April 15, 2019

To begin, I don't like doing big emails

A super cool experience happened this past week. My comp and I were riding our bikes to the church for our English class (we teach an English class to 1 person). We're on the street of the church and some random guy yells "Ragazzi! Ragazzi!" so we stop and he asks us what time church is. We told him he said he'll be there and then invited us to have dinner at his house that night. So 2 things happened that doesn't happen. 1. A random guy saw us and decided he wanted to go to church 2. We got invited to a nonmembers home for dinner. It was awesome, but we couldn't have dinner because we had English class. Sunday rolls up and there he is! He actually showed up and he stayed for everything and after told us he'd like to learn more and keep coming. It was an odd answer to prayers. So the next day we go finding (try to anyway).

The Italian people are crazy stubborn. When my comp and I go up to people here, they see our tags and tell us that we are either A) Jehovah's witnesses B) we're just kids so we don't know what we're talking about C) "my great grandparents were catholic, so I need to honor that" D) we lead people away from the true church so we worship the devil and we're going to hell. So, you could say finding is a success. My comp loves to do house to house and it doesn't work yet. We have to ring a doorbell since all the building here are apartment buildings. They have a phone in their apartment to answer the doorbell thingy and sometimes they answer it, sometimes they look out the window and see a big American guy waving at them and almost immediately close their shutters. 

The branch I'm in has about 12 members who show up, but they are some of the happiest people I've ever met. Our branch pres is from Ecuador so he speaks Spatalian and same with his wife. We have 2 young men who show up every Sunday.

I love being here, I love learning more and more every day. I'm ready for a new comp and cant wait to see more of Italy. It is beautiful here in Forlì, but supposedly it's one of the more ugly parts of the mission.