Week 46 - Girls Camp and Tour de France

Family!!

I have so many things to communicate to you that it is hard to do in an email once a week but here we go anyway! 

Breaking it down by days- gotta stay organized. 

Monday. P day. Normal. Took a nap for like two hours which was heavenly. We'd planned to do some other stuff in ville but that did not happen. That night we had a rdv with "C" and "I". They're so fun. You never quite know what's going to happen, you have to just be ready to respond to anything and sometimes have really thick skin. But that little Chadian firecracker who contacted me on the metro 4 months ago has a pretty big place in my heart. As we were getting up to leave she and "I" start singing this totally African (but in French) hymn and sort of dance us out of the apartment. I would pay a million dollars for a film of that moment. 

Tuesday. I don't really remember but we did some contacting and walked around a lot. Got a referral from the elders. Woot. 

Wednesday. SUCH a good day. We went to Camp Jeunes Filles!! [Girls' Camp] So funny story for the start of this story- we'd been told we were going to to "camp" which in French sounds like "cahn" with a really nice French nasal ending, so we've been thinking this whole time that we were going to Caen, the city for the camp haha so we end up in this little town called Pouance or something and we're like "this is no where NEAR Caen!" duh. Soeurs. So yeah. French is definetly still not my first language. 

But Camp Jeunes Filles. SO fun. Such an amazing day. They asked us, the Angers soeurs and the Nantes soeurs to come up and do some classes, because the youth theme is "oh ye that embark in the service of God...." So Tuesday night the girls received their mission calls and then Wednesday was the MTC. 

When we first got there though, they wanted us to introduce ourselves and talk about why we were on missions, and focus on chapter one of PMG. So we did that, but the Nantes soeurs weren't there yet so we were sort of just filling time so we answered some questions and then sang the mission song and did notre object if [PMG - my purpose as a missionary], and then sang the mission song again haha. 

Then we did our little classes- ours was on effective studies and they wanted us to focus on how to study and apply the sciptures, and specifically the Book of Mormon. And then in the afternoon, the equipes [teams] (they were in trios because there were a lot of non members (10 of the 42 girls weren't members!!)) came and taught us in little spots around the campground and the lake it was next to. 

SO cute. So many just good little moments with those girls. 

And THEN President and Soeur Babin showed up. They were doing a fireside that night for the girls- we had permission to stay, even though it was late (Pres: "well, the president de mission isn't too far so...") but we had to leave with the leader that brought us to camp. But not before we took a selfie with him and sr babs! I love them so much. 

Such a spiritually enriching day. Seriously, Sr Walton and I were talking about it, just it was so fun to get to talk about our missions and how much they mean to us and remember how amazing this whole experience is. And five hours of language study was pretty good too. 

Thursday/Friday. Not nearly as interesting as Wednesday.

Saturday. TOUR DE FRANCE. We had a rdv in town so we thought we could go to it and then also be in centreville for when the Tour passed but when we got in there was NO way we could get to our amis house so we changed the time and then decided to take our lunch hour to wait for the Tour de France and then go off and our other stuff that day. And we ended up talking to this Irish couple for like an hour and a half. It was so so cool. They were very similar to French people (kind of believing but kind of not, lots of really interesting questions about us/belief in general) very tricky questions sometimes - very much a "not be confounded before men" moment which was cool. And it was just really nice to be able to talk and teach and testify in English! Usually its really hard but it was really cool. 

And then the tour passed! Bucket list! 

Sunday. Did some porting, met a peachy old man named Michael. 

And yeah. That was my week. So so so much information dumped on you- please enjoy the pictures. 

love you guys!

sr hansen