Indexing and lunch

Sunday I woke up with a very froggy voice and a runny nose, but it would not stop me from teaching my lesson. I took some DayQuil, which helped quite a bit. Our Sacrament meeting was overflowing again, but not as bad as the other (more central) wards: Roma 1 apparently had over 550 people at their meetings. Some Americans sat by me, but we ran out of wireless translation headsets, so I translated for the grandma of the group, who was very grateful. The ward probably should have adjusted and done alternating speaking/translating over the microphone, but this is all rather new to us here and will probably not happen again.

Sergio gave me a bag with some pants in it for my wife to hem for him. His Italian is difficult to understand because he uses so much French, but I thought he said that he had already talked with her about it. Nope. She will gently turn him down, unfortunately, because she has so little time left and so much to do.

My Sunday School lesson, on the temptations of Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well, had lots of participation, including a guy from the UK making nice comments which Anziano Sanchez and I translated into Italian. After the two-hour block, there was a scheduled indexing event, which was the biggest yet. Too bad that Dee wasn't there to enjoy it. There were a bunch of youth, plus many adults, and even some of the Americans stayed. I helped Melchiorre and Vincenzo dip their toe into the indexing pool. It is nice that we have fast internet now at the chapel, with so many people online. Once they configure the newly installed access point, the WiFi coverage will be really good; right now is it weak.

The youth indexing crew

The others

After the indexing, we had one of Roma 3's patented lunches, which was wonderful. Our ward knows how to party!

The youth group, about to dig in

No fear of running out of food!

 

A number of the young missionaries in our ward are going home this week, after having extended three weeks for the Open House. So I took some final photos of our big district. Anziano Sanchez will be staying on until the end of the transfer, when he goes home too. We love these wonderful young people!

L-R: Castro, Ferrara, Ashton, Muce, Harmon, Yanacallo, De La Rosa, Crook, Sanchez

After getting home, I spoke with Dee. Her sister Donna is coming to California again later this week as Dee heads back to Rome.  Dee strongly feels the need to go home (for good) to help her dad a couple of weeks after returning here, when Donna leaves, which means that she would miss the temple dedication by just a few days. That would also be only a few days short of 18 months since started our mission, so it's not really going home early. Also, it means that we wouldn't overlap with the Motts, which we have been looking forward to. And of course we will be sad to miss those last couple of weeks that we had extended for. I talked with the Pickerds, who were very supportive and said it would not be a problem. He suggested that we have the Balzottis take over from us, since they have basically finished their Open House assignment and will go home a few weeks after us. They will be great, and they can then orient the Motts on how we do things. Of course, the Motts may decide to do many things differently, but at least they will understand the framework. Details are yet to be worked out. I am asking permission to stay a few days longer than Dee so that I can attend the temple dedication -- that would be nice, but not essential.

The Willeys dropped by after their church so that I could configure their new Iliad SIM card in their hotspot device. Their fiber internet stopped working for some strange reason, and they have been using the hotspot as their home internet for some weeks. Iliad gives them better price and more data, but you always have to configure the device to insert the SIM PIN automatically, which isn't easy to do for most people.

By late afternoon, I was having chills, and it felt like I was running a slight fever. I kept the living room really warm and wore a sweater and a jacket, but whenever I would leave that room I started shaking. We don't have a thermometer in the apartment, but fortunately the Sorelle below us did. My body temperature was only 99.1, so that was ok. Sister Millet, the mission nurse, told me to drink warm fluids, which helped a little, but I was still cold all evening and felt very wiped out. Finally I turned on the electric heater in our bedroom to make it toasty there and went to sleep with extra covers.