Sunday marked six months since we started our MTC training, so we will be home about one year from now. It's incredible how quickly time has passed. We love what we are doing here and hope that time slows down for the next year, but that's probably wishful thinking. Anyway, we are delighted to be serving together and thankful for everyone's love and support.
Church was great. In Sacrament meeting, Rhenald, our GANS from Nigeria, gave a talk on repentance in English, with Brother Bosco translating. Then Margarita spoke; she's our Relief Society President from the Dominican Republic. She used a wonderful parable about the worth of souls. She was called just when we got here, and she is doing a terrific job of reaching out to sisters and caring for everyone. As Dee says, she is "all heart". Bishop Perego then called the Huber's daughter, here on spring break from attending West Point, to give a brief testimony, as well as my wife to do so on family history at the close of the meeting. There was a method to that madness: after the three-hour block of meetings, we had a ward activity for indexing and family history. A bunch of us brought laptops and set up tables in the chapel. We were there for a couple of hours and had a great time, with the two of us helping out the members using our family history skills.
My IT skills are also an asset here. For example, the DSL internet is pretty bad at church, so I set up my phone as a WiFi hotspot, which made things go much better. Monica, our Primary President, was there with her very old HP laptop whose battery no longer works. I told her that she should get a new battery, but she said that they aren't available any more. So I told her about eBay, where I buy such things, and sure enough we found one for her for under 30 euros. Since she doesn't have an eBay account, I offered to buy it if she would pay me back, and she was interested. Meanwhile, the Magnantis have some computer problems that I will help them with, including upgrading her laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 10.
Dee writes: I helped a sister who has been a member for forty years. She told me her mother had done a ton of genealogy. When we looked at her tree, though, there was a bunch of stuff for her to do. She was surprised and delighted. It is almost always the case that the family tree that is "all done" in fact has a lot of holes. I love helping people delve into their family tree, especially in Italian!
Fabrizio (he is also the one with whom I team teach Gospel Doctrine) and I had a nice/brief initial home teaching visit with Sergio. Sergio is about my age, born in Morocco of an Italian mother and a French father. He grew up speaking French in Casablanca but moved to Italy almost 45 years ago as a young adult. His Italian isn't very good and he has a very heavy French accent, so it's often hard to follow what he is saying, but he's very sharp and quite knowledgeable about the gospel. He joined the church in 1977, having first heard about it by following the Osmonds. The first time he ever attended church was in October 1975 in Rome, so he might have actually met my wife there right when she arrived in the mission. Small world. It is good to get to know these people better.
We had a bunch of WhatsApp conversations all day about upcoming events, including Easter weekend with General Conference. Because it's a family kind of holiday, we'll pare back our usual conference schedule so as not to drag kids away from their families.
In the evening, we went over to the Knieses apartment, just across the piazza, for some Mormon Tiramisu (Orzo instead of coffee) and delicious caramel corn and visiting with them and the Balzottis. It was lots of fun -- wonderful folks all.