Open house

Sunday was one of those long and wonderful days. We left home at 8:30am for church and returned 11 hours later. It rained quite heavily on the way there, as well as a bit in the early afternoon, but fortunately the rain let up for our open house from 3-6pm. We left early for church to practice for a ward choir number, "Our Father's Love". We probably didn't sound all that great, but we had a rather large group singing, including most of the Relief Society, shown here after the meetings.
Dee writes: The Relief Society President sent out a message Saturday at 5:30pm, asking all the sisters to wear black and a flower. I asked her if she would bring one for the sister missionaries. She told me it's easy for each of us to find one--either from the garden, the plastic centerpiece in the kitchen or the curtain tiebacks. However, we missionaries don't have a garden, centerpiece or curtains, so she brought some for everyone :)

 

It was Ward Conference, but with a special twist: they replaced the bishop. Ugo had told us he was being released after serving about 4 years. The stake president was concerned that he had too much on his plate, with lots of travel for work, the Institute, his family, and being bishop. So in a way he was glad to be released, but at the same time you love the people you serve so much that it's hard to give it up. A stake president once described it as one of those "happy sad days." Our new bishop, Stefano Magnanti (we had lunch at their home a couple of months ago) is a wonderful man, and he will be terrific. We are delighted to sustain him.

My Sunday School lesson, on Joseph in Genesis 34-39, was cut a bit short by the longer Sacrament meeting, which was ok with me. It went fine, with good participation. During the third hour, the stake ran a joint meeting, talking about goals of doing simple, daily things to increase our faith and improve our lives. 

At the very end, the stake president got up and said that he knew we were out of time, but that he had an announcement to make and needed our help. He said that they had been given permission to look for a new chapel location for our ward. The current chapel is not in a good neighborhood, is a bit run down, is over half a mile from the subway, and is on the second floor with only a crude outdoor lift for handicap access, so this was very welcome news. He said that they have a location in mind and a plan, with a meeting on Monday to get the plan approved by Area authorities. The new location is only 50 meters from a subway stop, in a nicer part of town. It will take a bunch of interior construction to turn the facility there into a chapel, and they still need some concessions from the landlord, so he asked us to fast and pray for divine help in getting it all done soon. We were all pretty excited and will have to wait and see what happens.

After church we left directly for the Institute, where Dee started putting out food for the open house. I began printing photos on our nice color laser printer to be used in making eight posters of the various kinds of activities that go on at the Institute, two posters per room. Fortunately, Alessio and Ugo, with two of his kids (Joshua and Sarah), showed up to help us set things up, including gluing the posters together and hanging them on the wall. It was a lot of work, but we were more or less ready in time. 

 

 

 

People started arriving slowly, but by the end we had over 40 people who showed up, which probably exceeded our expectations. The word for open house in Italian is open house, but they don't quite have the concept down. Nobody left until it was over; they didn't seem to get the idea of dropping in for a few minutes and then leaving. That was all good: it meant we had a lot of visiting and a full house.  At the end, one of the stake presidents gave a spiritual message, gathering the whole group together in the biggest classroom (again, not usually what we would do in an open house, but it went well). All the seats were full with more people standing at the door. We got to meet the parents of a number of our GANS kids, which was wonderful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dee's carrot cake was the hit of the night. Several kids and adults couldn't get enough of it, and both cakes were consumed. She promised to get the recipe out to a number of people. Italian cakes are usually very simple, sort of like a light, dry pound cake, and no frosting. So the nuts, moist cake and cheesecake frosting knocked them off their feet.

After we got home, I went over to help the Knieses with a problem they were having on their laptops with the church email website. It is probably related to the fact that they use Macbooks instead of Windows machines, as it seems to work fine on Windows. I told them to call the church tech support folks Monday -- sounds like a bug on the server web page.

In the evening Dee got a call from Joe, an Italian cousin from Edmonton whom we met a few years ago. She had given them some family history and thought that he was calling about that, but he was just touching base. He was surprised to learn that we are living in Italy, and he gave us an update on his parents and aunts/uncles, all wonderful folks from Calabria, most now living in Canada, who are the contemporaries of Dee's parents and are not doing well healthwise. It was cool to hear from him.