Hi!! Guess what Sunday is?!?! MOTHERS DAY!!!!! HOT DIGGITY MOTHERS DAY!! YOU CAN HERE MY SWEET VOICE!! What better way to celebrate a holiday! I certainly can't think of anything better. I haven't seen you guys for almost a whole year. Are we even still related? Different sides of the earth, different languages, different time zones... luckily those are about our only differences. Similarities? Good looks, good humor, good tastes, and just overall goodness. I love our family. Count your blessings though that I'm still alive: we basically got stoned this week. Ok well, not stoned stoned. We were walking through an extra unsavory neighborhood one day when a group of ghetto kids on the other side of the road starting yelling "Jesus-this and Jesus-that" at us. So we just kept walking like the innocent little Americans that we are, and then when they were about 50 meters behind us, a baseball size rock came flying about 3 feet over our left shoulders and smashed into the sidewalk in front of our feet. So we picked it up and hurled it back along with some choice words from the french language. Then we booked it out of there. JUST KIDDING. That last part was a lie. We left the rock on the sidewalk and just kept walking away to safety. But Samuel the Lamanite much? Miracles much? Also, on the same subject of danger (as if mom's heart isn't beating hard enough already), President told us not to wear our missionary plaques today because of Osama Bin Laden being killed. So that's weird. I keep freaking out that it's not on my chest where it's supposed to be. OTHER THAN THAT WE ARE SAFE AND SOUND :)

We had a pretty good week. Lots of lessons, lots of dissappointments, and very tired as always. We started teaching a few new sweet people. One is named Trésor. Aka, Treasure... sweet name huh? A lot of Africans have cool names like that. One time I knew a 'Prince Good Luck.' Our English class has been flourishing lately too. We teach english for an hour every tuesday night and then we do a half hour spiritual section. It has been working really well and we've gotten some really good new amis from it. There are a lot of Chinese girls that have started coming too. We usually have 6 or 7 students there. Of course I am always reminded of mom teaching english class to japanese men and making them believe that her name was Miss Gorgeous. People in France know English way too well to pull that one over on them.

This week during fast sunday i decided the first meal I want to have when I get home. Home made hamburgers, grilled on the deck, warm summer night, spicy pepperjack cheese, avocado slices, bacon, and then all the normal stuff. Did you know that bacon doesn't exist in France? Talk about trials..

I wish that you guys could be with Elder Pieper and I during some of scripture conversations in the morningtimes. It's cool because we always read the same twenty pages of the Book of Mormon during personal study, then for companionship study we go through it and try to apply it to us and our investigators. So most of the scriptures that we use with amis during the daytime come from the 20 pages we read in the morning. Right now we're at the Sons of Mosiah missionary section. Oh, and I always make sure to sing Scripture Scouts to him. Take my favorites for example: http://www.scripturescouts.com/mp3/ss/AlmaAmulek.mp3 or http://www.scripturescouts.com/mp3/ss/BuildShip.mp3

Good thing you raised me right.

This week I also bought a french suit. Oh. La. Vache. Mom, you'd be proud to have birthed this. Normally I was waiting till the end of my mission to buy a suit, BUT seeing as my favorite clothing store is having a liquidation sale in Reims, I decided that getting a 200 euro suit for 60 euros was a pretty slick deal. Huh? Huh? I'll send a picture eventually. The pants are really skinny. It rawks.

Well... I can't wait to talk to you on Sunday. I'll work on my English before then.

Heavenly Father is blessing us.

Elder Benjamin Quinn Coburn

ps, another one of the amis in Evry that I started teaching is getting baptized in 2 weeks. I'm probably going to go to the baptism. It's Didier, if you remember him :)