c'era una volta...

Well, buon giorno famiglia mia! Another week has gone by and we've been learning a lot and doing lots of work. Lots of interesting things happening. Thursday we had a lesson with the Branch President's wife and their baby who has had bronchitis for a while so Sorella LaFerla couldn't come to church. It was a good lesson, we don't really know their family very well so it was nice to meet her and talk to her a bit. We read the “I love Loud Boys” talk with her and just invited her to find someone at church who needs a friend and welcome them. She thought it was a really good idea. It was a fun long walk to her house, down a street with lots of big old beautiful houses that are so different than all the apartments that are everywhere else. We also found some pretty good cheese that tastes like garden herb triscuits. Before corso d'inglese we had a lesson with a couple of girls from the course. They mostly just have a lot of questions, the one seemed more sincere than th...

Hello famiglia mia! It has been a crazy week. Both Sorella Hirsh and I have colds and the people above us are redoing their house and hammering even during pranzo (unheard of!) so we can't nap or anything. And well, some disappointments with people and getting sprayed with stupid carnevale foam. Lent has begun, so we don't have to worry about big feste for a while. So Gabriella, we're not sure what she's up to right now. We had an appointment on Wednesday that went great, and then she came to church on Sunday and it was great, but I think somebody said something about the fact she was wearing jeans and she's kind of stubborn and so she decided it's ridiculous that people feel compelled to wear jeans and then people sent her some fun websites to look at and she talked to a member in the branch on facebook who told her that if she had questions about why we wear skirts to church and why we don't drink tea or coffee then she probably isn't ready to get bapt...

That missionary sounds like a really dumb kid. Punto [period]. Maybe he should look for investigators or use his list of real inactives that the bishop gives him, it might be slightly more effective. So this week has been another adventure. Sant'Agata day is quite the adventure. We weren't able to make it down for any of the fireworks or to see the saint, purtroppo [unfortunately], but we did see the saint on tv at a member's house for a couple minutes. They don't want us to get away without seeing their city's biggest tradition. Wednesday Gabriella canceled her lesson so we were going to walk down to the Duomo to see the Sant'Agata fireworks and talk to people on the way, but we started talking to lots of people and realized when we got to the bus station that it was 8:25 and we needed to start walking home. It was a good night though. It was cloudy anyway so the fireworks weren't as clear, I'm sure. The anziani have videos. Kids here are so indoctrinat...

As of 1 July 2010, there will only be two missions in Italia—Milano and Roma!!! Yes, it's crazy. We're down to only 60 missionaries in our mission and it's going to be staying that way, and with six stakes in Italy and hopefully a Sicilia stake coming soon they have decided to consolidate. They think we'll probably stay down here for a while, but I would be pretty excited to go up north too...it's crazy! So we not only get a new mission president in July, we get a new mission. It'll be interesting. I can send you what President Taranto said about it too. So I was talking to a man on the bus about the Restoration on Thursday, and I asked him a few questions and then what he thought about it at the end because he had kind of been staring ahead and I didn't know if it was because he didn't really want to listen or if it was just so his ear was closer to my mouth so he could hear better. He replied “I think I'm ignorant for never having heard of these th...

Info from Pres. T: The Church is growing in Italy! No unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing! Zion is being established in this part of the Lord's vineyard! It is through missions and missionary work that the Lord establishes and sustains stakes of Zion. As the number of stakes increases, the need for missions decreases. More faithful, mature, self-sufficient members require fewer and fewer full-time missionaries to assist in building the Lord's kingdom. We see this pattern here in Italy with the formation of one mission in 1965, a division into two missions in 1971 (Milano and Roma), and later creation of a third in Catania and a fourth in Padova. As stakes have continued to be formed, the number of missions decreased back to three, and now, with six stakes in Italy, the building of a temple in Rome, and the formation of a seventh stake (we hope!) in the near future in Sicily, the First Presidency has decided to consolidate the missionary work in Italy into two mis...