Happy December

Well It was a great Thanksgiving here in Italy, thanks to the fact that I am spoiled and surrounded by American mothers aka senior missionarie! I ate very well and enjoyed every minute of it. I hope your thanksgivings were just as wonderful!

So the other day we had an appointment and it was a mess with travel and getting our member there with us and everything so in the end they AP’s helped us out and gave us and this member a ride however somewhere along the way I found a nice present left behind by a thoughtful dog and when we got in the car everyone was like, “what is that smell!” it was pretty funny, we pulled over and they made me put my shoe in the back of the car in a plastic sack. There is significantly less doggy bombs on the sidewalks here than in Pescara, but I still just wish people would buy less rain coats for the dogs and more pooper scooper bags.

Me and my companion have now taken part in the decoration of 3 different Christmas trees! It is nice because we have zero Christmas decorations in our apartment. I figure I probably won’t be in it for Christmas anyway. We had zone conference yesterday and because it is the zone conference before Christmas we had a special meal at the villa. Just like my very fist zone conference! It is crazy to think that since my first zone conference I have been all over the mission and back to the zone that gets to eat at the villa (mission presidents home). The other zones get a nice meal too, just not like the one we get.

Ok to end off I thought I would share a story of something that happened to us on Sunday. Me and my companion were heading towards the spot of town that we do zone singing, however we had got out of an appointment late and were running a little behind schedule. We were trying to figure out the fasted route and we got on a bus only to change our minds at the last minute and get on a different bus that passed a train station, knowing that if we were going to catch the train the bus had to be right on schedule. When we were two minutes from the train station and 3 minutes away from catching our train the bus started slowing down and we realized that the driver was arguing with an old lady at the front who was asking for directions, but obviously turned around. She kept saying one spot and then another and the bus driver was getting impatient. There were some young boys at the front of the bus who were being so kind to try and help this lady but in the end the bus diver decided to just call the police to pick her up at the end of the line and help her find her destination, think that maybe she was suffering from memory loss and didn’t know where she was. My companion calmly talked to the women and found out where she was wanting to go and found it on our map, but by then the police had already been called and would be waiting at the end of the line. The women was very nervous about all this and we talked to her and calmed her down. We had missed our train and we both decided that helping this woman was more important so we offered to ride with her to the end of the line so she wouldn’t feel so worried. The woman was so grateful and another passenger on the bus mentioned to her that she was very lucky to have found such wonderful people to help her. At the end of the line she left with the officers to head back home and we got back on the bus and talked to the driver for the whole ride and got his phone number. We called the older women, Leah, when we got home to make sure she was alright and she was so happy and said, I know that this was definitely the hand of the lord. Even though we were unable to go to zone singing I didn’t care because I felt so nice to be able to help someone feel the love of the savior and God’s hand in her life.

Happy December!