Week of 7 March 2010:

View of Mt Blanc from our driveway
(on a clear day)

We’ve got wheels – again! Monday, we got the car back from the repair shop. Unfortunately, the Asay’s relatively new car ran out of oil on the autoroute; the engine froze, and they had to have the car towed back to France. Elder Walker and Elder Doyle thus followed me out to their apartment in Prevessin, where I gave them the key to the Doyle’s Dacia, and then we three went to the Renault dealership to pick up our Dacia, now with brand new brakes – and they don’t screech. The afternoon involved working on the last two weeks’ worth of journal and preparing 10 sandwiches for the Spanish family home evening, which was attended by 26 people plus 4 missionaries, of whom 11 were nonmembers, some of whom are actively being taught. Sonia taught a very animated lesson about facing life’s challenges with courage and perseverance (or so Dede told me later). We gave Shannon Walch and the sister missionaries rides home in a very cold March wind (25 degrees F).

Where have all the (converts) gone? After a mission zone conference in Lausanne on Tuesday, we headed up to Yverdon thru very heavy traffic, where we tried to locate 4 of the refugees who had been baptized within the past few years. The wind was bitterly cold, and the first address turned out to be a building that housed a department of taxation and a justice of the peace. At the other address, the building had been converted to commercial ventures with no private residences, and the names that were still on the mailboxes in the narrow hallway didn’t match either of the people we sought. On the way home, we eased our hunger by munching a piece of “young” Gouda cheese and some chocolate.

The sisters get “dolled up” Wednesday, we had an appointment with Sister Mary Magdalene Jones to help her with her English translation of a 14-page letter she is writing to a catholic priest to explain her baptism (among other things). We got back to the apartment in time to heat up a 2-minute prepared dinner for each of us before she left to take Sister Doyle to a service project at church, where Sister Jones was teaching sisters from the stake how to make little fabric dolls for a local orphanage.


Doll making at its finest



Braiding is easier if the doll isn't moving











Around 8 pm, while I was trying to prepare a family home evening lesson for the young adults at Yverdon, Elder Doyle called to ask if he could pick me up so we could go take pictures of the event – and we did. There were probably 50-60 sisters there, all happily making fabric dolls.


'Voila!' Two dolls for the orphanage


Later that evening, we went to the nuclear physics research facility CERN to take a night picture of their “death star” (a spherical museum they call ‘the Globe’ that is lighted sometimes).

The CERN 'Death Star' is charging up - Watch out!



I shouldn’t have listened when someone said “Let’s go for a spin” Thursday, a definite tender mercy was being able to capture two weeks’ worth of journal plus pictures into a couple of blog entries – in a “record” time.



Our 1st encounter with Yverdon young adults, at the 2009 "Pink Ball"



I then worked on putting my thoughts into French for the FHE lesson while Dede nearly exhausted herself baking two quiches for the young adult dinner, a giant (and beautiful) salad, a chocolate mousse that we’d eat with vanilla ice cream, and baking two batches of cookies for Eve and Jenny, whose birthdays are this week. As we headed to Yverdon around 5:15, it began snowing lightly. Dede stayed to prepare for the dinner while I went to St Croix to get Anthony (a 2,000 foot increase in elevation over about 5 miles and with 10 hairpin turns). By the time I left Yverdon, the roads were starting to get slippery with snow. Salt trucks seem only to visit the larger towns, so the little villages and road between them as I headed up the mountain were untreated. At the last village before the first major hairpin turn, 4 cars were apparently stuck at a bend. Since I could see no headlights coming, and fearing that if I stopped on the sloping turn I might not be able to get going again, I went around them. A tender mercy was that when our car started to “fishtail” around the third hairpin, there were no other cars in the vicinity, and I was able to pull out of it before spinning all the way around. I crept slowly up the mountain and found Anthony. Another and potentially life-saving tender mercy was that as we got to the edge of the village and began heading down, the car in front of us was only going about 15 miles an hour. Since there were no guard rails, had we gone much faster, we might have slid off the mountain. By now the snow on the roads was about 3 inches deep, and I chose not to try to pass on the two-lane winding trail. Things went well, and we stayed about 2 ½ car lengths behind the other car, which frequently braked to slow down. Then at the 3rd or 4th hairpin turn on the way down, instead of just slowing to a crawl, the car in front of us stopped. I consequently braked, but we started to skid into his rear end. A definite tender mercy was that no cars were coming up the mountain around the turn, and we were able to swerve out around the car, missing it by less than 2 feet. As we approached each hairpin turn after that, we slowed to a bare crawl, but even so, at the 6th one, we spun out and made a couple of complete rotations on the two-lane road. Again it was a tender mercy that no cars were coming from either direction, so I was able to back up and turn around to continue down the mountain. We made it safely back to the chapel – the 22-mile round trip had taken just under an hour. And the quiche was delicious; the giant salad Dede had made was totally consumed also. The lesson was on faith. After scriptures (1 Nephi 8:19-24 and Helaman 5:12), a brief discussion about exercise and push-ups, and the picture of a heron being choked by the frog it was trying to swallow (captioned “Never Give Up”), we concluded with the story related by President Monson in the 2009 April Conference as told him by my cousin-in-law Fred Babbel about the woman during WW-II who walked more than a thousand miles thru the snow to escape Russian troops and who had to bury her children using a spoon to dig each grave, and who was ready to give in to suicide, but whose faith and prayer finally sustained her. Dede then asked what we could do to maintain and to strengthen our faith. All were touched - another tender mercy. We decided it would be better to let Anthony and Jenny take trains back to their towns rather than go back up the mountains in the snow, so I drove them to the Yverdon station – with about 5 minutes to spare.

Sometimes, too much rain might be a good thing: Saturday, we baked 3 batches of snicker doodles, answered emails, and cleaned the apartment. That evening, Dede attended the Rive Gauche Relief Society birthday party. She was impressed with the quality of clothing that was offered free for the sisters in their clothing exchange. In their program, at least 10 of the sisters told how they had been blessed by being members of the Relief Society. One of them who had joined the Church in South America said that she had simply felt an overwhelming sense of love radiating from the RS sisters, and she wanted to keep feeling that acceptance and support. Before we crashed for the night, we noticed that the weather report for the Northeastern US had a storm and flood warning for the weekend, with 3-6 inches of rain predicted, which, were it snow, would be 30 to 60 inches! Hopefully, Rob and Crystal can find an arc if they need one.