Soeur Hurd in Lyon: Spoiled!

Bonjour famille!

SO SPOILED--I will be staying in Ecully another transfer. 😄😄😄😄
This transfer includes thanksgiving and Christmas so I'm so stoked. I
found out Allison's equipe got whitewashed, which meant she was
leaving confluence, so I was soo bummed cause I wanted to spend
Christmas with her. But then I found out she is going to Val de Saône,
which is even closer to me than confluence! She's in my district even!
So she'll be there for every district meeting and zone conference. We
even have church in the same building. We also do exchanges with them!
I'm her STL! CHRISTMAS WITH THE FAM IS POSSIBLE. Maybe we will skype
together....does that mean we can put our hours together and Skype for
3 hours? We'll see. Also, we totally scored an invite to thanksgiving
AT PRESIDENT'S HOUSE. It was only supposed to be the office equipes,
assistants, and senior couples, but we were sitting with Sister Brown
at relief society and she couldn't resist inviting us. So she invited
our ward missionaries and we weren't allowed to tell anyone. Then she
invited Val de Saône sisters too so Allison will be there. We are
seriously so spoiled...I remember being in Cannes and hearing all the
cool things Allison got to do while in Lyon and I was so bummed. It's
just plain old not fair, so we're counting our blessings :)

Sister Wallace will be finishing her mission here in Ecully with me,
and we are receiving Sister Grant! We'll be training her to be STL.
She came to Cannes once for an exchange when we were there so we've
already gotten to know each other a bit. She's from American Fork,
Utah and is also an artist--we've already bonded over our favorite
drawing pens. She's a wonderful missionary and she speaks really great
French as well. I'm so excited to work with her! She's just really
down to earth and I know she'll be a huge addition to our equipe.
We'll stay in a trio for three weeks until Sister Wallace goes home.

This week we went to visit a woman who just moved into our ward named
Joy. She speaks English so we visited her with Sister Zinn who is the
mother of the cool American family in our ward. It was such a good
time! Joy is 6 months pregnant and has the CUTEST little toddler ever.
She's definitely got her hands full, so having Rachel come with us was
perfect because she's had five kids and knew exactly how to help her.
Rachel drove us all to the grocery store and we helped her with her
groceries and entertained the little girl at the same time. Rachel and
Joy just became friends so fast and they're both hilarious, so we were
having a blast. I don't know why, but it was just a highlight of my
week spending time with them.

Saturday was Ahmed's baptism! I don't know if I've talked about him
before, but he's an ami of the assistants and just like the coolest
person ever. Everyone LOVES him and it's because every person he meets
he loves and remembers them and just smiles and laughs all the time.
He's just the most pleasant person. Well he finally got baptized and
so many people showed up for it.

It's super weird saying goodbye to missionaries--all of my companions
are still in the mission and this is the first group of sisters I've
actually been close to that are going home. The mission definitely
won't be the same. But they're going to be hanging at BYU when I get
back so we'll for sure be hanging out :). Some fun times in the years
to come.

Today was a crazy day because it's the day of transfers, so everyone's
all over the office and people are leaving and sooo many people are
coming or switching trains and so everyone just stays at the office or
train station all day--but we had a special guest with us this time!
Sister Clain is a super cute girl that was set apart as a missionary
yesterday and leaves for her mission tomorrow. She'll be in Paris
waiting for her visa and then she'll go to her mission in Cleveland
Ohio. She needs a companion so she came out to spend the day with us
and she's just so adorable! I felt horrible that we didn't have a cool
pday at all, but she still seemed to enjoy being around a ton of
missionaries and seeing a bit of missionary life. She's going to be
the cutest little French missionary in Ohio.

Je vous aime très fort!

Sœur Melissa Hurd