Modena, Italy - January 5, 2011

You know, this week we used in a lesson for the first time this awesome object lesson where you douse cotton balls in alcohol and light them on fire! it's super cool.

We have been having a crazy time of things these past few weeks, because everyone we were teaching that was progressing or had a baptismal date went out of town for the holidays. They're still not back yet. So we have been doing tons and tons of finding work, lots of door knocking. One family we found was from Nigeria, a husband, wife, and their two-year-old daughter. Mainly we were teaching the wife, but this week on Friday we went and she was not there, but her husband was there, so we decided to teach him the first lesson, hoping to catch him up with his wife. He had the two-year-old daughter there too. She is a little crazy usually, but today she was pretty good, just eating her food on the bed across from me while we were teaching. Things seemed to be going well and he was listening, when all of a sudden out of no where, his daughter violently spits her mouthful of mystery-creamed food. All over me. Aach! It was super gross. The father was horrified. He went running around looking for a towel or something and comes back and starts attacking me (really the food, though) with some old t-shirt he found. By the time we took care of the food, the lesson had fallen to pieces. He did not like anything we had to say. It was crazy. And gross. Blech!

Also, we had another funny incident at service this week. Every monday from 3-5 in the afternoon we do service at a local mensa, a place where people who haven't any food can come and we give them food, like packages of pasta, rice, fruit, meat, bread, etc. Well, many of the people who come are muslim (a little ironic, since it is in a catholic church, which makes it equally ironic that we the Mormon missionaries do service there), and so we have to be sure not to give them any meat from pigs. Well, usually they give us a heads up before hand when we come to get their bags to take them back and fill them up. On Friday, when we went in because they called us and needed extra help for the holidays, towards the end, all of a sudden this lady comes back in with a slightly frantic expression on, with the loaf of bread we had given her in her hand, and comes up to me and one of the other volunteers. She points at the bread and says, 'cos'e' questo qua? c'e' qualcosa dentro?' which means, 'what is this here? is there something inside?' She was pointing at the pieces of grain on the outside of the bread. But she panics and starts saying, 'no, no, e' maiale, no?' which is, 'no, no, it's pig, isn't it?' but it was not, it was just grain. So we told her that we were certain that's not what it was, but that if she did not want it anyway she could easily just leave it here and did not have to take it home at all. All of a sudden she breaks the bread in half, says, 'secondo me, c'e' qualcosa dentro' (according to me, there is something inside it), drops the bread, and storms off! It was so startling!

i mentioned how the work has been pretty slow lately, with tons of finding work and virtually no progressing investigators. Well, we finally had a couple of second or third appointments, so we went crazy finding members to bring because we finally had the opportunity. It felt so good. Monday was a great day, and having members come with us to the lessons made such a difference! (also, as a side note, if the missionaries in your ward ever ask you to come to a lesson with them, please please go, it is so important!) The members talking and bearing testimony makes such a difference and helps the investigator so so much. We brought one fairly new convert from Nigeria to a second appointment with a man we found on the street placing Books of Mormon, the one who had just recently survived a car crash and felt he had been given a second chance at life. It was incredible to see how attentive they were and how much they all listened to him. We asked the member to share the story of Joseph Smith, and he did a great job. At one point he held up the picture in the Restoration pamphlet of Joseph in the Sacred Grove praying, and he very seriously looks at the four people in the room we are teaching and says, 'This is Joseph Smith, praying in the, in the sacred...uh, in the Most Holy Forest.' And it was so adorable. Afterwards he told us it was the first time he has ever gone teaching with the missionaries. He was phenomenal, and had those people hanging on his every word. One of them at the end asked if it meant that if everyone in the world followed the truth of the Book of Mormon if we would all be unified and have the same church Jesus had, and we told him yes, and he said he would read it. It was a really neat lesson. We will be seeing them again tonight. We are super excited!

Also, our apartment is falling apart. We did the big cleaning day, capodanno, this week on Saturday, we are not allowed to go outside all day and just clean clean clean from 10 am until 9 pm. We did not stop cleaning until almost 10:30, and even then still did not finish, and called the office on Monday with a massive list of things that are broken and need to be fixed. The biggest thing is that our toilet has a hole in it, and then that there is a bunch of mold growing on the walls. Crazy! So now we are sleeping on mattresses on the floor in the living room while we are preparing the bedroom, laundry room, and kitchen for de-molding by ripping off wallpaper, scraping, and sponging with bleach. We are to do that, my companion and I, as soon as possible, and then when the assistants are down in Modena (we are a fair ways from Milano, though closer still than several other cities) for interviews in a couple of weeks, they will come take a look at it. Our ward responsible person for the missionary apartments was totally unhelpful. He came over to look at it, said he already knew about all of these things and that the only useful thing to do would be to move us to another apartment, and refused to do or think of anything to actually help with the problem, just called the mission office to tell them how he has been saying for three years that we need to move. It was crazy! So now my companion and I shall do the deed! We are pretty secretely excited to rip all the wallpaper off the walls...hehehe...
well, I hope y'all had a great new year. I love you.

Modena, Italy - December 22, 2010

Buon Natale! So, we had our zone conference on Friday, in Modena. That was handy for us, because we did not have to travel at all. Zone conference was completely incredible, I think one of the best I have had in the mission. It was all about the Book of Mormon, and Sorella Ryan and I were able to share our testimonies of how God really truly does place people in our path who need and will read the Book of Mormon when we are looking for the opportunities to talk to everyone. Super awesome zone conference. And to top it all off, at the end the Wolfgramms called out certain people to be actors in a nativity scene, and the rest of us sang the primary nativity song while all these missionaries came in dressed as donkeys and angels and the star. hilarious! Then, it started snowing. really hard. Ao much so, that 12 missionaries from the Firenze zone could not get home that night at all, because the trains weren't going and the busses weren't going, so we housed the two sisters, and the anziani in Modena housed two elders, and then the other eight elders slept with the elders in Bologna. It was crazy! And everyone went home the next morning instead.

On Sunday night we were finding this invite's house, someone we invited on the street that is, but like two months ago so it was before I got to Modena. We found her and met her husband and two-year-old adorable son. He was so adorable, and so outgoing! He was bouncing all over and climbing all over us and playing with everything. His mom finally pulled him over to the other side of her to keep him still, but he still would not stay still. So, in typical Ghanian manners of discipline, grabbed his arm and bit him. Really hard, and he started crying. But he did calm down. It was so crazy. That is something really crazy actually, is the way Africans treat their children, they yell at them to be quiet when they are going crazy and usually say (but not actually do) things like (and this is one we literally heard), 'I will beat you! You be quiet, or I will beat you so hard your head will come off and you will see yourself!' It's always a dilemma as a peace loving, spirit loving missionary to know how to react in situations like those...

And then, on Monday morning, we took of to go do scambio! with Verona! yay! That means I got to spend Monday and Tuesday in Verona with Sorella Mullen again doing scambio. We are actually still in Verona doing p-day up here, so I am writing from my old haunts! It was a really awesome scambio experience, particularly for me. On Monday right after arriving we went to go see a sister who was baptized and confirmed the week I left Verona, so I missed the event itself. I had heard a bit from Sorella Mullen that the confirmation was kind of crazy, like in the audience all they could see was that the sister was breathing oddly and not quite herself, but seemed fine. So I asked her about it and how it went and she said it was incredible. She said that they were blessing her to receive the Holy Ghost, when she felt an electrical shock all down her, all over, so strong and overwhelming, and she lost her memory even for a minute before she came back to her senses and just had to thank and praise God for such an amazing experience. Talk about baptism by fire! It was so great to get to see her again, and see how incredibly happy she is to be baptized! Hooray! I also got to see another sister, and elderly woman whom we were teaching. Her health has improved so much that she can come to church and they have even set a baptismal date with her! That was so neat to talk to her about that. I remember when we found her all the way back with Sorella Rossi, and then teaching her for four transfers, but her health was so bad she couldn't even walk or anything, often not even sit. It was so happy! And then we dropped in on several other investigators who were super excited to see us, and had a great lesson with them. We struggled so hard to get one of these investigators to pray, and at the end of the lesson, she prayed without putting up one bit of fuss, and was totally serious about it and it was beautiful! AWESOME! I loved it. It was great.

I also discovered today by using the scale in the Verona apartment that I literally (including coat and boots) wear 6 kilos of clothing every day. Too cold! Bah!