No Institute, Just Temple

Thursday morning I had my followup chiropractor visit with Dr. Williams. She adjusted my neck and worked on it for a while. It is generally doing quite a bit better. Again she refused to take any payment despite my protestations, saying that each month she chooses one patient to give free service, and I am the lucky one in February. 

From there I went to the Jonio subway stop near our home and picked up Arsene, the young Catholic priest from Burundi, to take him to the temple Open House. He is such a wonderful guy and seemed to enjoy the visit, though he is still fighting a residual cough. It was fun to visit with him. At one point, I mentioned all the wonderful art on the walls inside the temple, but upon a moment's reflection added that "you (Catholics) know all about wonderful art in churches!"

I'm not very good at selfies

 

After dropping Arsene back off at the subway, I had about an hour at home free again, eating a little lunch and doing some lesson prep. Then Dee and I went out together to pick up Chris Campos for an Open House tour together. He too had been sick but really wanted to go. This time we did the English tour, and he really enjoyed it, staying to get some great photos of the Visitors Center afterwards. 

Chris's panoramic shot

Dee and Chris took the bus back to our neighborhood from the temple, since I had yet another tour (in Italian) with Marco, our landlord at the Institute. He has been very helpful with some issues there, and we have developed a little friendship. He brought his mother, 88 years old, who was amazing. Her near term memory is starting to fail, but she is plenty sharp. She walked up two very long staircases, resorting to the elevator only at the end of the tour to go back down. As a girl in 1949, she played on a girls' basketball team from Rome that won the Italian championship, which was a big deal because Milan was the dominant team back then! The two of them were delightful to visit with, particularly since they speak very clear Italian without a Roman accent. Ugo was there and got to meet Marco, who had some ideas on larger places for the Institute.

Marco with his mom

I got home a few minutes before Dee, who had walked back from Jonio and gone grocery shopping at Conad, without a cart. After that we had the evening at home, which was welcome for both of us. I hadn't had time to prepare much on my lessons, and she had phone calls to make to work on caregivers and doctors for her dad. We had informed the GANS that the Institute campus would be closed for the afternoon, and the Ganziani opened it up for the evening and their English class. 

I spoke with Sister Canfield some more about Chris Erhue. She believes that he is ignoring good advice and warnings about his family situation here, and that they should go back to Nigeria. We are coordinating efforts to make sure he gets the same message from both of us.

We were both exhausted and went to sleep about 9:30pm, hoping for a full night's sleep before a busy day Friday.  I was up until 2am the night before and really appreciated an earlier night.