptical, but then he decided that he was going to form his own opinion about the mormon church. so he started taking some lessons, and it all just clicked in his head. this was the truth. and voilà voilà! he's baptized now, and even recieved the priesthood yesterday too. he's going to be a solid member.

so that was my highlight this week. it's week 5 in this transfer, so the days are winding slowly down. so we'll see what's in the works for me in a couple of weeks. also, as to phone calls, i have no idea. we haven't really had a chance to think about it yet. the calendar goes to fast so i don't even really know how soon mothers day is. so i'll get back to you on that next week hopefully. mais bon. il faut que j'aille. but hope you are all just having the time of your life. have a good week! love you!

--

Elder Matthew Meyers

223 A05, blvd De Valmy

59650 VILLENEUVE D'ASCQ

La France

thailand!

hi everyone!

well to start off this letter i want to tell a story before i forget! so, we were out contacting the other day, and we have this special love here in villeneuve d'ascq for asian people. whenever we see one, no matter what we are doing, we always find a way to contact them. i think it's just that they are so humble and nice. anyway, so we did this the other day, we were contacting along and we saw this asian girl, so we got all excited. we went over to her and had a nice conversation and guess what?? we found out that she was from thailand! that should be exciting for you dad. so i kind of freaked out cause it's the first thai person i've met, and immediately i said (pardon my spelling) sowhat dee crup! she was so impressed haha. that's how you say hi in thai for those of you who aren't quite as cultured as i am haha. but really, when you speak their language, asians just brighten up completely. so we continued out contact and i told her my dad went to thailand for two years and such so i learned a couple of words and it was just great. the only sad part is the fact that she is a girl :( so that means that we have to pass her to the sisters. so we were pretty sad that we weren't going to get to teach her, but it was still just so fun to talk to her. sometimes i wonder how i can get so cool speaking three different languages. oh and chinese. make that four. so impressive right? haha

so that was mostly the highlight of the week for me. i was so excited about it. anyway, also happening this week, in case anyone didn't know, i became the favorite of my dearest little niece clara. just thought i'd get a little trash talking in there, especially for you mike. love you :) too bad clara doesn't love you as much as me hahaha

anyway, done trash talking. also news this week, we went to calais and dunkerque! so that was fun. we got to see the ocean! too bad it was a little foggy or else we could've seen england in the distance. cool huh? so we had a good time doing exchanges down there. learned a lot of things as usual and hopefully helped out the missionaries out there. if nothing else, we really got to know them and got to serve them, so we are really developing charity for our zone. really learning to love them and understand them. that's a huge improvement from last transfer, so at least we're still learning right?

hmm, so in talking about easter, yes we did find eggs to color. they are pretty stellar. if i remember i'll send some nice pictures of our masterpieces this week. also, another discovery of the week. well first off, background. so here in france, the milk is gross. honestly the worst taste ever. no one ever just drinks a glass of milk. they either eat it with cereal or chocolate or something. it's cause their milk they like ultra pasteurize it and add all sorts of chemicals in it. they don't even refrigerate it after it's bottles and such. so it's terrible. but. this week, as we were going along guess what we found? american milk! not really, but we found a little place that sells milk from the farm, and it's soooo good. it tastes like real milk. and i'm not really a milk person, but with all the chocolate and stuff that they have here i've been craving it for forever, so last night, we had some real delicious milk and some pumpkin chocolate chip cookies that we made, and had just the most amazing american moment ever. vive l'amerique!

so voilà. that was all the real exciting/not boring things that happened this week. we're doing all sorts of well and everything is going just peachy. we are starting week 4, so transfers are coming up soon, so we're kinda scared for that cause we both want to stay, but we'll see. no use starting to worry now.

oh one last thing. me and elder andrus are bowling champions. we went bowling last p day with the elders from lille, and we pwned them! we pulled off two games of comeback wins. it was stellar. so yeah, who knew i was a bowling champion too? i sure didn't haha.

so there ya go. hope everything is going great in the states! love you all and have a good week!

--

Elder Matthew Meyers

223 A05, blvd De Valmy

59650 VILLENEUVE D'ASCQ

La France

easter!!!

salut mes potes!

herro everyone. well to answer all the questions that i know you all have about easter, here in france, it's pretty similar. being a missionary, i didn't really get the chance to do an easter egg hunt, seeing as we're kinda short on time and such, but they still do it here in francy. so it's pretty much the same. the one impressive thing about easter is the fact that you actually see a couple of people at the cathedrals! cool huh? it's not very often that you see people inside that aren't taking pictures, but we walked past a couple on saturday night and they were actually kinda full-ish! vive l'eglise catholic! haha but anyway, things here are good. easter was well past, we went to our DMPs house (dirigeant missionnaire de paroisse, ward mission leader) to eat sunday night, and that was fun. he's a funny guy and we had a couple of people from the ward over, so it was just magical. we have fun joking with our ward. elder andrus and i have so much fun together. we just play off each other's jokes all the day long. we both have the same sense of humor, so we just laugh all night. it's so fun to actually be at the point in french that i can joke with people. c'est super.

so this week was long, to say the least. we had two exchanges, one in amiens, and one in st. quentin, and it was long. with these exchanges, instead of leaving one in villeneuve and sending the other there, we both went there so we could really work hard for our zone.we went to amiens and then right after to st quentin, so we didn't even have a chance to take a break.  we just had to be at 120 percent for 3 days. but in the end it turned out pretty well i think. we had a good time and we all learned a lot i think so it was pas mal. on the not so bright side, this week we were on two exchanges, so we had 2-3 whole days in our week where we couldn't do missionary work in our area, so that was pretty hard. we didn't have the best numbers this week, but it's fine i guess. we're just going to have to work even harder this next week, where we had two more exchanges to calais and dunkerque. hopefully we can pull off a miracle. and by pull off a miracle i mean get blessed by a miracle haha.

speaking of which, we had a really cool experience this week. so like i said, we've been gone for a long time this week. and also, this weekend, we had some rdvs set up with our baptismal dates, but they are kinda in a pickle right now.... so in the end, they both ended up canceling. one of them, claver, is kind of just starting his downward descent... he's becoming more and more bauffy and flakey and i don't think he's going to make it. but it's not all bad. we didn't really want to baptize someone who was going to go inactive a couple of weeks later anyway... but so yeah, we'll see how he's doing soon hopefully and maybe we can figure out what's going on. then also, cedric, he's got some different problems on his hands. he's living with his cousin now in an apartment, but as he's being taking the lessons and such, he realizes that that isn't the best place for him to live with all the drinking and partying and all that jazz going on. so he is now in the process of moving to find a better place to live, so that he can live these commandments better. he's has such a strong testimony, and the talks during conference really touched him. especially the one about the kid who was going back home from the states, and he said that all of his family was going to reject him and he work would be really hard to find because of it and this and that, but he knew it was true, so that is all that matters. cedric is exactly the same. he's a champion. so he's going through a hard time right now,  so that's no good. trials always right before the baptism... but as of now he should be good still for the 21. so anyyyyway. back to the story. so we learned about both of these things on saturday, after getting back from st quentin the night before, and so everything just kinda looked like it was falling apart. our only rdvs that we had fixed just canceled and we didn't have anything else to fall back on. so instead, we just went out finding. so honestly we were pooped. we were just really sad about how everything fell apart and we were just kinda feeling bad for ourselves and wondering what more we could do, cause honestly we were so tired. we thought we had done everything we could and we couldn't understand why we hadn't received blessings yet... so we were pretty disappointed, but we went contacting anyway, and the second person we contacted, his name is antoin, had 15 minutes, so we got to sit down and teach him a lesson. and we got another rdv with him. and he's super cool. so after all of that complaining and feeling bad for ourselves, we get hit by a miracle. we just felt stupid. it's like when you open christmas presents and you don't get what you want and so you whine and whine and then your parents had just hidden this one so it would be more of a surprise, and so then you get it and you just feel dumb? if that makes sense. that was our feeling. so we felt pretty humbled and blessed. so there's the little miracle of the week.

but yup, that's life here in villeneuve! everything is going great, and we're going to play tennis today with someone in the ward! so that's going to be fun. i'm excited for that. i've talked myself up quite a lot though so hopefully i don't make too big of a fool of myself haha. so voilà! bonne semaine et je vous aime! à bientôt!

conference!!

welp, as you all know, or should know, it was general conference this last week! we got to hear the prophet himself speak, and boy was it good. we actually had an ami at every session! so that was good. on the down side, that means that we had to watch them all in french, which is all good and dandy and such, but the translations aren't always up to par sadly. it's really hard to translate jokes from one language to another, so there were a couple of times when everyone started laughing at the conference center and we had a profound silence here in france haha. but it was good. i still learned a lot, and the gospel is more familiar in french anyway. but the prophet at the end of the sunday morning session, wow. that was such a good talk. i wish we had more amis there though cause that was exactly what they needed. so we're probably going to tell them to watch it sometime soon. that was a great talk though. so were they all eh?

so this week was okay. we had transfers changes and stuff on wednesday, so we had a lot of administration stuff to do. we also went to paris on thursday for zone council. and elder andrus bought an electric toothbrush today. he was really excited. so yeah, it was pretty rough on missionary work this week, but i think everyone is getting settled in and getting used to everything so hopefully this next week we can turn things around. we'll see i guess.

here in vdasqc things are going well. cedric and claver are still just progressing along towards baptism. more cedric than claver though.. the problem is that cedric is so completely engaged in this and is just incredible, he came to 3 sessions of conference, and on the other hand, claver is just kind of there... he's do everything that we tell him, but he doesn't really have the initiative to do anything himself... so i'm not sure.. we're still trying to figure him out. on verrrrrrrra. also, speaking of knowing the gospel better in french, it's soooo much easier for me to teach in french than in english. it just feels so weird to talk to anyone but my companion in english. i always end up talking super slow and enunciating completely every word. but. we did get to teach in english again this week, with our ami wei, who is chinese. honestly this kid is so cool. he's so humble and really just has his heart in the right place. it was our second lesson with him this week, and we are so nervous for every lesson with him. it feels like every word that we say is just soooo important, so we really think hard about everything we say. it's like being a blue again and just trying our hardest to not make a mistake because we think if we do it will ruin everything. i don't know, i think it's just because we want this kid to accept the gospel so much in his life.. sais pas.

anywho, thanks for the package!! i got it today and we are so excited for the egg painting stuff!! that's what we are going to do after this for sure. only problem is that we don't have any white eggs haha. the eggs here in france are brown, so we're going to have to go white egg searching. i think we'll be able to find them somewhere though. we'll see.

so voilà notre semaine. i don't really know what else to say for now, except thanks for all the support! love you all and hope everything is well!

--

Elder Matthew Meyers

223 A05, blvd De Valmy

59650 VILLENEUVE D'ASCQ

La France