Elder Ian James Smith

  August 25, 2025 Hello, everyone! My week was absolutely fantastic! We had one of the greatest weeks for our ward. And we did so many things. On Saturday we had a barbecue for our ward and it was amazing. So many people came and we were able to play field hockey. I haven't played field hockey since third grade, but it was very fun. We were able to see some inactive members, and some of our friends came as well.  Then on Saturday, we saw 6 friends at church! One more friend came 4 and a 1/2 hours late to church, but we were still at the church, so we did a little lesson and it was good. But Bro, why can't you come 4 hours earlier?  Then right after that, we found out that our ward was going to a festival in a place called Aht. And there were 2 inactive members and 2 of our friends joining them. So we decided to go as well. It lasted from 2 to 7. It was super fun. I have photos on my Google Photos album.  This upcoming week we receive the new transfer board. I'm excit...

 August 18, 2025 Hello, everyone! This week was absolutely amazing. And we saw so many miracles. Along with a lot of funny stories.  Charleroi is low-key kind of ghetto. So there's a lot of homeless people. And one day we went to the train station. We saw a homeless dude fighting. Eventually he started walking away. But the police started showing up and surrounding him so he ended up putting back on his shirt and trying to get away. But the cops eventually caught up to him and arrested him. And we watched the whole thing, it was super funny.  We were able to visit an inactive member this week. And she came back to church, it was amazing! We had zone conference this last Thursday. We played twister, which was fun. We talked a lot about balancing our lives as missionaries. But I was still sore after we played.  I also don't think I said this in my last emails, but waffles are incredible here in Belgium. They're so good. Today we're going to Brussels to play some pickle...

 August 11, 2025 Hello everyone! Pretty standard week this week. But we put together an absolutely amazing missionary week by finding and teaching standards. Besides dealing with the occasional drunk guy, our week was pretty uneventful. One story that I have this week started Thursday morning when we were street contacting. Me and Elder Gambee always split up and just talk to everyone at the gare (train station). So I stop this one cool guy named Françoise, a younger guy from Cameroon. We had a super good conversation with him when half way through a older white lady comes over and starts speaking in the fastest french I've ever heard. Me and Françoise were still talking but she was going crazy with some of the wildest questions I've heard. lNot bad questions, but just have no relation at all with our conversation. Like stuff about Mcdonalds in the United States and then after 10 minutes she just turned around and left. What makes this story better was that Françoise came to ch...

August 4, 2025  Hello everyone! This week was pretty normal with a couple of highlights. This Sunday was awesome! We had 3 friends come to church and I was able to meet more of our members. They are awesome. I met a member yesterday who does a barbecue with the missionaries every week. We are going over later today. Et j'ai hâte (I can't wait!).  This week we also hit the streets hard. We found 21 new friends and had a super awesome lesson with them right after the second hour. Our ward is also going through a new bishopric right now but nobody has accepted the calling. So for right now we have a member of the stake presidency who comes and presides for us. He is super cool, he served a mission in Mexico and he speaks English, bro is awesome. Besides that Charleroi is the hood but the people here are amazing and I love Belgium. The amount of Dr pepper and pepsi we can find is sweet. One thing that Elder Anderson challenged our mission to do was to memorize five scriptures...