I Am Here

Bonjour my family and friends!

This is the end of an interesting week for me, first getting through my "discourse" in Sacrament somehow, and then getting permission to visit overnight with our Branch President and his wife.

I worked so hard to translate my French talk into a work of phonics, so that I could pronounce the words correctly, so the members could understand me. This is a sample: UH AMI MA-DI UH JOUR, KUH LAY FAMM KEY SON DON L'EGLISE SON TREY DURR EN SWA-MEMM. ELLE PONSE KELL-DWA ETRA PAR-FAY EN TOOT CHOSE! (I hope I haven't killed you off, Elder Betteridge!) I had seven pages of this, double spaced and written in my best elementary school capitol letters. But, as I began to reread it, it looked and sounded like complete gibberish to me, just sounds without meaning. I wanted to toss it into the trash and run for the hills!

Jack tried to calm me down by "helping" me to see my small errors: not "honking" my EN, and saying A for ah, and ah for A, mixing up une and un, et and est... EEEK! The night before, our new transfer, Elder Mayo, counseled me on learning French by reading the real words, not made up ones, and that made total sense, so I began to change things back. Now my papers were covered with colorful red and green marks and arrows and frowney faces, etc. and was scary to look at. Now Jack counseled me to start over, and redo the whole thing, and reluctantly, I could see that he was right, so I stayed up until 11 doing it how I figured was best for me.

With only 20 or so people to serve, the Sacrament is over in a heartbeat, and as I began, you could literally hear a pin drop. The members are so patient with us fracturing their language, they were wonderful with their compliments afterwards. Even Jean-Jac shook my hand and claimed to understand my words. C'est vrait?, I asked him. He said, Oui, it is true! (This is from a man that most French people can't even understand! :) )

We drove early in the morning on Monday to Breve, which is past Perigouex (the farthest point south we have ventured so far). The countryside totally changes there, becoming more mountainous (a high of 600 ft.) and rocky, and was very picturesque of course. We located a couple of great chateaus along the river on our way, and still got there at noon as planned. The Ashpoles are great people, and they both are full of stories told with great gusto along with their very droll British sense of humor. They insisted on showing us some sights, and we were soon flying low over hill and dale in their late model Peugeot. Pres. A used to fly helicopters for British Airlines, and I think he was having flashbacks! We had a late dinner and went to bed without tackling the member list that was the reason for our visit!

Tuesday (our P-day), dawned even more rainy than the day before, but they had more to show us, so armed with our umbrellas we took off again. Oh, my it was terrific. We saw the red village . . a beautifully laid out ville where all the houses and church and buildings are all built of red brick like rock. It was so interesting because the rest of the country is of normal rock. Then we went to a famous abbey built high on a rock cliff where the monks ascended the stairs on their knees. We took a tram to get to the place, and tourists flock there so of course there are many shops and stores. We were up that night too, so we stayed an extra day and they got the member list tackled in the morning. You see that couple missionaries have much lee-way, and are encouraged to take time for themselves.

Well, that's all for now, take care.

Love you, Sister Mom