I would just like to start off by saying I am in LOVE with the life of a sister training leader. We are busy all the time, and it is so much fun. My new companion is Sister Paine and she is the best! She's from Franklin, Tennessee and was fast tracked through the MTC so she's only 2 weeks ahead of me on the mission, but a full transfer ahead of me in the field. We work super well together, and get along great!

I will be honest, I was super hesitant about leaving Montreal and coming to Gatineau. Our area, Gatineau, is in Quebec but we also spend a lot of time in Ottawa which is the province of Ontario. I don't know what I was expecting, but I set my expectations super low. Thankfully, I was completely wrong about everything because this place is absolutely beautiful! I would describe it as the perfect mix between Europe and USA. And everything is so clean! I love it.

This past week sister Paine spent a lot of time helping me just get familiar with the area and the investigators that we currently have. We found out that the sisters before us did a lot of great work in finding investigators, however, they didn't do an amazing job with retention. There are so many names of people that are apparently being taught right now, but we have 0 investigators that are progressing. It's actually pretty sad. Sister Paine and I have plans to go through and do kind of an area book detox. We are going to visit everyone and see what happened. There is so much amazing potential in this area, it's unreal! Pretty much every french speaker in Ottawa is ours, yet the church is empty on Sunday. 

We met a new investigator named Jean-Mil! He is from Haiti and lives here with his wife and 3 sons. He met with missionaries before while he was in Haiti and is very open to learning more. Our lesson with him was not the best because I kept wanting to speak Spanish, and sister Paine and I had not prepared as well as we should have. However, lucky for us the spirit was able to do all the teaching. He agreed to read the book of Mormon and would like for us to continue teaching him. It's really cool to see that even if we don't do our best, Heavenly Father will help us out.

On Saturday we had an amazing day planned in this area called Hull, but everything fell through. Sister Paine and I both felt really impressed that Hull was not the area we needed to be in. We decided to go through our area book, and find names of people that we could pass by to start our clean sweep. We both agreed that we needed to spend our day in Ottawa, and I am so happy we did! We ended up passing by a ton of people which in turn led us to schedule 4 return appointments, and contact a few potentials. 

Sunday was super fun because I got to go up and give my testimony in French! It feels weird to be back in French, but I also really love the language. I do hope to find a couple of Spanish speakers out here though, I will not lose my Spanish! The new ward is very very small. It is the smallest ward I have yet served in. More than half the chairs were empty on Sunday. I learned that the ward actually has a lot of members, but a great amount of them are less active. Because our ward boundaries are huge, and there are a lot of people who don't have cars, it can make Sunday church attendance really difficult. Another thing is, the members are very sweet, but they don't understand the importance of member missionary work. Our saving grace is definitely our new bishop, he's young and has a fire within him to help the ward in any way.

That's about it for this week! I can't wait to see what else is in store for the rest of this month.

Love,

Sœur Garcia 

Scripture of the week:

Alma 26:12

Quote of the week:

"The only people we had to talk to were moose"