Two is better then Three!

Emilia and her mom at church.  Kind of a dark picture

Nana one of our investigators and a boy who lives with her

This will probably not be funny to anyone else, but we were laughing so hard. This lady told us to take one of her fruits, but the whole branch came off instead and we ran away before she could notice. 

All the missionaries here...and Pamela right in the middle for English/French class!

This week we got a new sister in our apartment--Sorella Patterson! She's from Texas, super great, and has studied Italian for two years so she is already really good (only at the grammar though--I'm still ahead in speaking and understanding)! But it has been really fun to have four sisters, although it's kind of weird hearing English again. Yesterday I told a storia in English and it was actually funny (my stories are never funny, but it takes so long for me to explain)! But I like staying in Italian so I can learn it faster! As much as I loved my last companionship--it is SOOOO much better to only be in two in every aspect of the work! I love being with Sorella Spicq; we have a lot to learn from each other, but we try really hard and also have a lot of fun! 

Okay some great stories from this week:

One of our investigator's name is Pamela and she comes to church almost every Wednesday, comes to French class, and we teach her whenever she has time. She said she wants to be baptized, but she hasn't talked to her husband about it yet. Her husband, Franco, also comes to French class and we decided to talk and invite both of them to be baptized as our thought for French class at the end (they are our only students at the moment for that class haha). We weren't sure how Franco would take it, but we decided to try anyway. We explained how we need to be baptized, and the blessings of it, etc. The whole time he was nodding his head and when we asked him to be baptized he said, "I need to think about it...but how do I prepare?" Then we explained how we would need to teach him and we invited him to come to church. He turned to his wife and said "Let's go?" We were absolutely shocked! All this time we thought Franco didn't want to do anything with the church and here he is all prepared and wants to be better! We don't think his wife ever even invited him to come to church! But now the other Sorelle and I are teaching both of them the lessons and hopefully they will be baptized together! 

Also, we have this other investigator, named Adamo, that we haven't taught in forever. His wife is super active and he comes to church all the time. It's weird because every time we have an appointment with him--his wife calls and cancels the appointment! We think she just doesn't want to push him into the church or something. Well this week we finally had an appointment with him...well the other sisters were teaching him this time and they decided to go ahead and invite him to be baptized--and he accepted!! Whoo we're so excited! The wives here are silly. 

Okay so this ward that I am in has probably over 200 members...but only 90 are active. Non va bene. This ward used to be a ton of small branches, but they combined all of them into one big ward. But our members are still all over the place. We think this is one of the main reasons why so many are inactive--because they now have to drive at least an hour to get to church every week and we think most of them just kind of stopped caring to put in that much effort. Since our investigators have now been split up, this week we've been working with the less active members a lot. Almost all of them are part member families so we are also finding new investigators through that. The other day we were on the bus when this guy came on, saw our my name tag and said "Ah the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints!" (which is kind of odd because my name tag is in Italian). Then he told us how he was the first Italian baptized. We don't believe that is true...but turns out he was baptized a long time ago and is now one of our in-actives! On Monday we visited him and he told us how he saw the missionaries a long time ago and they were in front of some graffiti that made them look like Christ...so he talked to them and was baptized a while later. He told us about how special his baptism was, how he has noticed a void in his life, and wants to start reading and praying again.  He and his wife (who is not a member) promised to come to church this Sunday and we're going over for dinner and a lesson next week! He totally wants to come back to church, but all he needed was the invite. It was definitely a miracle that we happened to take that bus to meet him!