❄L'Hôtel de Glace❄

January 31, 2022

Allô tout le monde!

Can you believe the first month of 2022 is almost over? No? Well, me neither so I’m glad that I’m not alone. This week was pretty good, fairly standard, but as usual there were some fun highlights so I’ll get right into those!

First of all, service! This service experience was definitely different from anything I’ve done before. Back in California we did a lot of impromptu and informal service, but here in Canada we do a lot more volunteering at charitable organizations. To make things even more interesting, as you might expect, everyone speaks French! Even the super nice head lady, Betty, who is originally from Colombia speaks French. Small note, listening to French from native Spanish speakers always makes me smile. It reminds me of a story from one of my young leaders who said there was a saying in France, “I speak French like a Spanish cow,” (meaning not very well), and I would genuinely love to be able to speak French in a Spanish accent, even if I spoke about as well as a cow - but back to the service. We helped out at their thrift store and pretty much just followed a man named Kenny around and helped with odd jobs like moving bins full of items that had been donated. Kenny was older and super Quebecois which isn’t exactly the best combination when it comes to communicating, but in the end it worked out and it was a good experience. We are going there again this Thursday which I am definitely excited about!

Something pretty unique that happened this week is that we had a mission wide district council. Just a bit of background for those of you who aren’t as familiar with mission jargon, a district is basically a group of 2-5 teams of missionaries in a specific geographic area (ie when I was in New Brunswick I was part of the New Brunswick district) and every week all of the missionaries in the district meet together to council and practice missionary skills. Since much of our mission is unable to gather in-person right now, we’ve been doing district councils mostly online, and our mission leaders thought it would be an ideal time to have a demonstration for the whole mission of what an effective district council looks like. So, 5 teams of young missionary leaders held a normal district council over zoom while the rest of the mission watched the broadcast. I’ll admit that I was skeptical of the idea at first, but the preparation and the sincerity of all of the missionaries involved made it a powerful and very instructive experience. President and Sister Harkness spoke at the end about the importance of councils in our church and in our families, and the principles of good communication and seeking the will of God they taught are something we can all apply into our daily lives. It’s hard to fully explain, but it was nevertheless a great experience!

This week we also continued to do a lot of work among the members here in Charlesbourg, and that is honestly where I feel like we’ve seen the most success during my time here. Between phone calls, video calls, and even more cookie drop offs we’ve able to get in touch with a few more less-active members and continue to strengthen our relationship with others. Something that was really awesome was helping Brother Paradis, the person we visited on Christmas Eve to drop off a Bible, watch church as it was broadcasted over zoom. I think that was probably the first time he’s been to church in a while, and he also is going to join us for an activity tomorrow night walking around Old Quebec with some of the other members of our branch and I’m super excited for that!

Definitely the coolest thing that I’ve done this week though was visit the “Hôtel de Glace” today! It’s basically a hotel made entirely out of ice and it’s only thirty minutes outside of Quebec city! I’ll admit that it was a little bit chilly, but the ice sculptures and carvings inside the hotel made it more than worth it! I’ll include as many photos as I can in this email, but I’d definitely encourage you to Google it yourself if you can. The funnest thing is that you can actually spend a night in l’Hotel de Glace, so I think that might honestly be a new item on my bucket list… 

Well, that’s pretty much it for this week. Time just seems to be passing faster and faster and this week we have interviews with our mission president and zone conference which I’m really excited for! I hope you all have a wonderful week!

Love you all,

Elder Jackson