I'm with Elder Tai instead of Elder Oliverson now, and he's really Asian. The members all love him though, because French people love sushi and they think it's cool that he's the first Japanese missionary to serve in France. We talked about possibly running in the mornings, and he replied by saying he would rather do kung fu. We have a drawer full of soy sauce flavored rice cookies. He's cool, especially because he went to BYU. He gave me a Chinese name, and he said that the characters he gave me for "Wilson" means "marvelously sober" in Chinese. I guess I HAVE been cutting down on my alcohol consumption. If missionaries are marvelously-anything, it's definitely being sober.
Well, on Oliverson's last few days, we went around and had some family home evenings with members. We had investigators and recent converts come to most of them throughout the week, so it was a success. We were wandering around the city of Tourcoing and carried empty cardboard boxes down a few blocks for a slightly crazy woman. She kept commenting on how strong we were to carry the empty cardboard boxes such a long distance. Come on, lady. I know I might be scrawny, but do I really look like I can't handle some cardboard?
Right before Oliverson left on Wednesday for Amiens, we went to Adil and Ashna's house. They're the recent converts from Mauritius. They wanted to make us a meal before Oliverson left town for good, so they made us some awesome curry chicken with pimento. The awesome part was that the whole meal had to be eaten without utensils, so hands only. I've had some African meals like that as well, and it's always fun.
After the whole transfer day in Lille and moving people around the northern department of France, Elder Tai and I went to mission council in Paris. It's basically a 5 hour meeting on what we want to have happen in the mission over the next 6 weeks, but it's fun to see everyone I know. They called us ahead of time to tell us that we would need to bring a bag to carry mail home for our zone, but they neglected to tell us that a full size pickup truck would be more appropriate for the number of packages we had to carry. We're just popular, okay?
A highlight of the week came as Elder Tai and I were waiting at the doors for church to start. We greet everyone as they come in the building, but "H" and "D" hadn't show up yet even though they had promised they would come. Granted, a "promise" to come to church usually doesn't mean very much, but as we turned to go into sacrament meeting after it had already started, in came "H" with their little girl! It was just a big deal to me since they're some of the coolest people I've taught so far. Having a young French family as investigators is quasi-unheard of.
Saturday night was Easter Eve, and Elder Tai and I bought a bunch of pizza for an apartment Easter party. It had to happen only because the pizza place is called "speed rabbit." Yesterday for Easter itself, we got invited over to a member family's house for dinner and ate a bunch of lasagna and chocolate cake.
Happy Monday!
Elder Wilson
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