Anziano Rodriguez, a new assistant to the president, told a very funny but also instructive story. Once he attended a Sacrament meeting where a speaker got up and started by saying that he really didn't like giving talks or preparing for them. So he had procrastinated working on his talk until the end, and ultimately he decided just to rely on the spirit to tell him what to say. He then asked the congregation to wait a minute while he waited for inspiration on his message. After a bit, he looked up and said "brothers and sisters, the spirit has just spoken to me, and what it told me is that I should have prepared a talk!" 😀
Adrian, one of our GANS who leaves in less than two weeks on his mission to Milano, was invited by President Pickerd to attend. Fortunately I mentioned to him a couple of days earlier that he should wear a suit, as otherwise he would have showed up in much more casual attire. He looked good and seemed to enjoy it all (especially lunch :-). Because he doesn't speak English, they had live headset translation for him and a young Sorella, both originally from South America. Part of the time Elder Sanchez did the translation from English into Spanish for them, but when the Simoncini couple showed up, Elder Melling did translation into Italian for a couple of hours. That is exhausting work! Adrian didn't have a name tag yet, so I loaned him one of mine to wear so that he would fit in better. That earned a couple of double takes at first, but he looked very natural wearing a name tag.
I did some final polishing of my lesson, and Dee worked in the kitchen to prepare her Crack Chicken specialty (chicken, bacon, cream cheese, cheddar, and ranch powder). It was served in warmed pita bread, which is called pane arabo (Arab bread) here and is not well known. She had done a bunch of the prep in the days before, so it went fairly quickly, but she still ended up needing every minute. Dee writes:We were delighted to be able to serve some Easter Colomba cake that Ugo had bought for us at a discounted price of 99 cents each, on clearance. Also, I cooked up the frozen french fries to help make room for all the Wednesday ice cream.
Kids started showing up for the evening a bit early, and by 7pm we actually had a good quorum to start the class. That never happens! When he showed up early for the first time ever, I actually said to Claudio, "who are you, and what did you do to the real Claudio?" 😉 We had quite a nice class on 4 Nephi and Mormon 1-6, with lots of questions from me and thoughtful responses from the students, as well as some good laughs along the way. Class ended a bit early, which left Dee with the problem of needing to warm the bread when the oven was already in use, but a couple of girls helped her by warming pita bread in the microwave as fast as they could to keep up. Everyone had their fill and loved it. Dee was asked for the recipe by one young man who asked her in English to "learn me how to make this!"
The Simoncinis have the job to man the Rome Temple Information Center, a trailer on the temple grounds with a lovely picture window looking out on the site. It has been quite busy in its first couple of weeks, with much of the traffic being tourists from the US. We learned that they really don't get a day off, as it is open all seven days, with shorter hours on Sunday. The young missionaries help out in the afternoon, but we want to offer to sub for them regularly one morning a week before going to the Institute. It would be fun for us and hopefully give them a bit of down time, so we will see what they say. President Pickerd gave us the ok to make them that offer.
My sister Karen & her husband Dave have been doing some research and planning for their trip to London and Italy in October. They had a number of good questions about airports and getting around here, so we talked on the phone for a while after we returned home from the Institute. Their trip is longer than our other visitors', so they have enough time to do Venice and maybe Ravenna, one of our favorite spots. It was fun to talk with them, but late when we finally got to bed.