Bonjour ma mère!

Thank you so much for your emails! You always add so much detail and I love it! And sorry about last week. I totally typed out the whole email and I sent it to you, but for some reason it didn't send it, it just stayed in my drafts. Sorry about that, but I am glad Alex was able to help you out. This week was awesome. I love working with Elder Spens so much. The kid is a genius with french. He is one transfer ahead of me and, like me, didn’t take french before his mission. I have learned a lot from him over these past 5 weeks. So as you know, there will be 9 missionaries leaving from the three cities this Friday and we will be receiving 8 new missionaries. Transfers will be crazy this weekend. The Nuttalls have a rough sketch up of what will be going down and they have figured out that, on Friday, there will be a total of 21 missionaries going in and out of their apartment. There are going to be so many trips to the airport and bus station. Elder Spens has been transferred and will start working over in Bonaberi. So that leaves me alone. Here is the awesome news! I have been assigned to train one of the two new missionaries coming into Douala! Elder Spens will be training the other. My new companions name is Elder Thibault and is from Provo. I will meet him on Friday when he flies in. I am so stoked to be in Elder Lambs shoes and finally train. I learned so much from Elder Lamb and I hope and pray that I can have the same influence on my new companion that Elder Lamb had on me. I have also been assigned to be the District Leader for the Bonapriso district. I am so excited to have been assigned these new responsibilities! Especially to train. I remember my first few days and how crazy they were and Elder Lamb would always tell me how much fun it was to watch me react to certain things and it reminded him of how crazy of a world we are actually in. Right now, when something crazy happens, its just life. The crazy stuff that would happen back home is like nothing now. For example, this morning we were all eating breakfast around the kitchen table and we hear this huge bang and some screams so we ran out onto the balcony and looked over at this carrefour that is right by us and there was a silver mercedes almost all the way through the intersection with a moto underneath it and there were two bodies laying about 25 feet away. Cameroon doesn’t have stop signs, and when they actually do no one respects them, so when you drive through intersections you honk your horn really loud and that is the only security you have. Well, neither the mercedes nor the moto stopped at the intersection so they collided and the two people on the moto were thrown about 30 feet from where the impact took place. You can see where all the skid marks and what not are… I took some pictures but they will not be on the memory cards that are going home to you this Friday. So one day you will see what I am talking about. But anywho, this big accident happened and I wasn’t surprised at all. I was just like wow that moto is messed up… and that was it. Back home I would of freaked out because I would of seen the fresh results of a motorcycle/car accident and just seeing bodies laying around almost dead kind of freak me out. But now its just a part of life. You probably won’t want to drive with me when I get back… It might take me a while to realize that I can’t just weave in and out of traffic, go whatever speed I want, fly through stop signs, honk every 3 seconds, etc. The list goes on and on. So after typing all that… I am STOKED to be training!

At church yesterday this guy got up to give a talk and I had never seen him before and I was trippin big time. It looked like Elder Reidhead was standing in front of the congregation… but in black skin. It was the weirdest thing ever. He even talked the same way as Elder Reidhead, except in french. His face looked the exact same… it was so trippy.

I was talking with Elder Tingey the other day and we were talking about what I did before my mission for work. I was explaining to him how I worked for the Ellsworths and I was explaining the products that we sold and he said, “Wait a second, I used those books!” So I am out here with Elder Tingey and he used the product that I worked with for almost a year. Small world.

There are 3 memory cards that are going home to you this Friday. I am going to try my best to get them backed up onto some DVD’s before Elder Thompson leaves… and on these 3 memory cards there are a little over 1,400 pictures and videos so you will basically see what my life has been like since the beginning of November. The four of us elders here in Bonapriso ate a bunch of eggs this week… 75 to be exact. In 6 days we managed to eat over 6 dozen eggs. Awesome.

One of our investigators (Maman Françoise) was in an accident last week and had some pretty bad neck injuries and was in the hospital. We got to the house and we were wondering where this one investigator was and her husband explained to us that she was in the hospital and that he didn’t know when she would be back at the house. So we decided to start and Elder Spens said the opening prayer. As he was praying he started praying for this investigator and right as he was praying someone walked into the room and stopped because they realized we were saying a prayer. Once Elder Spens finished the prayer we all opened our eyes and voila!! Maman Françoise was there!! Talk about immediate answer to your prayers.

We have a member that we have been working with a lot lately because he hasn’t been the most active member. We are helping him find that love he once had in the gospel. We decide to surprise him and show up without him knowing that we were coming and we walked into his house and we found his older brother, who is also a member, in the process of preparing his goods that he was to sell that day. Wanna know what those goods were? Drugs. It looked like he had a table full of marijuana all cut up and he was putting it into little paper balls that he made. We asked him what he was doing and he said that he was making medicine. Haha… yeah, right. He had a buddy there right next to him and he was so plastered. He was just nodding his head and agreeing with everything that we were saying. I’m positive back home I would have freaked out and not known what to do. But here we just said, “Look man, you need to repent and get back to church.” He didn’t say anything and kept on working so we left.

Well, there is my week for you! I have been at the computer for an hour and the stupid internet is not working. Internet here is so frustrating. You have no idea how nice you have it over there in America. It is going to be so nice going back and being able to go log into my email and not have to wait 15-20 minutes to read the first email. If I am not the most patient man in the world when I get back from my mission then I have failed. I love you all so much and I can’t wait to email you next week and tell you about my new companion. Life is going to be so crazy for him these next couple of weeks. Awww yeah!

Je t’aime,

Elder Schmid