ça y est! je reste!

hey!

well, transfers came and went, and i am safely staying here in Caen with elder johnson! so that's good, i'm happy about that, especially after the week that we just had. as to changes that are happening, we are going to be having sisters coming into our city. weird huh? haha i swear i always have sisters around. but it's good, that's just what our ward needs cause there is a lot of sisters work here. and by that i mean a lot of single ladies that need to be visited that we can't due to their singleness. so that'll be way good. we'll see how the transition goes. it'll be good for the ward though. one of them is going to be a blue too so that'll be exciting. anyhow, this week was wayy good. guess how many lessons we taught? the most frustrating number in the world. 19. how lame is that huh?? i was so mad. one away from our goal of 20 lessons that we fixed at the beginning of the transfer. to have a 20 lesson week. but no, we had to be lame and only teach 19 haha. honestly it's really interesting how attitudes and expectations change over time. because anytime before this, i would just be exstatic to teach that many lessons, but now all i can think about is how many more we could teach and mostly the fact that it doesn't matter how many people we teach if we don't baptize anyone. so we really neeeed to find that person or those people who are going to be baptized this next transfer. we're working on it. we still have our two baptismal dates for the 29th, but we are going to find at least 2 more for this transfer. it'll be way good.

as to all of our amis, steve and stanley are both doing good. they are both in a really hard situation, but they are both dealing with it well. hopefully they can get their papers one of these days... on va voir. we also have june and judith, who are both 7th day adventists. everything is going along well with them, they are having some blocks about the bible and book of mormon and stuff, but we've planned a really good lesson for next time that will hopefully clear up a lot of their questions, and i can see them both getting baptized this next transfer. we'll see. they are both super cool though and we always have fun lessons with them. next we have olga, who is a russian psychologist. she is pretty intense. but we have been talking about the plan of salvation lately and she's been really enjoying it. then we have shery and philip. shery is the american lady and philip is her french husband. i think i told you this already, but her son and his wife (who are both strong members from america, they live in missouri i think) came this last week and will be there for about 5 weeks, so they are going to come to church for the next 4 weeks, (seeing as they already came this week and had a way good time. :) she is honestly ready to be baptized, we just have to help philip feel the spirit and then they will both go together. hopefully we can even do it before her son leaves, cause then he could baptise them. that'd be sweet. they are good though, we're going over there this week and we'll get to teach philip for the first time, so that'll be good. as to other people, we have the family bamélé. leo and sylvie and their nephew brandon. he is from togo and she is french, and they are both about 50ish i'd say. they are super good, we've been teaching them for a long time, but they came to church for the second time this week, and it was great. so hopefully we can get them in the habit to come to church and then after that, i think they will get baptized too. they are super nice and they always agree with everything we teach, they just need to decide that they are ready to make the commitment. also, exciting note, this week we had 8 amis at church. honestly it was the best week ever. 19 lessons which is a record for me and then 8 at church which is also suppppper good. missionary work is so fun. i luv it. i wuv france.

this week we also had our exchange with the APs. and that was really good too. i went with elder saguibo, and it was so fun. he is just a really fun loving guy that really easy to talk to and just to have fun with. we honestly had the best time just contacting people. he really reminds me of elder andrus and how we used to contact. cause elder johnson is a really good worker and everything, but he's pretty intense in his contacting. it's kinda just straight down to business. but me and elder saguibo just had the funnest time joking with people and talking to them about the gospel. that's how missionary work should always be. but it was good, we taught a couple of people and we had a lot of fun and i learned a lot. i really enjoy going on AP exchanges and just absorbing everything. c'est bien.

okay so intense experience that we had on sunday night. so we went out to teach someone in an area of caen called grace de dieu. honestly it's just so ghetto. it was intense. it's where alllll the poor people live. and all the africans and muslims that are trying to get legality for france. just really desperate people. so anyway, we go to teach this person, and he meets us at the tram stop and then we walk to his apartment. it's about a 5 minute walk, and we get there. as we are walking along, he's telling us how this place isn't a very safe place, and we believe him haha. there is music blaring and just a lot of shady people walking around. just people who would do anything to get out of their situation. so we walk into his apartment building and it's just shady. we start walking up to his apartment, and we walk up the first round of stairs, and we get to the top of that flight, and on the top there is just something that looks like red paint all over the ground. we walk over it and as we are walking up the rest of the stairs our friend there looks back and said "blood." it was a puddle of blood! crazy huh?? so we taught him quickly and got out of there as fast as possible and are not going back anytime soon. so that was a nice reality check. it's funny how things like that don't even really make us scared though as a missionary. we felt like we should get out of there, so we followed the prompting, and it's just cool because we know that as we follow those promptings we don't have anything to worry about. at least if we're not stupid. so that's what we did, and everything was good. a lesson learned. also, another contributer to not being scared could be that my comp is 6 foot 5, 280 pounds. he eats people haha.

well, that's about everything that i did this week. we taught a lot of people and had a lot of fun. i hope everything is going well there in the states! also, i just barely tried to type with an american keyboard again, and it's terrible. i can't anymore. completely forgot. so i'm probably going to have to use a french one for forever cause i'll be too lazy to switch back and get used to it haha. well, i love you all and hope you have a great week! hugs and kisses.

--
Elder Matthew Meyers
1 rue de la Délivrande
14000 Caen
La France