Scarlet Letter

Hello from Angouleme,

We are busier than ever with all the goings on at the branch. We will have our 1st coun. soon as our branch member was waiting on the Stake Presidency and visa versa. Now I have put the two parties together it should happen during our next visit.

Our Sister Bouchard received her mission call to the Genealogy Mission in Salt Lake and she is as giddy as any young person could ever be. I had the privilege to sign her acceptance letter as is required. To send the first missionary from this branch in decades is a thrill. She will be leaving on Jan. 5, 2009 and we will be moving into her house and paying her rent instead of enriching someone else. She has a big house and we will have plenty of room although we have nothing to complain about where we are now. We will probably rattle around in the new place. She is happy to have someone she can trust to take care of her place.

We are headed to Bordeaux this weekend for Stake Conference and Sunday I will drive a 9 passenger mini bus for the members. The Sat conference will be held in the stake center and on Sunday we will be in a large conference hall. It will be good to take a different route to Bordeaux tomorrow to see some new things since we don't have to be there until the early afternoon.

We have noticed that in France there is a Scarlet Letter. It is displayed on many cars here in our area and I was afraid that the old custom that was around in the colonial days was coming to France. I asked one of the members what it means to go around driving with a large red "A" pasted on the back of a car. He said that it was placed there to warn all the other drivers that these people were potentially dangerous. It signifies that they are amateurs and they have just passed their drivers test. The red "A" will stay on the back of their car for two years instead of the previous one year. We were also told that the police take strict notice of the speed and driving habits of the cars with the red". It is not bad enough for everyone to be on the lookout for you but to have the local police and the national gendarmes looking for you makes it twice as nervous for the new driver.

If the amateur driver gets a ticket during those two years they must pay the $1,500 to take the driver school all over again and go through the process once more. I think that all the young people in our country should thank their lucky stars they don't have that cost and that type of scrutiny.

Joanne is getting things ready for a family here as well as the missionaries to join with us for a thanks giving feast. The family is providing their home and the regular cheese, bread, drinks and veggies but we are bringing turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, apple pie and rice crispy squares. I'm not much help except for peeling what's needed.

Our investigator, Sandra is coming along. There is so much to do to help them put their family life in order, but the family is so willing that it will all take time. They are filling out all the necessary papers to find housing, work, and to get themselves onto the rolls of the French government. They are very anxious to get away from Joao's drinking brother. The brother, parents and our little family all live in the same house. After they get into their own place we will get them married and then finish the teaching of the basics and Sandra will be baptized. It is so great to see her want to follow the principles of Jesus even with all the problems she is facing. All their problems makes our look so small.

We love you and you are always in our prayers. Keep growing in love and especially in the light of Christ.

Hello from France

Hello to all,

Every time Windows decides to change the format of something, it causes havoc with my brain because I am thrown out of the usual and into an area where there is not enough familiarity to wrap my brain around things. I have just spent the better part of two hours figuring this whole thing out so I could send a message. Up to that point, we didn't have time to spend and so no messages went out to everyone.

We have been very busy meeting with the Saints and taking care of the needs of those who are far from the chapel and have no means of keeping in regular contact. It is great to serve those who need the help because of age or sickness. It gives real meaning to the Savior's words,"When you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me."

I am very pleased to have a counselor now because he is very competent and has a desire to do the work and he is French. It is tough to know all the words and the slight differences in meanings, but to have someone by your side who does makes all the difference in the world. Patrick Humblot is the exact meaning of inspiration.

We are getting ready for our genealogy activity at the branch today and it will be great to introduce the members to the wealth of help that comes with the new program of the church in genealogy. I have worked with New Family Search, and the added new information that is already in the data base is amazing. As you merge duplicates, it adds the new information of others to your line and expands your genealogy family tree most of the time. Since this situation has happened, I have been in contact with others who now see the connections to us and our family.

The members here are excited to have the library back on line. After six months of working, it is exciting for me also. We are now opening up the genealogy library on Thursday afternoon and evening. Joanne and I will take the afternoon session and Patrick will handle the evening session. He has the genealogy bug the way I do. We will use this Internet connection and advertise the genealogy sessions to the people in the city to see what contacts we can make. The Elders have made contact with a single woman from Ethiopia and she is planning to be baptized within a week or two. It is hard to get the final interview process done since we are the furthest city from anywhere. Almost makes you feel you are in Cokeville. Our stake president is 5 hours away and so is the mission home. We are felling like we are out in the frontier.

Joanne and I are still meeting with the Corga family and they are fighting so many problems. No job, having to go back to Portugal to have money sent here, dealing with situations that are foreign to them and not having their own home, makes life pretty tough. We can empathize with them 100%. They are working hard on their stop smoking program, but with others smoking where they live makes it extra hard on them. They are a neat young family that wants the best for their children and they want to be part of the Gospel plan as they see it an advantage to their lives and the lives of their two children.

We are getting ready for stake conference at the end of the month and we will rent a mini-bus to get everyone there for the Sunday session. It will be great for everyone to be there together and to come back having attended as a whole branch, instead of just those who could drive their own cars. We will come back more unified for the experience. The conference will be held in an assembly hall in Bordeaux so there will be enough seats for everyone. The stake center in Bordeaux is not large enough to accommodate this large and spread out stake.

We hope and pray for all of you back home. We are planning many activities for the Christmas holidays here. It seems strange to realize that this will be our second Christmas away from all of you.

Take care and know that we love you all very much.

Our Progress

Hello to all,

We have finally made some progress on the Internet connection at the chapel and we now have the link to the church genealogy site. We are back on line and we now can hold our long over due Saturday session and prepare the member and friends on the genealogy program of the church. Our branch 2nd counselor, who is as big a genealogy bug as I am, will be the facilitator. He almost danced a gig today when I told him that everything is connected and ready to go.

We had two church officials come today and while one was doing a full inventory, the other was helping get us connected. He was able to use his laptop and information from the French church headquarters in Thoriy to find that one of the connector boxes had gone dead. He carries spare parts in the van and in no time had the Internet up and running. All the frustration over the last 6 months went down the drain and happiness was the end result.

Our Portuguese family is making some strides. Juan is still looking for work, but with the help of one of our members, he is now signed up and is waiting for the call to go to work. But their friend in Portugal, who was taking care of transferring their mail to France, up and died suddenly last week and their bank account couldn't be accessed from France. Sandra prayed all Monday after not making connections with anyone in Portugal. This morning she got a call from a friend and that friend was able to forward her mail and access the bank. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

We had a great Sunday School lesson with them last Sunday about the Plan of Salvation. This sister drinks in the Gospel as if she was the most thirsty person on earth. Her eyes never leave you as you unfold the scriptures and truths of the plan of Heavenly Father. Today as we took a coffee substitute to her home, she said that because of the loss of her father recently and her husbands brothers all the information made sense; especially the part that all mankind will get to hear the Father's Plan here or in the life to come and will make a choice on whether to accept or reject the commandments of Christ so that when the judgement comes we will all be on equal footing.

They still need to find a place of their own so they can be a family, instead of sharing a house with so many others and having all the distractions that are going on, but as we take the challenges one at a time. With the prayers of all and the help of our Heavenly Father, all will get done.

We had a hard time saying good bye to Elder Giles. He said one day that he cried twice on his mission. Once before he boarded the plane after saying good bye to his mother and once in his first city in France when he had no idea what anyone was saying because they were all speaking so fast. Well, he cried once more as we hugged and I said my farewell to him. He sobbed and said he didn't want to leave. I told him he had to take the next step in his life and that this experience would be a great help to him. I told him that I loved him and that he needed to go home to progress further. I wept also because he was raised without a father and he and I bonded well together. I said to him just before I released him, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."

We have sent two good missionaries home from here and it is rough to spend 6 months with them and then to let them go home. It is different when they continue on their missions because we see them again at Zone Conferences and other situations, but when we send them home it gets tough.

Our new Elder is Elder Green. We have known him before and once he said that he missed peanut butter. The next time we got together we bought him some good American peanut butter and he was in heaven. We will buy him another jar tomorrow and give it to him as a welcoming gift.

Love you all from Angouleme,

Elder Dad & Sister Mom