The first member I will talk about is Sister Jacqueline Bouchard, our 81-year-old Relief Society President. Don’t let her age fool you because she has more energy than the Energizer Bunny. She still helps the infirmed with their house work and can keep up with the best of us. She has been out porting, door to door, with us and will speak to anyone at the drop of the hat.
In our Sunday meetings, you will get tired just watching her. She directs the Relief Society and plays the piano there, then she will give the Sunday School lesson, and to finish things off she will play the piano in sacrament meetings. She can give a great talk, which we do often because of our small numbers, and has a strong testimony. Her greatest desire is to serve a mission and we just finished her papers and made calls to SLC to the genealogy library president to have her come to his mission. This sister is as excited about serving and getting her call as any young elder or sister.
We have Family Home Evening with her and the other single members of the branch and she will take any assignment we issue. She can get into a lesson on the Gospel and play a mean game of UNO for the activity. She lost her husband some years ago, but that doesn’t stop her from making many trips to the Madrid temple (10 hours away) by herself in her little car. She is the greatest. She has the distinction of being one of the first women mayors of a town in the Charante.
The next is a high priest, Patrick Humblot. He lost a son 11 years ago when the son was serving in the military in Bosnia. This son was planning on a mission after his military service, but it wasn’t to be on earth. The death of the son caused the mother to go into depression and lose all control of her life. Patrick kept his faith with both the loss of his son and then the problems with his wife. His wife left him, but he stayed true to his testimony.
Patrick is the activity chairman and he does his job with a great deal of enthusiasm. He has the one thing that brings us very close and that is a great sense of humor. He is always on the phone with encouragement with a humorous slant. He gives great talks because he can put the Gospel subjects in a way that everyone can follow him and his humorous antidotes keep everyone on their toes. He loves history and is like me in the enthusiastic way he tackles his genealogy. He has an interesting job: he makes false teeth, crowns and bridges for the local dentists.
Alain Kaus is a single member who is 45-years-old. His family is from Austria and is of Jewish decent. The family came to France to escape Hitler and hide here in the Charante during the war. He served in the Foreign Legion for 5 years and was sent to Africa to fight for the French in wars in the former colonies.
He joined the church here in Angouleme after his military service and loves the Gospel. He works as a mason, bu
t here in France this is one of those occupations that are at the mercy of the work available and all the work is only by the job. He and others have to meet at a central place so they can be picked for the jobs open at that time. He and the branch have been praying that he can find someone who will keep him hired and with his faith and the members fasting a praying, he has found someone to keep him on full time. He is a wiry thin man who you would not think to be a brick and block layer, but he works long hard hours. However I am the only one he has challenged that beat him in arm wrestling.I have the distinction of being one of the few that can follow what he says because of my early training with the French language. Being taught by young neighborhood boys, I picked up much of the slang and Alain speaks in the French slang. He can speak properly and does so for talks and in his priesthood lessons each week, but he slips easily into the slang of the country whenever he can. Our English branch president brings me into his office whenever he interviews Alain because he can’t understand enough of the lingo to get all Alain is saying. Since I have the responsibility to get all active members to the temple, he and I have had some great discussions about the temple and he is planning to attend this fall for the first time. He had a great deal of stress over the fact that he had to kill other men in the opposing side of conflicts, but with much help from the branch presidency, love, the scriptures, and some recent talks by the brethren on the subject, he has overcome his feelings of guilt and is ready for his interview.
Alain is another member with a good sense of humor and I enjoy his love for life. He is always asking me if we have any single girls in our family and I always refer him to Joanne and since he doesn’t speak English the inquiry ends there.
The other member who I would like to talk about is a little mite of a sister, Marie-Christine Clenet. She is barely all of 4’10” and can’t weigh more than 90 pounds. She is in her 50’s and is single because she took care of her parents who were both sick for years. She is a librarian and can give the best talks without referring to her notes and can give a dynamic lesson that will keep you listening because of her knowledge of the Gospel and her quick wit. She can keep everyone on task with her kind ways of reminding us that we need to be on task.
She cooks for the branch meals even though she can’t often come and everyone can feel her sharing nature. She is always smiling even though all is not going right with health or family.
These and many others of the branch are the salt of the earth and will be very much my friends now and after this life. If I have learned one thing being here, that is that we are all God’s children and Upton Sinclair was right when he said there are only two types of people in this world, “Those I love and those I don’t know.”
Love, Elder Dad, Jack, Grandpa & Papa
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