100 Backpacks

An addendum on my clothes dryer "rant" from Thursday: our mission president once mentioned to us that our apartment, which we absolutely love, is rather inexpensive. It dawned on me yesterday that perhaps one reason for the low rent is that we have only a tiny balcony, completely filled with an HVAC unit, so there's no place to hang clothes outside to dry there. Maybe that's why it's cheap -- who would want it? 😏

Friday was an awesome day at the Institute. In the morning on the way into town, we went to Lidl to buy a bunch of food for the evening meal, as well as for the ward Christmas party Saturday. My wife was asked to bring a "secondo", which usually means some kind of meat, but we asked several Italians exactly what it meant and got a wide variety of answers. She ultimately decided to cook some sausage, so we bought some of that.

For Institute Friday night, she decided to go with pasta. Anziano Waddell has a great sauce recipe, so she bought his list of ingredients (a triple batch worth) and had him come in to help her make it. Now she'll know how to do it next time. The sauce has chopped-up sausage in it, so we bought a bunch of that. There's a secret ingredient the Italians love, as long as you don't tell them what it is (spoiler alert: barbecue sauce!). It turned out very well. Here are some photos of the process:

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the afternoon I taught my Seminary class, on prophets and revelation, with my three regular attenders: Luis, Donatella, and Valentina. We're getting to have a very nice rapport now, with good back and forth discussion, and they laugh at my jokes. I gave them a homework assignment this week, to memorize one of the Seminary Scripture Mastery scriptures. Here are the two girls after class in the kitchen, Donatella on the right:

Kids started arriving soon thereafter for the evening events. Ugo was running late, which was a problem because his car was full of the nine big boxes of materials for the refugee kits. There was a big accident on the road which stalled traffic for a while, but then it cleared, and he arrived a bit after 6pm, instead of 5:30pm as planned. Fortunately, by then the traffic zone limitation was lifted, so he could drive right up to the outside of the Institute to drop everything off, with a bunch of kids coming down to carry everything up. We didn't get started filling the backpacks with items until after 6:30pm, but the kids finished it all in under 15 minutes! Ugo gave a nice little intro speech, explaining that often when they do service projects for the refugees, they never get to see or interact with the refugees, so we are going to hand deliver everything this next week and have a meal with them. We had two assembly lines, one on each side of the tables:

 

  

 

It was organized chaos that went very well. Click here to see the video. Using LDS Charities' funds, we had bought 100 each of the following items: a small backpack (used to hold everything), socks, gloves, a warm scarf, a portable battery charger for cell phones, a flashlight, a chocolate bar, and a granola bar. The line started with the backpacks, then passed from station to station where each kid added their item. At the end they zipped up the backpack and passed it to another bucket brigade carrying the finished items into the next room. They didn't have quite enough people to reach, so Jomar and Anziano Waddell cleverly came up with an air delivery system down the hall -- watch the video here!

Ugo also brought in a couple of church public affairs people, who met with us a for a few minutes. They will try get some press coverage for our refugee meetings.

At the end, we had 100 completed kits, ready to be put into the shipping boxes for next week!

Despite the late start, we were then able to begin Institute class almost on time. 

 

 

 

On the sign-in sheet, we had 31 kids in attendance, though there were probably a few more. It was as full as Thanksgiving, with barely enough space to move around! Ugo kept the class short, because there was dinner and then a white elephant game. The Knieses showed up to help, and they were wonderful! Sister Knies handled portion control on the pasta, which was critical because we had so many more kids than we expected. Anziano Knies ran the dessert table and handed out plastic place settings. My wife even had a special meal for Gustavo, who is vegetarian. Please watch the brief video by clicking here, which gives an idea of how crowded and noisy the place was. We're not complaining -- the place was really hopping!

 

 

 

Gustavo (at left) got a vegetarian pasta meal

 

 

 

We had a little time to visit with the kids, though it was pretty busy during the meal and cleanup afterwards. They were having fun being together. Just after 9pm, as the party was getting started,we headed out. We were going to drive the Knieses home, but the young sisters got partway home on the subway and realized they had left their flip phone at the Institute, so they came back to get it. By then, it would take them too long to get home on the subway to keep mission rules (and they also said lots of creepy guys were there late on the subway), so the Knieses volunteered to return home on the Metro and let the sisters drive with us. What wonderful folks!

The coat rack was so overfull that it was hard to fish out our jackets. We were tired but very happy about how well it went. Hopefully we'll continue to have such great attendance!