I'm not dead Perpignan 3:4

So, no nothing happened on Monday, we ended up having our zone
conference. Want to know why???

IPADS!!!! Yes we got our iPads on Monday, it was weird, for a second I
felt like a real person, not a missionary. I mean what is more at home
then scrolling through something on an iPad. So nostalgic it was
weird. But that was only for a second until they told us to start
deleting apps that come pre-downloaded... Then the missionary in me
came out again.

There's nothing much else to say about this week. We went to Lucie's
 on Saturday as usual. It was fun, she had invited her old neighbours
again, the young Romanian couple with the little girl. She is so cute!
The first time we met she was pretty shy, but this time when ever she
would look at me I would make kind of a funny face then smile as big
as I could, and she would copy me. It was so cute! And then after a
while her mom said to me, she wants to give you a kiss, and so she
came over to me and kissed me on the cheek! It was so cute. I think
in romanian kiss is pique or something like that, because she said it
again and then followed Lucie into the kitchen and her mom told me
that she wanted to give Lucie a kiss too. And hen she came and gave me
another kiss. It was so cute!

Not much happened this week because Soeur Bolanos has been really
sick, so we had a few days and afternoons inside. So I had a really
good week of studies but not so great on the other end. We didn't meet
very many people, but we did have a really good lesson with our one
ami Rosemary. She has been meeting with the missionaries for a long
time, but hasn't wanted to really act. She loves church, she loves the
members, but because of some personal difficulties it has been hard
for her to commit to anything. But, this week we talked about the plan
of salvation and asked her what she wanted for after this life, and
she really started to change during the lesson. I could see in her
eyes her desire to follow Jesus Christ, and her love for the gospel.
But still, there are something's holding her back, but it was really
cool to see a change even during that one lesson. She also gave us
canned peaches which we ate with her and the elders and Sebastian
(recent convert) and his friend afterwards.

With Soeur Bolanos being sick we have gotten so many phone calls.
Everyone asks us how she's doing, if anyone else is sick, if we need
anything. We couldn't go to the soirée familial last week and Lucie
called saying how it just isn't the same with out us and how important
we are and how much she loves us, and Jean B, he's I swear one of the
3 nephites in disguise, called us and said he had a bag of food for us
because he knew we hadn't been able to go out. He brought us all these
chocolate bars, and crackers and yummy stuff. He's the most
Christ-like person!!!!


On Sunday we had lunch at a members house, Miranda, it was at the
parents and 2/3 of their daughters were there with their husbands and
their so was there with his wife. They did this big bbq, with ribs and
sausages and salmon. It was so good!!!! But you can't eat ribs and not
have the appearance of someone who hasn't seen food in 3 weeks, you
just can't! We all tried using our forks and knifes, we all know
that's a joke, and they all to.s us to just use our hands, so that
made it a bit easier, but it was so messy! And the hard part was that
my piece was one that didn't just have the ribs, it had half the
sninal cord on one side, so I could not get small pieces. At this one
point I started to try to break the bones apart. SUCH A FAIL!!! I was
trying really hard to break it off, and what does my hand decide to
do? It decided to become useless and it slipped off and landed right
in all my bbq sauce. My hand was completely covered!!! I had to try
and discretely clean a whole bottle of sauce off my hand, while
simultaneously continue my conversation in French like nothing had
happened, it's hard enough just talking in French!

So that was really wonderful.

But seriously, it was nice, the food was so good, and for dessert,
yes, there was strawberries.   It almost made up for the whole ribs
thing, almost.
And church this week was really nice too, as usual. We had visited
this family, Mulenda, on Monday and had a fhe with them. We told the
story of Lehi and his family and the liahona, and then talked about
all the things in our lives that help guide us. Then we played the
typical, blind fold someone and have them find something in the room
based on following directions. It was so fun!! The family has 7 kids.
The oldest 2 girls and boy are around 18 and the youngest is almost 8.
Then there is a set of twins about 10. They are the cutest kids, and
we all had some have fun. And so on Sunday we say them just as we were
going in to sacrament, and so we ended up sitting with the twins and
the oldest girl after them. I sat with Chloe and she had learned the
story of the lost sheep from the ninety and nine, and she would read
it over and over again in her bible, and then read it to me, and then
she would ask me for more scriptures and if she didn't understand them
I would explain them to her. It was really cute!

A little bit about Huguette. So she is our ami that really wants to
get baptized but doesn't come to church, so there's a little problem
there, and she is eternally late, also a problem, but she is just the
cutest and she needs the gospel, she needs Heavenly Father and Jesus
Christ. Her life is really hard and she needs the strength that comes
from the gospel, but teaching her I becoming a problem because of the
above reasons. But we can't just stop seeing here she needs it and we
all just love her so much! She texts us a lot and it's always so cute,
she always feels really bad, and her apologies are these adorable
almost prayers. She texted us the other day saying how hard certain
things were and asking us to pray for her.  She's just too cute!

Today since we had the conference on Monday, our p-day was changed to
today, Tuesday, and we went to the beach!!!!!! It was really pretty,
there's the beautiful Mediterranean and then these mountains. It was
so nice, but the wind, oh, I will never live somewhere where there is
wind like that, it was the worst! But it was so beautiful that in the
end you didn't really notice.

I love you all!!!
Sent from my iPad

Perpignan 3:3

This week was a week of exchanges. We had the Montauban sisters come to Perpignan on tuesday night and wednesday, and then thursday morning we all left (they went home) and we went to toulouse to do an exchange there till saturday morning.

I got to see Soeur Everett! That was really fun, but also kind of weird because it's like seeing an old boyfriend when you started dating someone else. And for me it's like I started dating 2 people so it was even weirder.. That's not the greatest comparison, but really close.

So Soeur Everett and Sr. Sutcliffe (from new zealand) came and we had so much fun!! Soeur Hurd and I were with Sr. Sutcliffe and Sr.B was with Sr. Ev, in the end Sr. E and Sr.B were both sick, so they stayed at the apartment, and Sr.H and Sut and I were out all day together. It was so much fun!!!

We had a RDV (rendez_vous) set with someone, but they cancelled, so obviously we needed to stop at a pâtisserie to get something, and luckly there was literally 5 steps away... so we go and get a pâtisserie , and are sitting eating finalizing our backup plan, when the lady we had a rdv with called and said we could come right then.. So we scarfed down these dilicious pâtisseries, and head over, only to open her door and smell chocolate cake baking in the oven... haha. we had a lot of treats that day. dinner ended up being spoonfulls of speculoos and nutella... things like that just happen when you're on an exchange. but hey, when in France eh,!!

So we met with her, she's a les active that we teach english to through reading church material, so it's a lesson, and english together. She's really nice, and said that I was erally good at reading french, but the speaking... lets just say I have a lot of practicing to do :)

Soeur Sutcliffe and I went on a run together in the morning and it was AWESOME!! Super hard for me because I haven't run in weeks, but it was so nice!! And she's this amazing runner, so even though I died, i kept up so I felt a bit justified that I had eaten litterally a tub of speculooos for dinner, haha

Let's talk about the work here. So we have one ami who wants to get baptized, but either all her clocks are broken, or she hasn't changed the time from daylight savings.. because she is ALWAYS LATE!! always! sometimes over an hour! but we can't be mad because she is the cutest little thing and writes us these apology notes that are almost like a prayer. You just can't be mad at her! But it is a bit of a waste of our time as missionaries, so we are going to have to talk to her. And then pretty much every other person we meet with, we have not been able to get a hold of . Sooo, this week the focus is, can you guess?

FINDING NEW AMIS!!!!!

We did meet some cool people on the train to toulouse though, so there is hope!!

On sunday we ate at our DMP's house, Faucheux, and it was so good!! They do courses, so the first appetizer things, were bread, of course, with like sausage slices, and a cheese spread and pâté. All really yummy, and then we had maybe the yummiest thing i've eaten so far on my mission. It was croissantes that were cut in half and stuffed with  cheese and ham, and then I think baked, because all the cheese was metled and So so so so so so so so GOOD!!! It wzs so good!! then the next course came, which was some meat and these potato kind of pattie things. Sooo good to!! and then we had desset. oh my goodness. She had made fudge, really yummy and then this tiramasu styled thing, but it had speculoos layers and tasted like heaven!!!!! It was so good, but I was sooooo full!!!!  I'm going to get the recipes. Also, speculoos, if you don't know what that is, is a spread, like peanut butter or nutella, but is ginger cookies flavoured. THE YUMMIEST THING IN THE WORLD. I'm already trying to figure out how many skirts i'll have to leave here to beable to take as many jars home with me. It's that good.

Also, big news, IPADS are coming this week!! It's crazy! we are hopefully getting them on friday at our wone training!! I'm excited but also, a little bit on the edge, because we all know how much I "loved" facebook before my mission, and now beign able to have it on my mission... I just don't know how I feel about that. But I think those sorts of things are going to come in stages.

Also, soiree talent is in a few weeks, the elders and us sisters are going to sing amazing grace... we practiced on saturday., an ya, I burst out laughing in part of it so I think we are going to need to practice everyday until the 30th to be any good.  :)

Also, again, thanks for the letters and emails! I really appreciate it!

Love you all!!!

Perpignan 3:2 (and a lot of pictures)

 We were scheduled to skype with Soeur Christensen at seven in the morning on Mother's Day. Around eight we got a call from her saying something about an alarm? And that they couldn't get in an apartment and wouldn't be able to skype... she would email about when we would skype later. And hung up. Mom was disappointed, but got another week to look forward to seeing Cam! She explains what happened in this weeks e-mail.

So, I guess I'll start off with what everyone is wondering about.

No I am not dead, get that out of the way first. So what happened was we came back to the apartment after church to grab a quick snack and then head over to Skype. As we were in the kitchen just leisurely cutting up some veggies, and then an alarm goes off. I didn't know if it was the fire alarm or what, so I just kind of looked around to see if there was any fire anywhere... there wasn't but I see Sr.Hurd covering her mouth!! because it was the carbon monoxide detector!

We didn't really know what to do, just not be in the apartment, So in our rush to leave I grabbed the food, they turned the alarm off and we got out as fast as we could. In our rush we kind of broke the detector, it fell from the wall and all the batteries fell out...

But we decided to just go over to the members house where we were skyping and go from there.

So long boring story short, we called all these people, we were told to open all the windows and turn a fan on, air it out for a while... the usual, but it was kind of like no one believed us. We had called our neighbors to say that the alarm went off, just in case it wasn't safe to be there, and either they didn't know what carbon  monoxide was or they just thought we were stupid kids because no one really seemed phased. When we got back to the apartment to air it out our one neighbor came down that we had called and just helped us open all the windows, and told us how there was no fire, so she didn't see what the problem was... haha

So all in all, we aired out the apartment, spent half the day at the church trying to make sure it would be okay to sleep in our apartment that night, because, if there was a leak somewhere then we couldn't just say, well ca va no big deal, i'll just sleep and hope nothing happens to us, you can't do that! So that was a bit of a fiasco, and in the end we got our detector back working, and it didn't go off again, so we just slept in the apartment with the windows open and a fan going with the detector by us. And we aren't dead, so all is well.

It's funny though, when we got home 2 of our neighbors came and started to tell us all the things that we need to do, and how we need to move the fire alarm and clean this and do that. It was all in kindness, just funny because it was stuff we could do our selves, but it was like they thought be were 5 years old and didn't know how to do anything. haha. They were really nice though, it was kind of them to help us. they one neighbor kept saying to the other, speak slower, they don't understand french very well. haha oh the day when we will actually be able to speak french.!!

Apart from that this week was pretty good. we tried making crepes for the first time, as my birthday lunch, they are a lot harder than they look! You have to turn the pan while you pour the batter and you have to add just the right amount otherwise it's to thick!!! it was an experience. We made strawberry sauces and a peanut butter sauce and chocolate sauce, with strawberries and bananas.!! SO GOOD THOUGH!!! we felt so french :)

Also, soirée familiale is probably one of my favorite parts of the week! This week was sooooooo funny. We were in the kitchen cleaning up quickly with everyone before leaving and the threee of us started singing amazing grace and other very american songs and then our ami and one of the other amis, started singing for us and I dfon't think I've ever seen anything so cute! they just stood in the middle of the kitchen and very dramatically sang but like would lift their hands inthe air and kind of mumble french words, not really actually sentences or phrases,,, oui... Je vois... mumble mumble mumble.... Also, our ami doesn't have teeth, so also picture that. SO CUTE!!!!!

Everyone was having so much fun!!

Also, so you know we go to Lucie's every Saturday for her dinner party with recent converts and amis, and this week we had super yummy crepes!! Seriously!! SO good. they were just I think cheese crepes, but they were so good!

This week we met some cool people, this one guy we started talking to seems to have a had a really hard life, he said he was a sniper in a war and that right now he's trying to stop drinking, and it was really cool to be able to talk about God, and how he can help us in our hard times, he said he would call us because he really felt it could help in, so fingers crossed that he will call!

Also, a little update about Ipads, so apparently they haven't been shipped yet, and the french government has seized the ipad cases at customs. so it light be a while until we get those. Soon though, I'm really excited.

This week was...weird to say the least, but I LOVE IT! I read though the book of ether, wow. When you read it all in one sitting you really see how important it is to be humble, at least, that's what I took from it! And also To remember the things the Lord has done for us, and our families! So in lieu of that, I would love to hear more stories from my ancestry!

Thanks for the little binder of stories, I read it a lot!!!!!

I love you guys!! Give Fleur a hug and kiss for me!!!

xoxoxo

Sr.C

:) A BABY!!!

I don't think I have anything in my head except... BABY!!!!

I am so happy, haha, I feel like Mrs.Bennet, when Lydia get's married and she just jumps out of her nervous state and starts running around the house " a daughter married... I am so happy - is that really all you think about?- with 5 grown up daughters tell me what else could possibly occupy your thoughts...!"

That's how I feel except, A BABY! BORN!,, I am so happy!!

WOW, ah it's so wonderful! She's the cutest hing i've ever seen in my entire life!

okay, onto the book of... Perpignan 3:1   :)

I LOVE this transfer already! So my new companions, you already nkow Sr.Hurd (mtc) and Sr.Bolanos is the cutest thing! She laughs at everything, and is the most sincere person. She has the cutest humor! For example, we were joking about an ami that we have who ALWAYS comes late, or doesn't show at all, and we were just joking how we should tell her to come at 4, so that we can have the lesson at 6 when she actually gets there. And then Sr.Bolanos just bursts out laughing, and in the midst of laughing, word by word says, "Do you think she comes in the night time?" as in, at like 11pm she finally gets to the church looking for us. haha, we were in stitches laughing, my abs HURT! She's so cute!

Being in a trio is the greatest thing that has happened, and I literally have the best companions! They are so fun, we just spend the whole day laughing, and joking! But, we didn't know how much food to by for 3... so We kind of ran out, on thursdday!! We survived though, but our freezer and frige were pretty bare.

This week was really fun, being in a trio with Sr.Hurd and Bolanos is just really fun. Some fun things that we did this week:

1) Soirée Familiale: 

recent converts, amis, members that want to come for fhe at the church, we have a spiritual thought and then games and treats. There were about 15 people that came and we had alot of fun, Being in a trio is super nice because we divide and conquer. We all can talk to different members and get a lot done, it's nice! 

This week I really embarrassed my self though because I was talking to a member, and then a youngerish guy walked in, I didn't really see his face or anything, he's just shorted, and so I said, oh is that your son? ... nope, wasn't her son, definitely her fiancé

I became a tomato!

2)we have an ami right now that is really sick, and so we went over and cleaned her apartment for her. She was so thankful! Really over come that we would do that for her! Love is the key, Service!!!

3)we teach a spanish class... well Wr.bolanos teaches and we sit and learn spanish with people. haha, it's fun. This week there were 2 younger girls and they were SO cute, we had then dray all the pictures and then we would name vocab? adorable!

4)Lucie, sh's a recent convert and we go over for a dinner party ever saturday. She invites other recent converts and some neighbors. Her neighbors are this young romanian couple with a 2 year old daughter who is ADORABLE! Lucie has this cute dog and the whole dinner the little girl kept coming up to us and asking "Ou est Candy?" but not candy like we say candy, Cahhhndy SO CUTE!!

5)Every fast sunday the ward does a pot luck after church, so this week was super fun! We got to talk to so many members and get to know them. We had 3 amis at church and one is a nigerian lady. I told her how we had gained wait on the mission and she just laughed at me! haha

6) Our bishops kids have chicken pox right now, but we went over for dinner, and it reminded me of when maij and I had chicken pox, the daughter is the same age as me when I had them.

Such a fun week!!!!! I'll give more specifif info next week. But I love perpignan!