Hey! So Noah Jewkes, my friend serving in Denmark just emailed me. He is serving in a little city in the boroughs of Copenhagen. He said he was doing some Area Book and found a whole bunch of sheets and pics from a one Soster Kelley. He is in...hmm...Amager...Allerod...one of those! I don't remember! But he said he is going to take special care of those people! I thought that was kind of cool!
I also had Zone Conference this week! It was good to see
all the Missionaries from Sicily and Malta again. This Conference was about the
Book of Mormon. And about how we can use the book of Mormon better in our
finding efforts. President doesn’t want us to give out a book without a sincere
heart felt invitation to read it. Some Elders just set up shop and hand them
out!! Don’t know why... But yes. It was good. We also got a change on Suit
Jackets. We can wear sweaters or suit jackets now. Woot. Depending on what the
Zone Leaders choose. All the Zone Leaders are Italian... So they just say you
can choose.
Also... They changed the new mission standards. Instead
of 20 baptisms a month President raised it to 40 baptisms... The math all works
out when he was presenting it to us but this new goal is surprisingly hard....
The average right now is about 7 baptisms a month for the mission. We were able
to get 23 5 months ago. It was also President Kelly’s and a 20 others’ last
transfers in the mission so they were working super, super hard. I think it can
be done. But a lot of faith is going to have to be exercised that is for sure.
President also wants for Italians to be baptized instead of Africans or Chinese.
So our goals are changing and so must we.
He also stressed that the temple is getting built in less
than 17 months. So we have 5 months to get people baptized to get them to the
temple! That was a cool talk he gave actually.
It is orange season here in Sicily. Sicily is the land of
oranges and lemons. There are orange tress everywhere!!! For example... There
are hundreds of orange trees in the city and they are starting to drop oranges.
When you go out into the country it is only oranges! In the winter they are so
cheap people sell them for like 10 cents a kilo or just give them out free because
they are so many. Blood oranges to! Everywhere. The city smells like oranges
now too.
There was a big strike in town this week. All the truck
drivers parked their trucks in the middle of the road so nobody could move.
They were protesting poverty in the South of Italy.
We also had Stake Conference this week. We all climbed on
bus up to Enna. All the members. It was really fun for everybody. All the
members saw their friends and we saw all the missionaries for the second time
that week. At that conference, President gave some really good talks about
member missionaries and the temple again. One thing that was really humbling
for me--Stake Conference was about the same size of our ward every week, about
200 people and 40 of them were missionaries. It’s really such a blessing to
live in Zion. Makes me want to work harder.
Also. Our investigator, Francesco, with the baptism date
didn’t come to church for the 2nd time so we have had to move his baptism date.
He is still awesome though. He wants to get baptized really badly. But
sometimes he is just a little lazy. We are going to be seeing him a lot more
and see if there is maybe some family problems there. I think his mom is not
all too happy, which is maybe what is stopping him. So we are going to keep
working with him. He is still a progressing investigator.
Transfer calls this week. I am going to Catania for 3
days because Cicon has to take a plane to Napoli for his Visa. Should be a good
time.
