Elder Jordan Stanford: A lot of change

Hey guys! Not much to report this week, but we've got a couple of good teaching situations lined up for next week, so good things are coming. To give you a sense of what this past week was like, it involved two trips to Lille, an impromptu ride home in President Babin's car, a lot of teaching members (10 of our lessons were to less-actives or recent converts), and Larry giving the most African prayer I've heard in a long time at the end of Sacrament meeting. It was in English, and as his enthusiasm increased, so did the volume of his voice, until he was just shouting English praises into the microphone. And all the white people were kind of terrified, and all the Africans turned into Evangelists for a bit and just started saying "Amen, amen" in the middle of what he was saying. And then it ended and the postlude music started and everything went back to normal.

So one of the members we teach, Romain, is...kind of a hoarder. Earlier he told us he'd been having financial trouble with taxes and whatnot. While we were there, we looked around and saw these bowls full of small change--nothing more than 20 cent pieces--that he had been saving for years. And we asked him, Why don't you just cash all this in? But he has troubles getting out of the apartment sometimes, so eventually we just offered to take the coins for him and give him the money back. So we found a flimsy plastic bag to dump them in, and brought it around with us for the rest of the day, carrying it like a small child because otherwise it would burst and spill our coins everywhere. It weighed about as much as a small child, too. While walking through centreville with it, I was so scared to be approached by a beggar, because what am I going to say to him? I'm sorry, I have absolutely no small change to give you?

At Auchan, our current grocery store, there's a machine where you just dump in all your change, it counts it for you, and gives you a receipt with which you can buy food. Perfect--we'll just put in the coins, buy our food with the receipt, and give him the cash we would have used. Right? Well, we underestimated the ability of small and simple coins to bring great prices to pass. The receipt came out for ninety-five euros. And these stupid receipts force you to spend it all in one purchase, at Auchan only, and you can't buy gift cards with it or anything. Like a demonic missionary cooking show, to see how much p-day time they'll spend trying to spend exactly ninety-five euros on things they actually need. Two weeks' worth of food, some cleaning products and a set of ceramic cooking knives later (we were really out of ideas okay), we were on our way. And now we owe Romain almost a hundred euros.