Sorella Rachel Riley: 18 months in northern Italy: Week 8

Forlì - week 2

This week can be pretty much summed up by saying that it is hot, missionary work is hard, but I love my mission and the missionaries and members who I am working with.

On Sunday, the branch 1st counselor literally fell to the floor and passed out because of heat stroke. The loud crash he made woke me up from my mental nap (my eyes were open but my brain was off). It took a good 10 mins to get him conscious again, he drank some water and they brought in a fan to blow on him and sacrament meeting continued. So yeah, if you have it, be grateful for A.C.

English class: one of the old men who has been coming to English class with the missionaries for at least 5 years, brought a bag of fresh tomatoes of all varieties, and that made my day! According to Sorella O it's not normal to eat a huge tomato like an apple...hopefully one day I will be able to do that without squirting seeds all over my front. Anyways, this super-Italian man is very friendly and loves to have doctrinal discussions with the missionaries. When answering questions for language practice, we discovered that his favorite animal is "the woman".

Now that we have bikes, traveling is much more efficient. I have learned to trust in my companion and to hope that the cars won't hit us because bike riding is a whole new adventure over here. We have attempted many pass-bys to inactives but obviously not enough because nobody has let us in yet.

It's America week at Lidl (a grocery store). They have all this "American food", made in Italy. We had a blast grocery shopping but some of the stuff was pretty hilarious, like I have lived in America for a while and I have never heard of most of it. We got to explain to some Italian men how bagels are eaten. We bought things such as hamburger-flavored peanuts and pizza-flavored cheese balls. That was fun, I learned so much new stuff about what real Americans eat!

We taught the whole first lesson to C, a Nigerian refugee, who speaks English! He's a super cool guy and just wants to figure out what church is true because so many different groups are claiming to have the truth. He seemed to understand the restoration lesson pretty well and was eager to read the BOM and pray for an answer. So yeah that was/is awesome!

On Monday night, we got a call from F (an eternal investigator who we had scheduled an appointment with for Thursday, and we didn't know much about him bc the former elders left no info besides a phone number and name). So this guy wanted to meet with us right then so we hopped on our bikes and met him at the church. The situation of him wanting to meet, seemingly out of the blue, was a little sketchy so we called our district leader and let him know what was going on, just in case we were never heard from again. The meeting went well, he's a nice man who has been meeting with many different pairs of Elders. He was shocked that girls could be missionaries too, since they don't hold the priesthood. He asked us our thoughts on that and a few other tough to answer questions. He has obviously been doing research on the internet...

So yeah, not a ton of investigators but that will soon change! We've been getting referrals from the members, who are so pumped to have obedient, hard-working missionaries in Forlì.

For P-day we are visiting ancient Catholic churches in Ravenna. Super cool!

In the words of Pres Allen we are starting from -0, but this is going to be an awesome adventure filled with lessons, conversions, and baptisms!

Quotable quote from Sorella O: "the best thing about pizza in Italy is that you can buy and eat a whole pizza for yourself and nobody cares because they're all doing the same thing!"

Thanks for staying in touch, I love y'all!

Love,

Sorella Riley