Sushi for dinner???

Here's Elder Lyman's email:

Ok, so it's Monday again. First of all, yes I know the Hitotos.  They live here and are in the ward. I couldn't remember Frere Hitoto's first name, but he is a black doctor and his wife is white, and they have 3ish kids. I haven't talked to them a ton but they are really nice, cool people.  She actually taught Sunday school yesterday.  I guess I'll have to talk to them next Sunday. As far as talking about my companion more, I don't know what to tell you.  I'll need specific questions probably. Yes, he has an accent & yes he is different than Elder Wagner. His name is Elder Snee. He is my only companion now because my other, temporary companion's companion got here. It's Elder Schwind as I told you, who me and Dane were pretty good friends with in the MTC, so that's cool. It's also cool to have someone newer than me.  I kind of feel like a normal veteran missionary, but not really. The French and everything is going fairly well though.  I think I see improvement. Yesterday we ate at a member's house and a bit to my surprise I just kind of talked and joked around with the family and the kids the whole time, so that was cool and I felt pretty good about it. They live like 45 minutes from Angers so that means we stay there for quite a while, so I was worried that after a few hours I might get burned out but it was good for the most part. But whenever that kind of thing happens I generally end up being brought down to earth soon after, and tonight we are eating at another member's house, so we'll see how that goes. Also I think he might be making us sushi, so I'm a bit worried. but it should be fine. If worst comes to worst, this member speaks English so I'll just tell him I’m going to vomit if I end up being disgusted by the sushi.

In other news, I finally got a letter from Dane so that was cool. You probably know I guess, but he is in a little city in France called Chalon (I believe that's correct). It doesn't look to be way far from here so letters will go pretty fast I think and that will be cool. He sounds like he's doing good. But anyways I don't have a whole lot else to say but I love and miss you all, Elder Lyman

 The couple that Elder Lyman talks about named Hitoto, are a couple that Jed’s brother Gordon and his wife Kay have met.  They have been friends with them for a few years.  Here is a picture that Kay sent to us in an email after she found out they are in Josh’s ward.  It is a small world.

 

 

Elder Lyman gets a new companion & has an unschedule train ride across France!!!

Here is Elder Lyman's email from this week..............

So I'm about 5 days into my second transfer. As I told you last week I have a new companion, who is Scottish. What I probably didn't tell you is that I now have two new companions, because I didn't know I would. As I believe I told you Angers switched back to four missionaries and the other missionary who was coming was training a new missionary. It is by the way the one I had mentioned, who me and Dane had kind of been friends with in the MTC, but he wasn't on the plane with Dane coming over. In fact he is still in America, or maybe in a plane right now. I guess he was sick or injured or something and so he didn't get released from the MTC, so he probably will come sometime this week, we're not sure when. So, he is supposed-to-be companion to me and also my companion for now, which is pretty different. Adding one more person makes things a lot weirder, but it's fine for now. So far things are going fine this transfer with the new companions, though it's quite a change and will be hard to get used to. One experience you may be interested in hearing is what happened on Wednesday when I took Elder Wagner to the train station to send him off. I took him and we found his train and so I was helping him get his stuff on it, but what i didn't know was you're not allowed to get on the train and help them without a ticket. so anyways i was on the train helping him and suddenly I heard the door close behind me, which wasn't good.  I said what do I do and we were kind of panicking and we got the attention of a train worker guy. Elder Wagner told him I needed to get off and I didn't have a ticket and he needed to open etc. and he just said, what? We can't open the doors now, there's nothing I can do. And sure enough the train started moving a few seconds later, headed for Paris, with me on it. So the worker guy said he would go talk to his colleagues or whatever and a few minutes later a couple of workers came and said (in english), so you are having a problem? So we explained what happened and they just kind of huddled for a second then said, ok generally you are not allowed to get on the train without a ticket, which didn't do me a ton of good at the time, but they said, what you can do is get off at Le Mans (the next stop, luckily only about 40 or so minutes away, and not all the way to Paris) and go with the worker guy (who we had originally talked to) and he is getting on the train there back to Angers and he'll explain that you don't need a ticket etc. So they were really nice and I did just that and it worked out fine. But I was late getting to the station in Angers to pick up my new companion so I had to have a member go wait for him and explain what was happening. It was interesting, but it was fine, in fact for some reason the guy told me to sit down in a first class seat when we got on the train back, so that was kind of cool, though not much better. So that was pretty much my experience of the week. Other than that not much has happened, except maybe ping-pong and pancakes. Ping-pong and pancakes is an activity that I guess the missionaries in quite a few places do here. They just invite investigators and members Saturday nights to come play ping-pong (the churches here have ping-pong tables rather than gyms and basketball courts I guess) and make and eat pancakes. We hadn't really done it here yet except one time with like 3 people, but the new missionaries wanted to get it going. So on Friday we told a few people at the church (seminary and institute people) we'd be doing it, so we thought a few people might show up but not many, since it was the next night. But it turned out that like 20 members and a few investigators came and it was really cool, so that was awesome. It was actually ping-pong, volleyball and pancakes, because we found out there are volleyball nets to set up in the parking lot. It was cool and hopefully we'll get people to come each week. Things are going good right now, the language might be coming a little bit and I’m feeling pretty good about things. They say every transfer is faster than the last, which will be pretty crazy if it's true. Sometimes 16 transfers seems like quite a bit, but when I look at how fast my first one went it doesn't seem like very long. I only have a few minutes so I guess I'll wrap it up. I love you all and miss everybody.

 

 

Mother's Day call!!!

Calling from here.....................................................to here, is not that easy!!!!

There are two different times in the year that parents are able to speak to their missionary on the phone.  Mother's Day is one of those days.  Elder Lyman had given us his phone number to call him.  We had purchased international phone cards and looked up the country codes.  We felt prepared.  We were suppose to call at 8:00 AM our time.  We started dialing at 8:00 and the call would not go through.  When 45 minutes had gone by with about 45 tries and no success, we were panicked (we knew he was sitting there waiting for our call):(  I called Lyle Nielson (Josh's French teacher from high school) to see if we could figure out what we were doing wrong.  He was out of town but his wife Leslie said she would try to get hold of him.  She called back and said she hadn't gotten hold of him but she found some notes on their computer about calling France.  With the information she gave us we finally got through:)

We had a good, long talk with him.  He is doing good.  It was such a great Mother's Day present to be able to talk to him!!!  

Elder Lyman describes his "feeling like Job" day/ week.

So you said to tell about my week etc. This week was a pretty crazy, different week actually. I believe I mentioned last week the kind of day we had had Monday, but I don't think I elaborated at all. Anyways we had a rendez-vous that day with an investigator who lives like 45 minutes from Angers so we needed the car which another town of missionaries had taken from us, so we woke up at about 5 and took a train at 6 something to Cholet (where the car now is) and got the car. Then we drove back from Cholet to Angers and didn't really know how to get to the place where our investigator was, so we just started driving on some freeway and called a member who tried to help us, and it turned out the way we had gone was not good, so quite a ways out we turned around and drove back to Angers, and it was already after our scheduled rendez-vous time, so anyways the member gave us directions and we started back and drove a long ways and finally got there way late, but we had our rendez-vous. It actually went pretty well and it was with someone we hadn't taught before and she is now a very promising investigator so that was a good part of the day, but maybe the only one. So at this point with all the getting lost and so on it was already a frustrating day but we drove back to Angers and decided to go shopping for the week before going home. So we went shopping and got a lot of good stuff and had more stuff probably than we had ever gotten before. So all that getting stuff took quite a while (mind you i hadn't eaten at all that day and it was now like 3) so we took it all up to the checkout and neither of our cards would work. So we tried the ATM, nothing, ATM over at Mcdonalds, nothing, and realized it was the end of the month and we don't get more money till the first of the month. So we didn't have enough on our cards but there should have been at least some but we couldn't get anything at the ATM, so we just had to leave our cart there and go home to no food at all.  That was pretty much that day. then the next day was interviews (where president Staheli comes and has an interview with everybody and we have a little training from the APs, everybody being all the missionaries in our area come in) and just after that I left with one of our zone leaders (Elder Mendenhall) for Nantes (which is about 45 minutes away) for exchanges. so I was there for a day and didn't do a ton but we did set a baptismal date.  I returned on Wednesday and then went back to Nantes the next day for our zone activity, which was soccer. After we were done activitying me and one of the elders from Cholet (Elder Long) came back to Angers for more exchanges.  I was on exchanges for Thursday night and Friday and we didn't accomplish much. Then other than that it was a normal week but for the most part not way normal. You asked how many people we teach generally, probably about 1 every couple days . What i eat is pretty much pasta, cereal, omeletts, crepes, pigs in a blanket. not real exciting, I haven't loved the food for the most part so far.  I dread eating at members' houses. The cheese is disgusting and smells like dead animals and there are just quite a few questionable things. We have a ward here and there are about 100 members I think. We live in an apartment, it's normal. You'll see pictures if I get around to sending my card.  There's my week etc. Thanks for Dane's address. Love you all and miss you all.