Week 11

Elder Kirkpatrick and Elder Mayer

Bonjour,
Oh goodness has it been quite a week. Let me start out by giving you all my actual address herre in Marseille.

Elder Ethan Kirkpatrick
Les Missionnaires
27 Blvd D'arras
13004 Marseille
France

Ok, so you can all write this address and it will come directly to me rather than to the mission home first. I have only been in France for a week but it feels much longer.... other than the fact that I can't speak or understand people. Actually it is getting a lot better. Each day is a bit of an improvement but to be honest the person the I have the hardest time understanding is my companion.... I absolutely love him to death but when he speaks French he might as well be speaking Russian for all I know. Actually have the time when he speaks English I can't tell what he is saying. I have talked to some other missionaries and I am definitely not the only one that feels that way. Thank goodness I am not just horribly incompetent. Particularly when we are walking down the street and cars are driving by and he is trying to tell me something. There is no possible way that I could understand that. Ha.... A lot of times when he says stuff I say "Oui" and shake my head and it is a sufficient enough response.... although I have agreed to somethings that I don't think I wanted to agree to.... hahaha.

I honestly am not entirely sure where to start and what people actually want to hear. Each day is busy and we are running around teaching lessons and riding the metro across Marseille and walking around contacting. I was happy to hear that we don't do port-a-port here (door to door contacting). All of the contacting we do is out on the street and on the public transportation. I still don't say too much to people. I stumble out my testimony when it is my turn. I have taken a couple phone numbers and yesterday I scheduled a dinner appointment with a member, woah... Hold your applause everyone, it was nothing. :) I am really growing to love Marseille. It is dirty and very unfortunate that these beautiful monuments and statues get trashed by the people. We walked by this beautiful fountain a few days ago and on top of it were statues of people and stuff (half nude of course, this is ancient European architecture we are talking about) and someone tied string around some of the statues... it was just really unfortunate that people don't take pride in the history of the city. After being here for a bit longer I have seen that the majority of them are taken care of and they are absolutely beautiful. I will take some pictures and send them through email pretty soon so you can see some of this stuff. It would be incredible to see what this city looked like 200 years ago. There is a gigantic beautiful Château just a few streets down from where we are that is massive and absolutely beautiful! I am definitely not in America anymore. It is crazy how tiny the streets are and the drivers are insane! They whizz about and go in the lanes of oncoming traffic and they all park up on the sidewalks, it is funny. Oh, and the number of boulangerie's and pâtisserie's is crazy! There are little bakery down every single street and people buy fresh bread all day long every single day. Mmmm and I had some fresh baguette the other day. It was delicious!!

Anyway, I will tell you about some of our investigators and lessons and stuff. Some of the crazy things that have happened thus far. So first on jeudi (thursday) we had an appointment with a recent convert who hasn't been overly active so we went to encourage him to come to General Conference this weekend. He has this dog nemed Monsieur Buttocks and his apartment was the tiniest I have seen yet (and one of the dirtiest).... and that is a big accomplishment! He lives quite a ways from us so we had to take the metro and then the bus for awhile to get to him and so we had to take the bus back to get to the metro but some bus drivers were on strike or something so there no bus ever came. We ended up walking all the way to the metro because we had another appointment to get to. We got to Vieux-Port which is this area right by a harbor with all these big boats, it's really pretty. We met a member and taught her for a little bit and then my companion likes to do these "simulations" where I am a friend of the member and they teach me and I ask questions. It's not too bad.... until the second one that we did... I will get to that later. After her we met an investigator who is a refugee. His story is pretty crazy. He was on a boat and it sank and he and about three other people were the only ones that survived and he feels like God trully helped him so he has been looking for religion since. The funniest thing is that he is 23 but when he got to France he didn't have any paperwork so they had a doctor do some test to determine age and it said he is only 17 so he gets free help from the government until he "turns 18 in 5 months." I thought that was pretty crazy. The next investigator we taught that day was Nelson. He is an escapee from his country so he doesn't speak any French (so we teach him in English, yay!) and he is not legal in France. But he really wants to get baptized but he can't here because he isn't legal so therefore he isn't obeying the laws of the land. Apparently he has to go to Spain in order to be legal so he is in the process of that (the story continues on Sunday). We then went and met Flameur who is another refugee but he is from Cosavo and he left so that he could have religious freedom. He isn't technically legal here either but he is in the process of making himself legal so that he can be baptized. It is crazy to see how people will go to great lengths in order to be baptized. After him was the craziest one for the day.... Monsieur Rozzi. He is an older guy who is actually a France native. He lives not too far from us. We walked in and his kitchen was completely full of smoke. We start to talk to him and seriously I don't think he speaks French!! He is missing a bunch of teeth and he mumbles stuff. He was reading a scripture and I was following along in my scriptures and I had no idea what he was reading. I could make out a word here or there but the majority of it was not understandable. Even my companion said, "I speak French as my native language and I don't understand him, I pick up words and fill in the rest." Haha!! He went and got some juice for us and he grabbed a pair of scissors and started jumping them into the lid of the juice carton to open it when there was a little pull tab right there. We were in the middle of teaching him and he started mumbling stuff to himself and grabbed some mail and just started looking at it. We had to say, "Monsieur, Monsieur" for him to notice that we were still there; After we were finished, we asked him to pray and he said alright and we knelt down and he didn't say anything. After a couple minutes my companion and I looked at each other and he was still just kneeling there. We reminded him how to start and he started and then stopped right after dear Heavenly Father and was just kneeling there. We got him going again and it was actually a great prayer. He asked for the Lord to help him stop smoking and it was great. We left and he said he wanted to make us dinner next appointment.... uh oh we will see how that goes... Ha! After the appointment my companion said that he has already been to church twice and has been continually praying. He seriously is such a miracle. You would never guess that he would be so interested. We actually committed him to baptism... Although I'm not entirely sure he understood. Ha.

Friday was a good day also. Although not quite as crazy. We had planning for the entire morning and then had some appointments. Another appointment with Nelson again and then we had an appointment with an investigator and a member but the investigator couldn't make it so guess who got to do the simulation with the member... that's right! C'etait moi! This one was interesting. We were talking about the commandments of God and she said that all of them were easy and she understood them but that she had a hard time with having the desire to obey the law of chastity.... yikes.. right? Anyway, we discussed it for awhile and then we did a simulation where I was her friend asking about the Law of Chastity and what the point was. Oi... that was real fun. My vocabulary of French is very limited as it is and I have no vocabulary of that particular topic. So it was definitely interesting. After that we went and met the coolest older guy who is a member, unfortunately he is less active but he is so awesome. He was super nice, gave us food and chatted with us for awhile. He likes to talk about deep doctrine. He had probably the nicest apartment that I had been in. It was small but decent sized and it was clean and decorated nicely. It was a definite change from the majority of apartments that we go into. We had another appointment after that but I seriously could not keep my eyes open.... I don't remember much about that one... thank goodness we had a member with us so she helped my companion.

Saturday is the day of miracles I think. Ultimately as far as numbers go, it wasn't overly successful but a lot of good things came out of it. So every Saturday we go and play soccer with some members and any investigators who want to come. So out of nowhere, a guy was there who we had talked to on the street a couple days earlier. We didn't even tell him about it and he was randomly there. So that was miracle number one. Ha so the other companionship in our apartment left the key in the apartment so we couldn't get in. After the game some members drove us to their house, picked up some supplies and took us to the apartment to help us out. The sone of the member climbed through the window of out neighbor and onto our balcony and then through our window and let us in. After we got ready for the day, we tried to find to contacts and the first one had moved (to the US) and the other one wasn't home. So we ended up kindof wandering around and met a younger guy and we ended up teaching him the entire first lesson, he prayed afterwards and we made a return appointment for this week. Crazy! Miracle number two. After that we headed to the church to watch the first session of conference. With the time change it started at 6 in the evening here (Me and the other native English speaking missionaries got to atch it in English... yay!!) We made it there and we were talking with members (who love to chat and joke with the non French speaker). Conference was great and one the less active older gentleman came... yay!! I was so happy to see him there.

Sunday was good because we watched lots of conference. The Priesthood session at 11 and Saturday afternoon at 2 and then Sunday morningsession at 6. We had several investigators come which was so great. After the first session we met with Nelson and the BIshop to see if there was anyway to help him become legal and that became a two hour thing. Nelson speaks English well but with a thick accent and so my companion didn't alays understand him and then my companion would speak French and Nelson didn't understand so I was the wonderful mediator. To be honest.... nothing was really accomplished and his story was very confusing and complicated. So I missed the first half of the second session. After that my companion and I went out contacting for a bit and right outside of the church met a guy and told him about conference at six and he actually came! Even more exciting was that he
wanted a Book of Mormon and wanted to know more! So we set up another appointment to teach him. That is incredible. The prophets and apostles are truly inspired men called of God. We also had another investigator that came that evening too, it is actually a family and we have a dinner appointment with them tonight. So all in all it was a great day.

Today has been good also. It has been cloudy and beautiful all day and rainy. It has been nice. We just did some grocery shopping and cleaning and whatnot. We were supposed to go to Château Deef (I have no idea how to spell it... but like the place from Count of Monte Cristo) but the Soeurs couldn't so we are going next week. I am super excited. I am going to try and attach a couple pictures for you so you can see my companion and the view from our apartment.

Once again, thank you all so much for your love and support for me. I love you all very very much. No that I am thinking of you. This is not an easy thing, continually getting told that people aren't interested or don't have time or laugh at you day in and day out is really difficult but each day brings little mercies from the Lord that make things much better. Continue to pray for me and fro the French. I need it very much!! Love you!

Elder Kirkpatrick