Train to Lamezia

Wednesday was a travel day. The wonderful Balzottis picked us up just after 8:30am to take us to the subway. They're going to use our car while we're gone; its ZTL pass will help them pick up their daughter downtown and take her to the airport. Even though it wasn't a holiday, there was almost no traffic on the way to the subway, and the subway itself was pretty empty. It's called fare il ponte--when there's a holiday, the Italians often take the next day off. That's the ponte. It literally means "make a bridge". This was a BIG ponte, since there were still three working days in the week. 

We got to the Termini train station almost an hour early for our 10:10am train to Lamezia, which is south in Calabria. The train itself was quite full. Thank goodness for reserved seats, but there isn't much room to maneuver -- think coach class on an airplane.

It was a five hour ride, which was pretty pleasant for being somewhat cramped. There is one faster train trip (3.5 hours), but it leaves about 6:30am, which was not appealing. We sat in a group of four seats; the other two were a man and a woman (not connected to each other), with whom we had some very nice conversation. She in particular was quite vivacious. We sure would love to have her show up in our ward. She works in a private nursery and loves children. Just before we arrived, she started to doll herself up. She even put on deodorant! 

The Italian countryside is always gorgeous, and the last hour of the ride was mostly right alongside the ocean. We were on the wrong side of the car to get a good photo, but you can see a bit here:

It was rainy when we left, but the further south we got, the more the sun came out. When we arrived in Lamezia just after 3pm, it was quite pleasant. Our hotel was just a block from the train station. It costs only 60 euros/night but got great reviews online, and it was very nice and clean, with a real shower. The staff was very attentive and the rooms were spotless as well as large (by Italian standards). 

As soon as we got here and unpacked for a few minutes, we walked down the street to a Carrefour supermarket, where we got some fresh fruit, bread, bottled water, and some paper goods for our room, not to mention amaretti (almond cookies -- you have to try them!). They had a statue of Saint Francis in the front of the store.

For dinner we went out to a local "bar", which is more like a small cafe in Italy. We had some pizza and arancini, which were good enough, considering they had been sitting at room temperature for an indeterminate number of hours or weeks and were reheated in a microwave. I know how to show a girl a good time! At one point my wife took a piece of mine to try and ended up dropping it right into my cup of aranciata (orange soda), knocking it over and making a nice little pond on the table. We couldn't stop laughing.

We love our little Chinese stores in Rome, with their suprisingly good selection of just about everything from kitchen to clothing. There were a whole bunch of Chinese stores in Lamezia, but they're all wholesale establishments, so we couldn't shop there.

We are really looking forward to some good visiting on Thursday!

Santo Stefano -- tech day at home

Tuesday was St. Steven's day, another major Italian holiday, so almost everything was closed, except the Chinese store. For the most part, we were home, though I did go around and do a bit of IT Santa Claus work. It was good to have time at home. Dee appreciated time to catch up on laundry and reading.

The Knieses, who live in the apartment building right next to ours, have longstanding horrible WiFi problems at home with their iPhones and Macs. The service drops in and out, and they can't get WiFi in their bedroom most of the time, only about 20 feet from the router. Sure enough, their WiFi connection was bad in my first testing using my laptop. However, when I connected with an ethernet cable instead, I got over 50Mbps down and almost 20Mbps up -- turns out that they actually have a fiber connection! That's well over 10x the internet speed in our apartment, not that I'm jealous or anything <g>. So I gave them a couple of things to try and report back on. First indications are that it's now working well, but we'll see what happens.

I then went over to the mission office and helped out Anziano Paulsen, the mission financial secretary, with some things on his work PC: the default zoom setting in Adobe Acrobat, and getting the system language and keyboard set appropriately for him (English and Italian, respectively). After a recent Windows update, he had lost some of his language configuration settings. It's interesting for Americans to use an Italian PC. He has a physical Italian keyboard, which he needs for easy access to symbols like the euro sign and accented letters, but he wanted the system menus in English. Another difference in Italy is that the decimal point on the numeric keypad is a decimal comma, so we still need to adjust that for his taste. There were a couple of other issues I couldn't figure out easily and will get back to him on.

Meanwhile, I finished downloading the 10+ GB of photos for Sorella Manning and put them on her flash drive. It took the better part of a day, with various network/browser glitches causing a restart of the (very long) download. Anyway, it just illustrates why I need a second laptop, because I'm often doing something that runs for a long time but need to take my laptop somewhere with me in the interim. So hopefully the Dell unit I ordered will show up soon; if not, I will buy a cheap laptop locally. At home I had several laptops, which were often all busy with various tasks.

My wife bought new cloth shower curtains for my bathroom. The existing plastic ones were a bit worn out and, more importantly, difficult to clean, so this is a good thing.

We packed for our Calabria train trip Wednesday morning, fitting into our very small carry-on suitcases. It will be a busy few days on our trip, but nice to have a bit of a vacation. We have found over the years that small luggage is far preferable. For example, we each brought only a 22-inch carry-on and a backpack on our last couple of three-week trips to Italy. It's so much easier to get around, and also quicker for finding stuff.

In the evening I found a very disturbing problem: over half of my Google contacts had disappeared! There apparently is a longstanding but very rare bug (aren't I lucky? :-) that causes contacts to disappear. It has happened again since I did a restore from a recent backup. We rely on our contacts for lots of stuff, both on our phones and our computers, so not being able to trust them is a big problem. Google has a way to restore contacts to any point in the last 30 days, but the issue has apparently been going on for a while, as each snapshot I restored was missing different subsets. Yikes! I obviously need to back up more frequently, and I'll also have to spend some time splicing different versions of my contact list back together somehow.

Buon Natale: too much food

Christmas day was probably busier than we would have liked, but the food and company made it all worthwhile! The young sisters brought by some homemade cookies in the morning to say thanks for our help the night before.

After a fairly relaxed morning, in which my wife defrosted and baked the extra casserole from last Friday, we headed out to the Perego/ward Christmas dinner at our chapel. Ugo and his family have been doing this for four years now: the whole family arrives about noon to start preparing tons of food -- some purchased, some homemade. Everyone in the ward is invited, but it's particularly aimed at those who have no family nearby for the holiday.

When we arrived, my wife went to the kitchen, while I went into the clerk's office to try to understand the slow internet issues. After power cycling everything, I did some speed tests, which show about 3.5Mbps down and about 0.5Mbps up; horrible numbers, which varied a bit from test to test, but comparable to our DSL at home. I also installed the new extra router in the chapel to try to get better coverage throughout the building. It helped a little, but the slow internet connection dominates everything, not in a good way.

 

There were many kitchen helpers, and the spread was amazing. At first there were several kinds of appetizers, some of which Alessio helped prepare. Included were a bunch of small pieces of bread, on which you put various spreads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ugo welcomed everyone about 2pm, and the festivities began. Children and ladies got to start first.

 

 

 

After appetizers came the pasta and soup, with several different kinds to try. My favorite was the tortellini.

After the pasta came sausage, freshly grilled outside by our Elders Quorum President.

Finally came the desserts. 

 

 

There was a pretty good turnout, maybe 30 people, though fewer than expected, so there were a lot of leftovers, some of which went home with the young missionaries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After dessert, they played Uno, Yahtzee, and then Bingo.

The Peregos gave each missionary a nice gift: a sock filled with rice that you can warm in the microwave and put on your neck or back when something is sore. David made them all. We have some of these at home that we love, and there are times when they are indispensable.

Sister Manning wanted to Skype home about 5pm, so I went into the clerk's office, unplugged the WiFi unit ("LDSAccess") so nobody else could use the scant bandwidth, and then hooked up my laptop with an Ethernet cable for her to use. She was able to connect and have a call with decent quality. 

 

Once her 40 minutes was finished, I unplugged my laptop and reconnected the WiFi. Afterward, she mentioned that all of her photos are on the internal storage of her Samsung tablet, and in Google Drive, so I offered to buy a 64GB SD card on amazon.it for her (she'll reimburse me: 25 euros) so she can have a removable copy. I'm also downloading all her photos and videos, over 10GB, at home here to put onto her USB flash drive. We Whitings are pretty hard core about having multiple backup copies of things, having once lost stuff in a fire. She was delighted.

It was about 7pm when we finally got home, stuffed to the gills! Everything was so good, but we really shouldn't have eaten so much -- easier said than done. 😋

We called some friends up in northern Italy and in Switzerland to wish them a Merry Christmas, and then we also called our kids to do likewise. Overall, a very nice day, quite different from most Christmases for us. Here is our Christmas card to you: our 3-D figures with hand-made cards from our daughter Wendy.

 

Tech Support on Christmas Eve

Sunday was Christmas Eve. We had only one hour of church at 11am, a bit later than usual. The eight missionaries (four young, four senior) in our district were asked to sing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" -- in English! -- so we went a bit early to practice. Half of us were singing harmony and half melody, with me holding down the bass part. Anziano McConkie, who is a performing arts major and has a gorgeous tenor voice, sang "Silent Night" in Italian as a solo. After a program telling the Christmas story with scriptures, narration, and music, Bishop Perego gave a wonderful talk about the gifts we can give to the Savior, showing samples (fake, I assume :) of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that he undoubtedly uses effectively in teaching Seminary and Institute classes. He said that the best gift we can give is to obey the commandments, which bring happiness. There were a number of out-of-town visitors present, mostly family of our ward members, which made the day even better.  

I asked David Perego, age 13, what he thought he might get for Christmas, and his response was, "I don't really care. What I like is seeing other people get presents".  What a wonderful attitude. He has three younger siblings, so hopefully he can really enjoy that.

After church, I tried to help the Spragues with a gmail problem on their laptop. She had inadvertently removed a couple of accounts from their list of "linked" accounts, something I didn't even know you could do! Unfortunately, the internet at church is so slow that we couldn't get anything done. I told them to call me in afternoon from their apartment, where internet is decent, and I would help out via TeamViewer. They did, and I did, and we worked it all out pretty quickly. I also configured their myldsmail.net email accounts to forward to their personal gmail accounts; they were delighted to have one less place to go to check email. Their laptop is a few years old and has a dead battery, so I also offered to buy them a new battery on eBay, for under 30 euro; they were also delighted at that. Overall, being Santa GeekClaus is very rewarding!

The Hubers are an American couple in our ward. He works for the military in some capacity, so they have access to the commissary on the base near Naples, which is basically an American supermarket. Saturday they contacted us to see if we wanted anything from there, where there are many items which either aren't available here at all, or are very expensive. So of course we gave them a list we had been accumulating since they last did this for us a few months ago. After church they gave us a big shopping bag, filled with goodies which we were delighted to reimburse them for. Santa could not have done a better job! Among the loot: lotion kleenex (impossible to find here), a bottle of 100 acetaminophen tablets (you can buy maybe ten at at time here, for 10x the price), Crystal Light lemonade power (very expensive on amazon.it, apparently Italians don't do diet drinks much), Alka Seltzer, shortening, Hershey kisses, etc. Christmas definitely came to us on Sunday!

In the afternoon I caught up on some paperwork and bookkeeping, some personal and some for the Institute. The crazy and wonderful week had left me behind. My wife made some more of her wonderful chocolate/peanut butter cookies, and we dropped off a festive plate of them to our neighbors across the hall. There are four apartments on our floor, but only two of them are occupied, and they seem like a very nice family, with mom, dad, and a daughter who is perhaps 10 years old.

 

In the evening we went down to the Institute to let in our Sorelle (who live right below us), Ricks and Bryant, so they could put together a video collage of missionaries around the world singing Silent Night in different languages. After that, they wanted to do their semi-annual (Skype) call home, using the much better internet speeds there -- about 10x the speed of our home DSL connection. Unfortunately, the internet there was very flaky this time. We have a wireless ISP, and it's usually quite reliable but does occasionally go on the fritz. So they couldn't download the video clips they  needed, and they couldn't Skype. Thus, after a half an hour of trying, we finally just drove home. We needed to take some stuff to/from the Institute anyway, so the trip wasn't wasted.

At our apartment, we set them up to use Skype, one using my laptop (and our slow DSL internet) in our living room, and one using my the 10GB plan on the new 4G SIM card on my phone in the kitchen. Each one talked for about 40 minutes with their family, who had gathered for the event. We left them alone to do their visiting. It seemed to work well enough in both cases. In fact, as far I can tell, the phone only used 200MB of data for over 40 minutes of video Skype -- doesn't seem possible, but maybe they give some kind of free data usage on holidays (?). In any case, I'm not complaining. Monday at the ward Christmas feast I'll let some other missionaries there do the same, because the internet is so bad at church. Maybe I'll get to do some diagnosis of the problem as well, but we want these missionaries to have good experience with their families for Christmas, even if we have to pay for a bit of extra data on our SIM cards.

After the Skype call, we let the sisters do their video editing on my computer. It took almost and hour, requiring a bit of help from me using Nero to convert some of the video formats and to copy some videos from their tablet, because doing it over the internet here is prohibitively slow. At the end they had a fun little video to share with friends and fellow missionaries. They were very grateful for our help all evening, which made it all worthwhile. I didn't get good photos, but here they are at my desk:

 

I spoke with my sister Marilyn on the phone, and my wife spent some time trying to help her parents at home, which can often be frustrating because they have a knack for undoing whatever she sets up, inadvertently or not.

Overall, it was a lovely Christmas Eve. Our best wishes to all our readers for a Merry Christmas. It's the first time since we had children that we won't be with them in person during the holidays. We feel so blessed to be serving here and thinking more about others than ourselves, serving as Christ might do. May you all remember the reason for the season.

Baobab refugee camp

Saturday was the 100th birthday of my aunt Elma Udall, who passed away just a couple of months ago. She never married, and she lived all over the world, working at various US embassies throughout her career. She was a favorite aunt to many of her numerous nieces and nephews, including me. It was decidedly her time to go, as her health had been on the decline for quite a while, but she had a long and full life. For decades I have called her on Dec 23rd to wish her a happy birthday, and I miss having that chance this year. I'm glad that she's in a better place.

It was not much of a P-day, but awesome nonetheless! We left home about 10:30am to go to the Institute and meet the APs, Anziani Vance and Campbell, at 11:15am to put the boxes of backpacks into their van, so they could drive it over to the Baobab refugee camp. We expected to have a bit of waiting time, but they arrived early, which ended up being good. All of the boxes fit into the van, with only two trips up and down the elevator, and there was even room for us to ride along with them instead of taking the subway. It turned out to be difficult to find the place, which is right near the Tiburtina train station, but you can't really see the camp from the street. Fortunately, between TomTom and Google Maps, we made it there about noon, which was our target time. 

Along the way, we were chatting with the APs. Both are from Utah (Brigham City and Layton), and I mentioned that we have a nephew, Patrick Parker (my sister Marilyn's son), who teaches math at a high school near Brigham City. Anziano Vance perked right up and said "No way -- Patrick Parker!? He was my AP Calculus teacher and my favorite teacher ever!" Small world. Here are some photos:

Anziano Vance, former AP Calc student of Patrick Parker

The Whitings and the APs

We also made a small video to send to Patrick, and I called him in the evening to let him know. Patrick was delighted, and he gave me several things to kid Anziano Vance about.

The day was sunny and quite warm compared to the recent past, with temperatures nearly 60F. I had anticipated freezing during the day and dressed accordingly, but it was pretty comfortable out. We unloaded the boxes and waited for the others to arrive.

The first to show up were Anziano and Sorella Herway, the LDS Charities missionary couple for all of Italy. They were the ones to get us the funding for this activity, and they know the Baobab folks who run the camp. It's all volunteers from the community: the Herways love working with them because all funds go to the refugees, none to overhead. You really can't tell from the (rather isolated) street that the camp is nearby; you have to walk a couple hundred yards to get there. Anziano Herway had them bring out four shopping carts to wheel in our boxes, which got put into a locked shed to wait until after lunch. Sister Herway and my wife stayed outside on the street to direct others of our group where to go as they arrived, which took a while due to slowdowns on the subway system and being difficult to figure out how to get there from the station.

Sister Herway

The camp consists of a bunch of small tents where the refugees sleep, mostly adult men from Africa, outside a big abandoned building. There are about 100 of them there right now, many of whom hope to leave quickly for Germany or France, where the economy and job availability are better. The small minority of kids and women mostly go to InterSOS, which is much safer for them. LDS Charities helped provide some of the tents, including a huge white tent where they can eat and have other activities. When the Herways got here early in the year, the meals were outside, which was obviously difficult when it was cold and/or raining.

One of our local church Public Affairs folks, Brother Persico, showed up and did some interviews for an article he hopes to write for the Liahona magazine, possibly including some photos and videos that I took. You can see all the photos/videos from the day here, more than 100 of them.

Volunteers from the community started showing up, carrying in food and drinks for lunch. It was obvious many of them had been there before, as they knew both the refugees and the Baobab directors. We went into the lunch tent to eat after all the refugees had already been served, including some whom we had met the other night at InterSOS. The food was good and plentiful, with lots of pasta. I sat next to a young man from Senegal, who spoke mostly French and his native African dialect, but we were able to communicate a little bit in English. Some of our GANS kids helped serve, and other mingled with the refugees. The Ganziani also showed up to help, which was good since Claudia brought a non-member friend along to help out.

Claudia with friends from the InterSOS facility

These people, who have almost nothing, were happy and smiling. At one point a group of them started chanting and dancing, led by a nun; see the video here. After everyone had eaten their full, the directors cleared out the main tent and got all the refugees into a line outside to get our backpacks. We carried the boxes in and then had our GANS and the Ganziani hand out the backpacks, wishing them all a Merry Christmas. The refugees were let in a few at a time, and the volunteers gave them a fun cheer as they went by, as well as high fives and slaps on the shoulder.

 

You can watch short videos of the refugees entering the tent and getting their backpack here and here. Here are some photos of the process:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The refugees were very happy to see what was inside the backpacks, and they kept saying thanks. Photos are below, and here is a brief video.

 

 

Overall, it was a wonderful experience. I'd love to help out there somehow in the future. Afterwards, we all took the subway back downtown to the Institute, where my wife put out sandwich fixings and Ugo made Italian hot chocolate, which is thick and creamy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By about 6pm, everyone headed out. I ran over the Termini station to get a separate data-only SIM card for my phone. I use a mission SIM card, which has a 2GB/month limit, and that's not quite enough. So, for only 10 euro/month, I was able to get a Vodafone SIM with 10 GB/month -- very nice! Our Moto G5 Plus phones are dual-SIM, so I will use the mission SIM for calls and texts, and the Vodafone SIM for data. Now I don't have to worry about going over. It's also nice to learn how dual-SIM phones actually work in practice. It turns out that the 4G connection on our phones gets over 50 Mbps download and almost that much upload Saturday was not much of a P-day, but it was wonderful speed in our apartment, which is much faster than our DSL internet!

We got home in time to buy some bread at Conad, since the next two days are not shopping days for us, and my wife bought small gifts at Conad and the Chinese store for the missionaries we work with. It was a wonderful day, but we are exhausted!