Bonjour mes chères,

Another week has gone by, and good things are happening here in Melun. Despite the fact that we may have had a mini breakdown yesterday in the ghetto. And when some creepy guy asked us if we spoke English Soeur Johnson muttered under her breath, "Oui, je parle anglais. Est-ce que vous comprenez le mot pepper spray?" But it turned into a hilarious laugh attack/I can't believe this is our life right now moment and all is well. This week Marie Dumas' daughter who got baptized in Canada moved back to France! Miracle of miracles. it was really neat to hear her daughter talk about how she had been trying to find a way to get her mom to know about the church and had even contacted some members in our ward to go over there and talk to her. Mais voila, she didn't need to because God sent us on over to knock on her door. If you could see the obscure ville/building/corner of our area she lives in you would realize what a miracle it is that we knocked on her door. We taught her a few times and she is doing really well. Her daughter was able to be there to sit in on the lessons and it is so good to have a support there for her. My favorite thing about Marie is that she just laughs and laughs at the littlest things and she has one of those laughs that just fills up every corner of the room and you can't help but laughing too. Whenever we go there I leave feeling so happy. She promised to teach me how to make Haitian food soon which I am pretty stoked about. The only thing with Marie is getting her to come to church which we are hoping will be more doable with her daughter here now. 

We taught Petula as well and she is really progressing with her faith in God. She has not always believed, but told us of the instances in her life when she knew that God was there. She told us that when she was first married and living in Centre Afrique she didn't have any food or money. She was desperate and didn't know what to do. She remembered her family talking about faith in God and so she prayed. She said that the next day someone showed up at her door with milk and bread. This morning I was studying and I found this scripture that I loved:

"When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them." — ISAIAH 41:17 

I have seen and heard so many examples on my mission of when people have been—literally or spiritually or emotionally—starving and desperate, and faith has 'fed' them. God doesn't forget us or forsake us, even in the times when it seems impossibly hard. That is why I know the poor and humble people are more receptive to God. They are humble and know that they have to rely on Him. I learn so much from them every time I am with them—their simplicity and solid faith is humbling. What is cool is that Petula has had multiple stories like that, and it is amazing to see how her faith is growing. She also talked about how she has observed her friends lives and those who have a firm faith in Christ are happier, and their children are much less likely to get into crime or bad things, and have more direction. Her kids are just about the cutest thing in the world, and they all have American names that she found online and it is hilarious to hear them with a French accent.

I feel like all these things happened this week, and now that I am sitting in front of the screen my mind is blank. Better luck next week perhaps. I love you and will be thinking of you this week! Say hi to the beach for me. 

Love

Olivia 

Family, 

Bonjour mes chères. I hope you are all doing well. This week was great! I have to admit, the past few weeks I have had a bit of a 'french-people-are-cold-and-heartless' streak, and found my desire to talk to them waning, especially in the more French french french areas. And then. And then on Monday night we stopped by a woman whom we dubbed "Dior glasses lady" whom we had ported into a few weeks ago and told us to stop by another time. So we took the train to Fontainbleau and we trudged up to her door sopping wet and rang the sonnerie. She opened the door and welcomed us into her home, while handing me her little dog named Haribo. She lives in a home in Fontainbleau that looks like it could be featured in Vogue, and she has this awesome raspy French smoker voice. We went into her kitchen and she sat down with us and talked and listened to us so sincerely. She told us about her husband who had recently passed away and her family and the things that she loves about life, and talked to us about her relationship with God. She apologized for much of the French population, who she said she imagines isn't always the kindest to us, and then told us that she "is trying to bring a little bit of the American neighbor love" into French culture by taking her neighbors food from her garden. Then when we were leaving, instead of giving us the usual two kisses on the cheek, she said "I know in America you like to give hugs. Can I give you a hug?" And then she hugged us with a real hug and I felt like she was my grandma. I could have cried. She is not interested in coming to church or in learning that much about the gospel but she said "Come by whenever you want or if you ever need anything, stop by." Like I said, I could have cried. So the moral of this long story is this : French people can be open and kind and loving even to Mormon missionaries! And it was a nice humbling experience realizing that I was not being very loving towards a certain percentage of the population here. 

Then on the flip side of that we had a pretty crazy rdv yesterday when some Témoins de Jéhovah who let us in. They were nice at first and then BAM they came down on us with n'importe quoi, and articles about repressed Mormons and we just tried to testify of what we know and be kind. And then at the end we asked if we could leave them with a prayer and they moved away from us and scoffed as if we were parasites. Sigh. It was quite the experience.

On Tuesday it snowed like crazy and all the trains were cancelled or late and so we did a whole lot of wandering around looking for addresses. Wednesday we visited Soeur Egoshkin, a woman who is from Russia in our ward. She is in her late twenties and has two little kids and is my best friend in the ward. We love her. She recently started coming back to church, and she joined the church in Russia when she was 14 and was the first member of ten in her little Branch. We taught Madame Dumas twice this week and she is doing so well! Her daughter also started listening to the lessons and it is so amazing. She is a student studying architecture and is only there on the weekends, but we taught the Plan of Salvation this week and it went really well. That is my favorite lesson to teach. There is always a really tangible feeling of love and truth in those lessons.

On Friday we had the Elder Richards conference and it was ah-ma-zing. I was blown away by it. He and his wife were the loveliest people, and were so insightful. He started out by talking about knowing who we ARE and who we WERE. Our divine heritage and potential as children of God. Sometimes as a missionary it gets hard because people talk about numbers numbers numbers and I start to lose sight of what I know deep inside of me is the real reason I am here. The real reason I am here is to help people understand who they are and who they were. That we are children of God, and that there is a point to this all changes everything. There are eternal implications to our lives, and when we live it knowing that, life carries more beauty and more meaning. And baptism and accepting covenants is part of that. 

So life in Melun is good, and we found a few people last week who we are going to start teaching this week. Oh also! We got the news that we can email anybody, not just family on email now! That will be great, especially because my letter writing skills are plummeting. So yeah, emails are open to anyone. I haven't heard if I have more time or not, but I will keep you updated. We are heading to Fontainbleau today to walk around the chateau and jardins. We are packing these last few Pdays for Soeur Johnson! Fontainbleau is my fave town in our area. 

I love you! Beaucoup beaucoup. 

Bisous, 

Liv 

six hours on a train and stuck in the ghetto.

Family! 

So this email is going to be rather short this week, because it is vacances right now in France (when is it NOT vacances for the French? They vacation All.The.Time) so our usual spot to do emails is closed. We are in Paris for the day to do some sightseeing and eat some falafels, and we are at a place that is super super expensive so I only have a little bit of time. This week was crazy. As you know, on Tuesday we went to Belgium. What you don't know is that we only spent twenty minutes at the train station in Belgium, and the rest of it stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere in France. The train broke, and we were stuck on it for six hours. SIX HOURS. And they didn't open the windows or doors and it smelled like BO and people were getting malade! You know what though, it ended up being a total tender mercy because I was stuck on that train with my most favorite elders/family away from family. We sat in the hall of the train and talked for hours and hours and laughed so hard at the fact that six months ago we were in the MTC imagining all of the amazing missionary experiences we would have in France. And here we were, stuck on a train, going slightly loopy from lack of oxygen, just laughing and talking the day away. It was so great to see them and catch up on all of our adventures and also empathize with each other about the not so easy stuff. The only bummer is that Soeur Hill is serving in Luxembourg, so she had taken a train from there to Belgium so I didn't get to see her! So sad. When we finally got to Belgium, after they brought a train down from Brussels to pull us, we bought gaufres at the station and then hopped on a train back to Paris. So looks like I will be going on another trip to Belgium soon! Hopefully this time we will make it there. 

The next day we had exchanges with Caen. Soeur Alley came down to Melun and it was so lovely. It felt like being on exchanges with Laura Bennion, which is obvs an awesome thing. We taught Madame Dumas, the lady from Haiti. I love her. She is so humble and kind. We taught her more about the Restoration and she said she has been looking for the truth, and she knows that the only way to know the truth is to ask God yourself. So that's what she's going to do. And at the end of the lesson she held our hands while she prayed and said the most simple beautiful prayer, and then gave us juice and wanted to feed us. I love Haitians. I am more and more convinced that one of the reasons I was sent to France was because they can't send girls to Africa or Haiti, so France was the next best bet. I love these people. That night we taught Petula, the women from Centre Afrique with four kids. Her husband had guests over, and so we had to have the lesson in her kids' room on the bunk beds. How awesome/hilarious is that? Teaching a lesson from the bunk beds. It was one of my favorite teaching experiences on my mission though. She has not always believed in God but has recently been searching for Him. She wants her children to have God in their life. As we taught her kids sat on the bed reading their little illustrated Bibles. She had a million questions, and we were really able to answer every single one of them through the Book of Mormon. There is so much truth and power in that book. As I responded to her questions I was amazed myself at the fact we could respond. Things like infant baptism, why is their suffering in the world etc. She especially loved when we taught the preexistence, knowing that we knew God and lived with him before this life. 

We are still in great need of finding people to teach, so we have been doing a lot of all-day finding days. They are tiring. But I can tell that good things are coming for Melun, and we are finding some great people. Alexis is doing well, we had a FHE with him this week. He is just really busy trying to find work, so hopefully we will be able to teach him more. Last night we went to contact a referral and then we missed the bus back. And we were in the zup. The zup = the ghetto. Like we had a lady come up to us and tell us to leave. So here is the miracle of being protected as a missionary: We were wondering what to do and we look up and we happen to be right by William's building. So then William showed up and saved the day and walked us back to Melun! Seriously. I need to go, but merci for your prayers and your love. We are going to the Eiffel Tower so that Soeur Johnson can see it before she leaves (Three weeks! That happened so fast!). And then tonight, back to porting we go! 

I love you. I miss you. Also, I have had some crazy dreams about being home and people asking me how my mission in Tahiti was. And then my teeth start deforming or falling out. And I am carrying a backpack full of rocks. And then I walk into our ward building and they are doing an interpretive dance for the prelude.  Any interpretations?

love love love, 

Liv 

Famille!

Today the sun is shining for the first time in a few weeks, and I feel like that perfectly explains our week: the sun finally came out, and we got past our month of what felt like rough patch after rough patch after rough patch. It was a great week, still full of a lot of hard things, but the good things definitely outweighed them. Firstly, we have a shower. That is definitely the first thing that went on our list of miracles we have hanging up in the house. But the most important miracles were these:

I cut Soeur Johnson's hair and I didn't ruin it! Miracle! It was my first time cutting hair and I chopped a few inches and gave her bangs and it was actually kind of therapeutic to cut hair, which sounds totally creepy. Mais bon, c'est vrai. As I was cutting it I just kept imagining Mom cringing and closing her eyes. 

We went to teach some of the families we had ported into the week previous, and it went so well. One of the families is from Haiti, and they weren't super thrilled to have us over, until they asked "Wait, are you Mormons?" We confirmed that yes, we were indeed the Mormons. I was expecting to be run out of the house at their realization of who we were, but the mom exclaimed, "Yay! My daughter lives in Canada and she was just baptized and we have been really wanting to know all about your religion." Coincidence that we ported into them, out of all the thousands of people in our area? I think not. We taught them and they were very insightful and had a lot of really great questions. We are going back this week to teach them, and they were so excited that we have the Book of Mormon in Creole, and that I can say a few measly phrases of Creole. I love the joy it brings people when I muster up a "Sak ap fet?" I have Elder Louis to thank for that with our Creole phrases in the MTC.

We were thinking a lot about Alexi this week and wondering where in the world he was, and one night we decided to try to stop by his apartment one last time. We knocked on the door and he answered. IL EST TOUJOURS VIVANT! His face lit up when he saw us and he told us he was on the brink of going to a pay phone to try to call us, because he didn't have any credit on his phone and we hadn't called him. Ummm turns out we forgot that he had given us a new number and that he had changed his. Not kidding. Oops. He told us about how he had to leave last minute to the North of France, and that he has been looking for work like crazy, but has been hoping we would call. He is still reading the Book of Mormon and tonight we are having a family night with him and a young couple in our ward. We walked out of the apartment building and jumped up and down and hugged and called the District Leader to tell him that Alexi has not actually been deported and that he still wants to get baptized. Our District Leader said, "Wow you guys sound even more excited than when you called to tell me that your shower got fixed." Yes. It was that exciting. 

Yesterday we went porting and it was really fun, it reminded me of why I love being a missionary. We chatted with people, met a few great families who we are going to go teach, and just had fun. As we were porting there was this elderly guy working in his courtyard in the garden and we said bonjour and started to talk to him. He is from Spain, and was speaking the craziest Espagnol Francais (Franspagnol?) I have ever heard. He talked all about how we talk about God, but we don't live Christlike lives and then told us all about the plants in his garden. As we were leaving he pointed at me and said "You are going to find a beautiful fiance who is going to find good work and you will live beautifully!" So, according to the old Spaniard in Savigny, my future is set. 

The sad news of the week is that Eugene called us to say he doesn't want to study with us anymore. His family told him a bunch of crazy stuff about us and it looks like he got scared off. I will miss our tea and cake Saturdays chez Eugene, but I am happy that I had the chance to meet him. The other sad news is that the Patriarch in our ward passed away this week. We went to his funeral this morning and it was really neat. He was a superstar kind of guy. In the Marines, first person to join the church in his family. A woman came up to me after the funeral and told me that he was the kind of guy who "When he looked at you, he saw you for who you really were." I loved that. I want to be that kind of person who sees people for who they are and sees all the good inside of them. I am so thankful for all of these amazing people I meet who make me want to be better and learn from them and take pieces of what I learn from them in order to become more myself. 

Last night we went over to the Lopez (a family in our ward) house and made empanadas around the table and talked. They are from Venezuela and a couple who is from Ecuador came over too. It sounds strange, but France has taught me to really love South American culture. I love it! They are so lively and open and full of love. The empanadas were amazing and I have a new life goal: learn Spanish. Such a beautiful language. 

This week is going to be busy—tomorrow I am going to Belgium with my MTC group (yay!) to do legality and then the next day we have exchanges with Caen. Things are going well here in Melun. I am learning more and more that what this is all about is helping people realize that they are loved by God, and that there is a purpose for this life. Thanks for your prayers. I really felt them this week. I love you! 

Love, 

Olivia 

1 Moi et Soeur Jenkins sitting on the stairs of the train on the way to Paris before she left us.

2 Our bodyguard William taking Soeur Jenkins' luggage through Gare de Lyon. Such a stud. 

3 A pretty path we walk down often.