“One Thing Saved Us”: The Chion-Hocks, Alone for Five Years on Réunion, and a Hundred Baptisms in Their Backyard Pool

In May 1969 Alain and Danièle Chion-Hock returned with their family to Réunion after being baptized a month earlier in France. For the next five years they were the only Latter-day Saints on their island — no branch, no missionaries, no members to lean on. Despite the isolation, they felt armed with their testimonies and the scriptures. "One thing saved us," they later recalled: "prayer, reduced sometimes to the simplest expression, but never abandoned."

Their endurance became the seedbed of the Church on Réunion. As more members who had joined the Church abroad moved to the island in the late 1970s, a group was organized with Alain as group leader. James E. Faust, president of the International Mission, authorized the island's first sacrament meeting in July 1977. In October 1979 Joseph and Ruth Edmunds, the first missionaries in Réunion, arrived — and over the next eight years, more than 100 people were baptized in the Chion-Hocks' backyard swimming pool, including the first Réunionnais converts on the island, Rose, Richard, and Jacky Thia Soui Tchong, on December 23, 1979. The first branch was organized with Alain as president on December 30, 1979.

Alain Chion-Hock, called in March 2010 as the first patriarch of the Saint-Denis Réunion Mauritius District, looked back over four decades: "God's help has preserved us spiritually and physically from day to day, so that we might accomplish the various tasks required of us as we have endeavored to establish His work in our region of the world."