What a week!

Hello to everyone.

We have had a tremendous week. We went with one of our members, Alain Kaus, to an inactive member. She has very active brothers in the Church in other cities in the mission, but for some reason she went off the deep end after her mother died. We have seen her a couple of times in very poor living conditions with two children and a live-in boy friend. One good thing about it all is that the young man has stayed with her and the two children through these years. That is a rare situation in France.

We went to meet them in the apartment of the young man's sister and things were in bad shape. They live in the projects in Angouleme and the sister has two children, no husband and is off every night living a riotous life. The only reason she let Maia and the family to move in was so Maia could watch her children while she went off to play. The other bad thing about all of this is that Maia's boy friend has no job.

Well it does get better. Alain went back and met with them and committed them to meet with us. Then he picked Maia up on Sunday and brought her to church.It was a great meeting and it was the French Mother's Day. She felt the spirit and so when we went back yesterday and gave the restoration lesson all was well.

The young man knew about the church and found no problem with all we taught them. Now we have a wedding day for them and plans for the future. We have another amis we are teaching that has a government position in retraining people without jobs, so we are putting the two in contact with each other and praying that there is a good result. We are also seeing if he can do the cleaning and the gardening at the church since we now pay a company to do the work. We have another meeting with them on Friday with Alain. We will follow up with the video on the restoration.

We also got news about a sister we see 75 miles from the branch, Chantal Patricola. She just passed her written exams and will be moving to Angouleme.

She talked to our Sister Bouchard, Relief Society President and they have it worked out that Chantal will live with Sister Bouchard since there is a living space in her home for rent. This also gives Sister Bouchard someone to take care of the house since she is planning on a mission to the genealogy library in Salt Lake this September.

Someone might think that all of this is coincidence, but we know better. We see the hand of the Lord in all the good we try to do.

Love Elder Dad