August 4, 2010 - Verona, Italy

Woot! I have been with my new companion almost a week now. Her name is actually Sorella Tramacchi, and she is from Australia! She is really cool, super sweet and laid back. She was actually in the Rome mission, but got switched to ours because she was in the zone that moved up this past transfer, and has been in the mission for over a year now, so she only has this transfer and next left! She is really cool, and we are having a ton of fun together, even though bikes are being as hard for her as they were for me when I started. I have really come a long ways, it seems, with the bikes; they are a lot easier for me now and I actually enjoy them!

We have an investigator who is in the hospital. Well, she got transferred to another part in the hospital, then went home, then came back in another part, and now is in yet another part. We have been seeing her as often as possible through all of this, and teaching her. I think this experience has really humbled her, and she gave us her promise one week ago that she would be baptized! It has been really neat to see the change in her since then. Every time we come she talks about how it took her thirty years to be converted but now she is and how happy she is with this decision. Right now the problem she has is kind of intense and she is not doing well at all. I am afraid she will die before she can be baptized, but at least if that is the case she can accept it in the next life. We are right now trying to help her prepare for that if that is in fact what happens, planning on teaching her about repentance so she can start preparing. I know that sounds kind of weird, but that is what we feel like we should do. Awesomely enough, though, her hospital roommate is a twenty-four year old man from the Philippines, and we have started teaching him and he is so cool and super interested. He loves the stuff we are telling him and always feels good when we read together from the Book of Mormon. We have taught him the plan of salvation and the restoration, and he said he would pray to know if it is true. He is really cool, and I love teaching them together even in the hospital!

We've had some moderately goofy experiences, like our investigator giving us umbrellas because it was raining when we went to leave her apartment, but then asking us if we were even capable of riding our bikes with umbrellas, so we said no, because we can't (I certainly don't have the balance - remember that time I fell at the bottom of the ramp right on my bags when we were leaving the MTC?), and then she gave them to us anyway. This morning something really cool happened. The sorelle from Pordenone were here (i.e., Sorella Shuel!! my MTC companion and Sorella Jacobson) because they needed to bunk over on their way home from permesso (the documents that say you can live in Italy) stuff in Genova, so we took them to see centro here, and of course if you come to Verona you have to see Juliet's balcony. So we went there and just as we were entering this woman stopped my companion and started talking to her (I didn't notice and had to go back and find her a few moments later). Turns out she found a Book of Mormon in a used book store, bought it, and has been seriously reading and studying it. She has read about half of it and studying alongside the Bible using the footnotes, and is super interested and really likes it. She wants to see us when she gets back from vacation in two weeks! How cool is that? Even cooler: my companion just told me that her family found the church because her grandpa found the Book of Mormon in a used book store then went and found the missionaries. Neat, huh?

Sorella Rossi really taught me a lot about using visual aids, and teaching has become way fun using them in these days. My new companion really likes it too. It is fun.