Week 77 Email: Desole oooo

From: Christian.garcia@missionary.org
Date: Monday, December 5, 2022
Subject: Desole oooo

Bonjour tout le monde!! Comment allez-vous?

So this week and last (sorry for no email) was busy again and full of long, tiring, adventures. But very fun ones as well!!!

So 2 weeks ago we spent a lot of time going back and forth between the 2 villages up here. We probably biked for a solid 2 hours one day going back and forth and doing contact visits. I don't think that I had ever sweat that much in my entire life. But all in all I really enjoyed it, the people here thought it was pretty great too haha. I heard lots of "Yovo sais conduire!" which means "white guy can drive!" but in this case it's "white guys can ride a bike!" And yes I do know how to ride a bike, even if I have fallen a time or 2.

We had a super cool miracle at the end of last week too. So as a missionary you make goals every week and you put them into an application called Area Book and then throughout the week you can see your progression. Well, Elder Mbowa and I decided that we were going to try and find 8 people because it's a big sector and we had gotten close before. But by the end of the week we had 2, so when we were getting ready to leave we both decided that we just needed to let Heavenly Father know that we are here to serve Him and asked for Him to guide us. When we had finished praying we headed to our lesson only to find that nobody was there!! So we were talking and this family says "oh yeah by the way there's a new friend who's been coming to church I don't know if you know her yet." So we went and visited the friend and ended up talking to her whole family. And by the end of the day we had added 10 new people. It was amazing to see that when we literally just let the Lord do His work through us, then everything will work out how it needs to in the end.

So getting into this week we started off with realising that it's going to be December soon. Honestly, I don't understand how people tell the time of the year without snow and fall and stuff like that. In my opinion it just makes things much easier. But that being said, we had a pretty fun district council with the Zone Leaders, Elder Kempe and Elder Gbangbo. They talked about how we can find new people to teach by asking questions that don't have a yes or no response. And then as you have their attention you can start talking and let them know why you're there. We did a little role-playing activity and it turned out really well, even if my companion and I didn't fully finish haha. And throughout the week we tried to incorporate that into pur teaching and it turned out to help a lot. We made some good contacts and hopefully those people will now respond when we call them.

Wednesday we did our normal weekly planning and then we went and visited a member who I love. His name is Frère Théodore (Theodore in English) and he's just fun. He's on the older side of life and just really doesn't care what comes out of his mouth as he's talking anymore. He loves to talk about his ideas and how bad the government here is and then tells us how he would fix it. We also got into taking with him about soccer, and that was really funny. He said that he was going to go and play soccer in Congo but then told us that he was going to do it in the 1970's! And then we realised that he meant to use past tense but didn't haha. We ended the day, after contacting, by going and teaching a lesson in English. This time around we added French and I translated for our friend. That was really good practice for me haha. I didn't think I could do it but the Spirit was 100% there to help.

Thursday we had a lot of rattez-vous, which is when someone misses the lessons we had planned, and lots of rain as well. We ended up talking to Frère Kokou (coe - koou) and his wife about the Plan of Salvation while it was pouring rain. But they were really into it and even asked about baptism!! So stay tuned to see what happens there. Then we got stood up for the remainder of the day and the excuse was "la pluie" and when it rains here nobody wants to go outside so it was a little hard to talk to people on the side of the rode. I did sleep very good though Thursday night, it was nice a "cold" because the rain cooled down everything.

Friday was kinda a go and see day. We didn't have much planned but what we did have planned fell through so we said another prayer and left it up to Him. We ended up talking to people that we hadn't seen in a whole and because of that they felt better about the lessons and we got a return appointment!

Saturday we had 2 lessons that were farrrrr from home. So we grabbed the bikes and went. While we were eout we met up with a member and tried to go and teach a family but they went to the farm to get food. So we headed back to his house to find the senior couple there! They followed us in thier truck back to the apartment and got a video and some photos of us on the bikes. We went a lot faster than normal so that we could get back before then and open the apartment for the inspection. We were both really tired and each of us downed a liter and a half of water at the return haha. We spent the rest of Saturday helping at the church with singing the hymns and a family home evening (more on the fhe later).

Sunday was such a good day at church. We had loads of people coming and even new people I had never met before. We sang Christmas hymns and all I could think about was snow and the Christmas trees haha. Maybe later that'll come though, Christmas miracle?? We went and taught the big family again and found more people there too! Everyone in villages tries to live next to their families so they buy a part of the land from their dad and then build a house on it and then they make their own little "village" of just thier family so we were meeting cousins and aunt and uncles last night. It was awesome. We went to another part of Tabligbo that's far to teach another ami who has been putting us off for a while. It's funny because she's always there when we visit the member family she lives with but never wants to talk so we finally found a day and it worked! We ended up going and meeting a new ami who's super smart for the last lesson. This guy was helping me lots with my French because he teaches it at school. It was really good to get his help on little grammar mistakes and now it makes sense why some things go here and some there. He also expressed a desire to do lessons as fast as possible so he could get baptised! Miracles are so real.

This week I wanted to share a thought from our family home evening we had on Saturday evening. We watched the film "The Christ Child" and then talked about it and how we all felt and something that we all agreed on was love. We saw the love of not only Mary and Joseph but also of out Heavenly Father in giving His son to the world. And that's really what this season is about. The birth of Jesus Christ. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we have a 'program' I guess you could call it called Light the World where everyday we get ideas on how to share the light of Christ by serving or helping others. And it's not just for the Church. Everyone can participate!!! Everyone has soemthing to add. I invite everyone to take a look into it and do what Christ did while He was here on the earth and Light the World. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist
Here's a link if you want to check it out ^^^
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/light-the-world/the-christ-child
Here's a link to The Christ Child as well ^^^

Thank you all for joining today and for reading! I know it's long, but congratulations if you read it all haha.

Until next time! Beaucoup d'amour,
~Elder Garcia
Photos:
Just some things that have happened from the past few weeks :)