Modena, Italy - January 12, 2011

Allora, cara famiglia, e' gia finito un'altro trasferimento.

Well, dear family and friends, already another transfer is done. Moving on into transfer number 7, I will be on my second city, still here in Modena, with my sixth companion, who will be Sorella Snodgrass! She was in the MTC with me, so I already know her. How cool is that? Sorella Ryan and I had a blast, and the transfer zoomed by super super fast, but she is off to go be whitewashed into Milano 2 with Sorella Thurston (a.k.a. Anna, with whom I studied abroad in London, still way weird that we're in the same mission). She is excited and ready to leave her first city. I am excited for another new companion! I never thought I would be so steadily switching companions so far nearly every transfer. Still Sorella Mullen is my only companion for more than one transfer! Strange! This'll be fun.

Also, this week we found something really awesome. In the July 2010 Ensign (or at least the Liahona, which is what we get here), in the section of Latter-Day Saint Voices (where people mail in and tell cool stories), you have got to go read, right now, the one called 'Forgetting Ourselves in Sicily.' The reason it is so particularly extra cool is that, yes, the Interdonato family, the one in the story, is totally in my ward here in Modena!!! Sorella Interdonato, who was just released from her calling as Relief Society President, was giving us a ride to an appointment and coming with us a few days ago, and told us the whole story of her conversion from her perspective. It was hilarious, and so awesome. She said her son, Omar, contacted the missionary and they printed the story all without telling her, and when she read it, she cried a lot. And our whole relief society, when they read it, all cried. Crazy! Go read it. It's super exciting.

Also, we have been doing a ton of finding work, lots and lots and lots of casa in these days. So at one of these places I forgot to take off my helmet and didn't realize it until we were already in the palazzo, so I certainly did not want to go back out to the bike to put it away, so I just carried it in my hand the whole time. Then, after getting about 50 other doors slammed in our faces, we were lamenting and wondering if we should be trying something different, because nothing seemed to be working. I made some joke about using my helmet, and my companion laughed, and we just kept going. This guy opened the next door, and my companion started talking, and all of a sudden I just jumped forward with the helmet up and a huge smile on my face. The guy gave me the weirdest look, especially because I hadn't said anything yet, and Sorella Ryan almost started laughing, and I just started talking and telling him how lots of bad things happen in life, and sometimes it's hard, and although we have helmets to protect us if we fall when biking, sometimes it seems there is nothing to help us out and keep us safe when these things happen to us in life. I told him we had a message about the helmet for our life (il casco della vita) that we would really love to share. It was awesome! He gave us a time to come back, because at that precise moment he was studying for an exam the next day, and told us to come back the afternoon after the exam was over. Cool, huh? It was way fun.

And speaking of helmets, it brought out another awesome story this week. No one in Italy wears helmets when they bike (and everyone bikes, even if they are 90 years old), except the missionaries. In fact, that's how people identify us. 'Wait, I know who the mormons are, but I've never seen the girl ones, just those guys on bikes with helmets.' It's kind of fun. Anyway, we were teaching this family, mainly the adult daughter and the mother, and there were three very small children, a six-year-old girl and twin 3-year-old boys. The boys are the most adorable thing ever, so cute. Well, we were biking along the other day and saw this woman with a wall of small children ahead, and when we got closer realized it was those small kids! (But with a different woman, I don't know why.) Anyway, we stopped and said hello to the small children very briefly, and the twin boys, were so excited to see us, and one of them kept looking up at me and saying, 'wow, che bella testa oggi!' which means, 'wow, what a beautiful head today!' And after a moment I realized he was talking about my helmet, and that this three-year-old Ghanian boy has never seen a helmet before in his life, and it is so foreign looking it did not even look like a hat to him, and he literally thought that today we had changed our heads. Not our faces, just our heads. And it was just such a funny thought how real that could be to him, that these awesome American missionary sisters could just change their head for the day. It was so adorable though, just over and over again, che bella testa oggi! hehe.

Oh yeah, and also, this week Sorella Ryan and I took our first ever cultural day. Once every other transfer we are allowed to take a short p-day and instead on another day attend some sort of event that we could not do during normal preparation day hours, so Sorella Ryan and I went to Bologna and saw a play in Italian! It was Agatha Christie's 'The Mousetrap,' and it was super interesting, because I have seen it before in English (in London, actually), but this time it was all in Italian. It was a really cool experience with the language in particular. We really enjoyed it.

This week we finally had a breakthrough with all our finding work and got to see one of our new people for the second time - the Italian family I think I mentioned a while back that we saw the first time right before Christmas. We were able to bring them a book of Mormon and teach them about it, and both of the wives (we actually haven't been able to see the husbands yet) are very interested and want us to come back, so we have another appointment this weekend! Hooray! We are very excited. It went well.

Well, I think that's it for this week. We have to pack up my companion today! I am so glad we have an elevator in Modena. In Verona, we were on the fourth floor and I moved four different people into and out of that apartment, and no elevator, and the bags are really heavy to drag up and down that extremely tall narrow staircase. Bleh. I expect tomorrow to go much more smoothly with an elevator. yay!