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.