Week of 9 August 2009: Excerpts from our journal

This spring, Grand Sacconex, a Geneva suburb, put up this wind turbine, water mill and solar panel house to taut its energy efficiency (last winter, this small plot of ground had a Christmas Advent calendar instead!)
Sunday, August 9, 2009: After just a little more than 5 hours’ sleep, we staggered out of the sack and prepared for our trip to Fribourg. The drive along Lake Geneva and up thru the pre-alpine valleys past Gruyere was magnificent, with the sun shining thru clouds and touching spots of green meadows and tiny villages nestled among patches of forest. We arrived just in time for Sacrament meeting. The branch occupies the first floor of the left side of a modern office building in a residential area. Including us and the two full-time elders, there were 19 people present, of whom two were children ages 4 and 6, one was a middle-aged investigator, and a member of the Stake Presidency presided (thus 11 regular members). We were very happy to meet with the three young single adults and learn from them the status of others who had either moved away or who no longer participated. On the way back to Geneva, we ate our peanut butter sandwiches and munched apple slices to stay awake. We arrived just in time, as the meetings were about to start. It was a great joy to see Sindi for the 2nd time in two weeks (even if she only stayed for sacrament meeting and we didn’t get a chance to speak with her). The first speaker told us she had been in the Manhattan, NY temple, “wrestling” with a problem for which she sought a specific answer. But the Lord impressed her that His answer may not be the one she wanted. She felt that in order to exercise her faith she needed to keep trying all she could to get the problem to resolve itself in the way she wanted, but that she also needed to be able to accept the Lord’s decision. Part of our testing in this life is to see if we will keep trying, keep enduring to the end, not just sitting and waiting, but continually striving.
Monday evening while Dede attended the Spanish family home evening, I spent an hour visiting with Br Shahkar and his friend Abel, who has 3 PhD’s (mechanical engineering, business, and environmental engineering). He is a director within a “Non-Governmental Organization” (NGO) at the United Nations, where he works with various countries to help them coordinate their own ministries of transportation, of environment, and of oil resources to optimize their interactions for the good of their people. The two of them have come for FHE a couple of times, and hopefully will continue to learn. Tuesday at District meeting, we learned that a “tender mercy” had happened to the Jones after we left, shortly before 10 pm. A young lady from Peru (Danielle) had stayed to visit with them. About 10 pm, the doorbell rang (on the second floor, where the Center is located). A young couple recently arrived from Chile entered. The girl is a member, the boyfriend (and father of their child) is not, but HIS Protestant (Evangélique) mother had told them about the existence of the Institute. They found the place, but it was so late that they thought no one would be there. Then from the street they looked up and saw the picture of the Savior that was illuminated behind the main desk – since the Jones and Danielle were still there, and they decided to go up to the second floor and try the bell. The girl was thrilled to find members of the church. She asked for a copy of the Book of Mormon in Spanish, and clasped it to her chest in joy when they found one for her. Because Danielle speaks Spanish, they all had a wonderful conversation. That afternoon a small miracle occurred as I sat down at the computer to start preparing a lesson for the Wednesday night scripture class on “enduring to the end,” using the two paragraphs from “Preach My Gospel” toward the end of chapter 3. Ideas and scriptural references to support them started to come so rapidly, I could hardly keep up. Instead of the often 4-6 hours it might take to prepare a lesson, I had just about everything done in 90 minutes or so. Wednesday morning brought another tender mercy. The total amount we had spent for Dede’s prescription medications since coming here was refunded from my UT retirement package agreement, which allowed me to pay all of our outstanding bills (Hooray).
Thursday, around 9 am, the doorbell rang. Since no one we know would ring without first having phoned to see if we were here, I thought it was just someone ringing all the bells trying to get into the building. But dear Dede picked up the intercom and opened the door. Soon there was a knock: it was the postal carrier with a package from Heidi. Then when we started opening our emails, we received word from Bishop Benner in Toledo that Alan Marco had been baptized by his son Jacob Wednesday evening. The ward was filled with those who know and love the family. What a great man he is (an anesthesiologist at Toledo Hospital, and a long-time assistant scoutmaster for the boys in the ward). With his kind nature and readiness to help others, he’ll be a great strength to the church. And then we noticed another email. Our friend Vivienne had written Dede from China to say that she had gotten the post at the major hospital she had sought (she’s a plastic surgeon who during her 2-month exchange in Geneva had heard us sing Christmas carols, had stopped to listen, had then accepted the lessons and joined the church just this past winter). Her husband (a pediatrician) had also been appointed to a position in that hospital. And she had found a branch of the church there in China, thousands of miles from Beijing. We could hardly keep from jumping for joy.

Vivienne and Dede at the Swiss temple, January 30, 2009

Friday, we met Sister MM Jones at the Swiss Archives in Geneva for some more family history sleuthing. Dede also had promised Kevin Hood, a fellow from Toledo who regularly visited the Family History Center in Perrysburg, to see if she could find any information about his ancestor who was presumably born in Geneva around 1632. To our astonishment, the fellow at the desk looked at the information Dede had, went upstairs, and returned in about 10 minutes with the actual church register from the 1600’s whose pages he had opened to the citation identifying the man she sought – with birth information, parents names, etc. That was no small miracle. Then while I hiked back down the hill from the old city, trying to locate an ATM in order to get some cash so we could buy a couple of Swiss outfits (for the grandkids we anticipate) which Dede had seen in a tiny store as we had walked to the Archives, Mary Magdalene was getting numerous bits of information about her own ancestry in and around Geneva in the early 1800’s. It was quite a successful visit. Mary wanted to stop by her daughter’s place, and she asked us to keep a lookout for her near the Mt Blanc Bridge as we returned home, since she also wanted to go to Ferney-Voltaire to open a small bank account in France in order to be able to send money to another daughter (Miranda) who is at a boarding school in Southern France. I thought it would be nearly impossible to time our return (in preparation for our 5 pm departure for Yverdon) with her arrival at the bridge, but we promised we’d keep our eyes open. There are 3 or 4 lanes of traffic in each direction across that bridge, and 4:30 is the start of rush hour. We slowly drove along the curb lane, and just as we got past the famous flower clock at the entrance to the bridge, we saw her. She had gotten there just seconds earlier. And there was a small turnout for tour bus parking at the mouth of the bridge where we could pull over to let her hop into the car. Our reason for going to Yverdon Friday evening was to attend the baptism of two young men from Nigeria, Rufus and Michael. They had met the missionaries, had received a copy of the Book of Mormon, and had almost immediately known that the book contains the word of God. Interestingly, neither speaks French. They’ve been here just a few months. But they seem sincere, and they wanted to be baptized. About 20 people from the small Yverdon ward attended the service. There was a wonderful spirit there. I had tears come to my eyes as we sang the opening hymn, “Souviens-Toi” about a parent’s plea to a newborn child to tell what it was like in heaven, from where he had just come, and a promise that they had made to each other in their pre-mortal existence that they would somehow be reunited in mortality.
Saturday I finally managed (after a couple of days’ efforts and a prayer this morning) to get a week’s information and 5 pictures onto the blog we had started last September (and which still had only two meager entries, the most recent being15 Sept.). This was our “free” day, so after scrubbing the floor, we grabbed a quick lunch before meeting the senior couples (the Doyle’s, Hansen’s, and Jones) for a trip to Fort L’écluse. This fortress consisted of an upper and a lower fortification, separated by about a quarter-mile of cliff. It commanded a narrow gap between two mountains thru which the famous Rhone River cuts a passage for transporting goods between Switzerland and France. There may have been a Roman camp here in the days (58 BC) when Julius Caesar had defeated the Swiss (the Helvetius) and wanted to keep them from returning to power. But the main fortifications had only been rebuilt in the early 1800’s. The climb to the upper fortress was gradual, but continuous, as we ascended about 1000 vertical feet (> 300 m).

The upper part of the fortress is at the top. Click on the picture to enlarge it and see if you can find the 5 climbers on the "intrepid route" to get there (we chose NOT to use this route)!

On the path, we met a white-haired British gentleman coming down. We visited a bit, and he told us he had been coming here for more than 30 years, mostly to watch migrating birds. But he also told us about once hearing from a man who had been a soldier at this fort during World War II. Apparently, a small group of French resistance fighters had taken refuge in the fort. They had made the mistake of firing upon a German convoy in the valley. The Germans had retaliated by attacking the fort. He told us that bullet holes from machine gun fire could still be seen in the metal doors to the upper fort.

The steel door of the upper fortress. Some bullet holes from WW-II are to the left of the "gun slit"

The resistance fighters who were not killed were taken prisoner (this man had been one of them), and then many of the local citizenry from nearby villages were also rounded up and sent to prison camps behind the German lines.

A view of the Rhone River from the upper fortress

After taking some pictures, we encountered a young family who were hiking in the area. Among other things, we learned that earlier on their vacation, the older two kids had been able to go hang-gliding from a mountain top. They even showed us the video on their cell-phone-camera. After entering the lower part of the fortress, we were all too tired (or frugal) to take a 5-euro tour of this section. But as the women checked out postcards and the men rested at a small picnic table, the same family Braud came into the courtyard. We visited some more, and we laughed as the girls put their sunglasses on the dog. They told us that the long hair over the dog’s eyes protected them from the summer sun. When we finally made our way back to the parking lot, there was the family once more, just about to get into their car. Three encounters in one day couldn’t just be coincidental. So we took their pictures, and pictures of all of us together,

Karine and Mickael Braud and their children: Vincent – 11, Julie – 9, and Alice – 6, and their Scottish sheepdog named “City”

and they offered Dede their email and home address near Bordeaux, with an invitation to come visit them – we think that someday they will be receptive when LDS missionaries knock on their door. – We may have to help things along by sending them a copy of the Book of Mormon for Christmas. We finished our trip by stopping at the local grocery store to buy ice cream bars to share (it had been over 90 degrees during the afternoon).