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Tràpani – Week 13 (Christmas Week)
Transfer 7, Mission Week 43

Ciao Tutti!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas week and a good time celebrating with friends and especially family. The week was really weird. I was in Palermo from Tuesday until Thursday doing a scambio with Anziano Palazzo. We had a really good scambio and I definitely learned a lot from him. We were able to see this new investigator that they received. Months ago the Sorelle met this younger guy on the bus and they were talking to him and he was asking questions and they said it was a really good conversation, but he wasn’t interested to meet and learn more. They felt they needed to leave him with the Book of Mormon so they did. Then just about 2 weeks ago he showed up to English course and he had read the introduction and something really hit him about the Book of Mormon (the spirit). He is now super interested and wants to learn more so we met with him and had a really awesome lesson on the restoration. He is very intelligent and understands things really well. He is such a humble guy and super nice. We then had English course there and talked about Christmas for the lesson which was a good time.

Wednesday we did finding in the morning for English course and then switched it to a Christmas survey before lunch. We handed a ton of English Course bigliettini [cards] out. Then, disgustingly, I somehow ate 425 grams [15 ounces] of pasta in a sitting and was still hungry afterwards. That was really gross. In the evening we went to this Palace in Palermo and sung for the employees there. It was super cool! A member had set it up and invited the missionaries. We then did finding on the way back to Palermo 1’s church. Anziano DaPonte and I went out and did Christmas Survey finding together which was a lot of fun. We were then able to finish up the night with another lesson with that super sick guy. The plan of salvation really went well and he is such a good guy.

So for the holidays it worked a little different than a normal week.

We had somewhat of Pdays you could say starting at 1:00pm on the 24th and going until 6:00am on the 26th. And we had permission during this time to skype our families, go to members for meals, watch 2 animated movies, and other pday appropriate activities. Thursday we had our zone blitz where we sang Christmas carols with all the missionaries in the zone. It was a really good time, and my voice definitely hurt afterwards. We had some members and investigators there with us singing as well. We sang at the two big piazzas where the opera houses are in Palermo. They are really cool. So we had a really nice backdrop for our caroling. We were talking to people that were walking by and listening to the caroling. We shared the Christmas video with them and tried to receive potentials for the Palermo areas. [Read more…]

Tràpani – Week 11
Transfer 7, Mission Week 41

Ciao Tutti!

I forgot to say last week that my zone conference was yesterday so we had to get P-Day switched to today. Well I hope that everyone had an awesome week! We had a nice crazy week. Last Monday we were able to play basketball with some ragazzi [boys] which went pretty well. I still stink as usual, but hey the ball never hit me in the face at all.

Tuesday we were unable to grab a bus to Palermo for DDM because it was a festa [holiday] so we had to stay in Tràpani. There weren’t many people out that day at all. We had a good pranzo [lunch] with our ward mission leader and his wife which went really well. We had 3 people show up to English course and they were all advanced so it was great to be able to have a nice time with them and share our testimonies with a smaller group of people. They are all really awesome and definitely have really good friendships with them.

Wednesday had a fair amount of appointments with people set up. Only one of them fell through and we were able to get to know a member family a lot better which was really nice. We headed out for Palermo that night and then we had to wake up at 4:30 to get to the station in Palermo in time for Anziano Bourne to catch his bus to Bari at 6:15. It was Anziano Bourne, Anziano LaPray and I that headed there together. Anziano Trejo and Anziano Vrska went to drop Anziano Borough off at the airport. We texted Anziano Trejo around 6:00 and asked if there was any faster way to get to the station. He called and Anziano LaPray, in an anxious tone, explained that we just woke up. We were just cracking up thinking of Anziano Trejo’s face. It was a fun little joke. Everything went well though. Everyone made their departures on time.

Anziano Trejo, Anziano Vrska, and I were in a trio for the rest of the day. We had two lessons in the morning after studies and then went to eat at a new convert’s house who is the Italian Stan Lee. He is super funny. We had lunch over there and then headed back to the apartment before heading to a less active’s house. We shared a really good message with him that he received very well and it was awesome to see that we all three had different examples, but they all were able to be applied back to the main message. Anziano Trejo had told us about this guy’s movie collection and it is huge. I was nerding out of course for the 5 minutes he showed us. He just has everything you could imagine. He even has a Back to The Future hover board and that hat Marty wears in the second one. It was insane.

Anziano Spencer got in just fine a little after 7:00 and then we headed to Tràpani and got settled all at home. [Read more…]