Monday, March 6, 2017

Getting to Know Switzerland (Update #31)

Hello everyone!!!
Update: everything you've heard about Switzerland being BEAUTIFUL is 100% true.
 It's unreal. I live in a postcard.    
Nestled between rolling hills and Lake Geneva, snow-capped mountains line the horizon above our little ville. I'm so grateful to be here, if only for the purpose of strengthening my testimony that there's absolutely no way this earth could have been created by anyone or anything except God. 

In other news, Soeur Goreeba is AMAZING!!
 She's an incredible missionary, is so loving, and is teaching me so much. She's from the Reunion Island but has lived in France for 1/2 her life (they speak French in Reunion), but she also speaks peeeerfect English. We made a goal that we would speak only in French outside the apartment and only English inside the apartment (that way we're both progressing) and I love it. It makes me feel like more a part of the country and culture to always be speaking French, but sometimes it's nice to speak English too :)
The ward here is super cool...mostly les persons âgées (older people), but seriously awesome. And just in this last week we've already seen SO MANY MIRACLES. 

I'll just share my two favorite:
1. One of my first nights here we decided to go hunt down a less active that Soeur Goreeba had never met before. We couldn't find their name on the letterboxes so we decided to port the whole building to
try and find her (knock on all the doors). We started at the top and worked our way down. When we knocked on this one lady's door she (surprisingly) was super interested and even invited us in to share a video. The longer we stayed, the more we learned about her story. She had been taught by missionaries for years, but one day they just stopped coming and she had no idea why. She said she used to go to church a lot and wishes the missionaries would come back. It's so incredible how God uses so many different ways to make sure we are in the right place at the right time, but sometimes we have to decide to knock on every door in an apartment building to figure out where we need to be.
2. SOPHIA. She's so cute, 18 years old, Chinese, speaks English and is her for her studies. She came to Suisse all by herself. She just showed up at church saying that she was converted to Christianity (a
different church) in China and that God led her to find our church in Switzerland. When I was translating for her in relief society I said something about the temple and she just said "what?! I didn't know that temples existed today! I thought that was just a long time ago when Jesus was alive." She's so open and loves learning more and is sooo cute.

Although I LOVE my companion and we've seen soooo many miracles, I'll be honest and say that this first week hasn't been the easiest of my mission. I think change is always hard and especially going from an area where I knew and loved everyone to starting completely over was challenging for me. Val de Saône became kind of a home away from home. But I love times like this where there's a little bit of a learning curve because "there's no growth in a comfort zone and no comfort in a growth zone." It's gonna take some time to figure out how to be a missionnaire à pied, going on exchanges, not being in the ville I know, but it's so fun to have so many different experiences.

In other news, I'm already back in Lyon for the day!! It's MLC tomorrow (Mission Leadership Conference) so we got to come back! Just couldn't stay away.... hahah

Love you all!!!
Soeur Cami Goold
Sent from my iPad


And here are a few more pictures from the week:   

Cami arriving to Lausanne by train from Geneva.   

What a lovely place that she is living. 



The requisite tag pictures.   


 She was having a hard day and was inspired by this quote...

More pictures with Cam and Soeur Goreeba...


I don't know why she included this picture, but she probably has a memory or story to go with it, so I'm leaving it here. 

 ???

 Beautiful Soeurs in a beautiful city!   


Lausanne has officially been added to my bucket places of places I need to visit someday...



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