ROAD TRIP!
We got a call from Sister Prince this week asking us to do some car switching. We'll be driving up to Brussels in a few hours, then staying the night with the Elders up there. Long live Belgium! Elder Christofferson is visiting Brussels, and we get to be included in the few and the proud who get to go listen to him speak to us. The Paris missionaries normally get all the benefits, but now it's Belgium's time to shine. Lucky for us, we're on the border of Belgium and get to be included. A special conference means that Elder Oliverson and I got to be the ones to organize the logistics for finding tickets and places to stay for the 24 missionaries in the zone who are spread over northern France, so here's to hoping that everything works out.
After the conference, Elder Oliverson and I are planning to drive back to Paris, drop off the car at the mission home, and take a train back to Lille in time for lessons and meetings. But that's for next week's email!
This week, we've been finding and teaching some cool people. It's a joke in the mission that there's a holiday on Thursday every week where we try to contact as many college-aged girls as possible, but no one actually participates. All the same, Elder Oliverson and I decided to celebrate by walking around the university in Lille on Thursday, and we actually ended up finding a handful of really cool, hip, prepared college kids. We taught one of them this morning for the first time, and he's from Malaysia. He told us today that he's already been to church, and almost all of his family is LDS and goes to school in Utah. Ahh yeah. We'll be seeing him again soon.
Some of my less-favorite college-aged kids are the ones who drink alcohol and terrorize the streets at night. Those street youths do the darndest things. We had one or two get angry at us this week while we were going home because we looked in their general direction and were wearing name tags, but lucky for us, they're all too drunk to actually do anything. They just settle for lots of yelling and punching the wall. Don't hurt your fist on the concrete, kid.
We had our investigator from Mauritius Island teach us how to make hot sauce, so Elders Oliverson, Walton, Shaver and I went to the Chinese store and bought enough peppers to make us cry at every meal for the next six weeks. The investigator and his daughter were going to get baptized this next Saturday, but since they're having difficulties with staying legal, we'll see if it'll happen here or in a different part of France. Regardless, we're having another one of our investigators be baptized on Saturday, so someone is joining the ward either way. He's from Africa and studying English literature, so he has a fun accent.
We have an area seventy in our ward, so he's a pretty nice resource to have when we need to give difficult answers to the investigators at church. We've been getting a number of referrals from members since I've been here, which is a phenomenon that hasn't happened for me yet. It's like they're doing half the work for us, or probably more than half when you count in our boss ward mission leader.
To Belgium we go. Have a swell week.
Elder Wilson
