Dear
Family,
Well it sounds like I'm experiencing much nicer weather than
everyone at home. We've got blue skys and chilly days, but we left the really
cold rainy weather behind a week ago, and we never quite reached 0° though the
mountains are covered in white.
Last Thursday we finished packing our bags, gave a final
sweeping of the apartment, said goodbye to the shower-toilet (see pictures to
come) and switched apartments with the anziani. It's always a little sad to
change from living in four to living in two. Our new apartment is great. For
the first time since I left home I'm not living in a giant apartment building
on a main street, but in a house, in a nice neighborhood, divided into four
apartments, with the landlady across the hall who gives us housekeeping advice
everytime we see her. We're told that she would bring the anziani food, and her
husband would make them pastries. Unfortunately, they seem to have greater
faith in our cooking abilities because they haven't brought us anything yet. We
have a small unit in the basement where we keep the bikes. It makes me think of
Grandpa Messinger's cabin everytime I walk down there.
We've been seeing lots of miracles this week, one of our
investigators came to church last week for the first time! We've been trying to
get him there for months, but because of opposition from his family and church
he's never been able to come. I can't even begin to discribe how happy we were
to walk out of sunday school and see him standing there.
Saturday was our ward talent show! It went pretty well. Here's a
hint for planning ward activities: don't put the missionaries in charge. We'll
do our best, but we're focused on other things. Luckily, we had an amazing ward
member who we picked to be the MC. He got really excited and made it a big,
'Mormon's got Talent' night with judges and powerpoint. It was great.
Because of transfers, we missionaries never really planned
a talent, so we quickly came up with the classic idea of the little people
where one person's the head, torso, and feet and then their companion is the
arms. We danced around to various versions of 'once there was a snowman' by
vocal point. Everyone seemed to love it.
I also joined in last minute on the talent of a nine year old
girl in the ward. She and her mom were baptized a few months ago. Last Sunday
she asked us if she could play the piano in the talent show so we added her
name to the list. About ten minutes before it started however, she walked up to
Sorella Pond and I and asked which of us would play with her. We ran to the
Relief Society Room and sat down at the piano. It turns out that she didn't
know how to play anything. After trying a couple different ideas, we finally
grabbed a dry erase marker and numbered the bottom hand notes of ''heart and
soul'' for her to play C, A, F, and G while I played the upper part. It was
probably the simplest version of that song I've ever heard, but the giant grin
on her mother's face afterwords was priceless.
Now it's Christmas time and centro is decorated with lights and
trees. We found a box of decorations while cleaning out the old apartment, so
we'll probably break that open today and decorate for the holidays. We've got a
giant living room with a fireplace- it should be fun.
With the Christmas season, keep in mind Anziano Ballard's talk
from conference. What better way to celebrate Christmas than bringing someone
closer to Christ?
Vi voglio bene!!
Sorella Pace
Our wonderful shower-toilet from the old apartment. Gotta love Italian bathrooms.
Saying goodbye to Sorella Nelson and Hunter last week after English class with Sara in the middle.
