Keep Your Ax Sharpened: Life in Granby

The river in St. Hyacinthe

Dear all,

Life continues.

I haven't really talked about our teaching pool here too much, so I will now. I would compare it to a Pillsbury biscuit because it's large and flaky. We find tons and tons of people to teach, but none of them really stick around for very long, if at all. It means our finding feels really productive while we look for the people who really care though. I've never found more people who at least say they're willing to meet than I have here. I feel like we'll find someone who's serious very soon, or that possibly we have already found someone who will progress.

This week we went on exchanges in Mont Saint Hilaire with Elder Beckstrand and Elder Moellmer. They're the only other Elders in our district and they live about an hour away from us, so it was a pretty big deal to head over there. Both Elder Tarati and I stayed in Mont Saint Hilaire and we just separated with our different companions to work for the day. I was with Elder Beckstrand from St George, and we headed out to St Hyacinthe to do some tracting. We didn't find anyone who was interested, but we had a grand old time anyway, swapping mission stories and talking about high school. It feels really nice to talk to Americans after you don't talk to any for a while.

While we were together, we had an impromptu lesson with an Arabic guy in Granby over Facebook. He taught us some Arabic, and said we could meet up sometime to teach him English. He didn't seem too interested in our message, but maybe that will change.

After the exchange, Elder Tarati and I taught an English lesson to a man from Côte d'Ivoire. Since we don't have too many very solid people to teach, we're trying to teach English to build some relationships and hopefully help people be more interested in what we have to share. It's a pretty weird experience to teach your native language to someone who has absolutely no knowledge of it. We started by teaching him the basic pronouns and how to conjugate "to be" with some simple example sentences. Trying to teach him how to pronounce "are" and "him" correctly was a little challenging, but he got it in the end. It's weird to think that there is a large portion of the world that has never made an "H" sound before.

We saw Manon and Marie-Soleil again this week. They again fed us more food than we possibly could eat, and gave us plenty of left-overs for home. I hardly ate anything the morning before we saw them to prepare, but I still could not finish all the food they gave me. It was quite the meal.

We ate with the Wong's again this week. They told us more entertaining stories about their travels around the world and how rough Chinese politics are. Sister Wong showed us the landscape watercolors that her father painted, and she was surprised that I could read the Chinese. It was very enjoyable again.

We have General Conference this week. Everybody's spreading rumors about mission lengths changing. I guess if it does, this will be my last ever email because I've already passed 18 months.

I doubt it though.

Love you all,

Elder Hadden