First off, Dad, Mom, take a chill pill. It's totally cool that you didn't write a day in advance. I didn't know I would be, so it's totally fine. I still love you! =D
And I absolutely love hearing about everyone there! I'm glad the campout was fun, and the dog's alright from his impromptu parkour! And WHAT THE HECK, KADEN IS 15!?!?! WHOA! Che cavolo!?! (Hehe, that means "what the cabbage", but they use it for what the heck) ("che" is pronounced "keh"). And he's gonna be DRIVING?!? Oh gosh, this is strange. And I didn't even realize that when I get back it's just gonna be 1 year before he can go on his mission! Dang... that just strikes me as super strange right now.
Anyway, here in L'Aquila: my gosh, this place is GREAT! This is apparently the only city in the mission that really gets snow, but it's getting warmer, so it's been melting. We got up to 8 degrees last week! :) And the branch is fabulous, they came up with an idea to hold a Family History activity for the community to try to help things get up and running here, which they're hoping to have in April or May. It'll be sweet! No joke, I really think family history is pretty fun since coming out here. I haven't had much of an opportunity to do it, but learning how... it seems awesome!
Oh, and playing piano in the branch is going well. I don't have a ton of practice time each week, but I'm definitely seeing blessings from Heavenly Father like crazy with that. Songs are being learned really quickly, and it's SUPER fun! But that's not all: some of the parents in the ward asked if I could give piano lessons to their kids once a week! At first it was kind of jokingly, but then I was super psyched to do it, and I'll have my first lesson on Friday night! It'll be weird, 'cause I right now only have the hymnbook and the church's conducting course to work with, but I ordered a keyboard course kit, so I can also do that for later wards that I go to. Plus, with this, relations with the branch here can get super good, and hopefully they'll be down to help a little more with missionary work here, which would be absolutely fantastic for us.
But this week has been AMAZING! It was a little hard emotionally at first, but Anziano Esplin is honestly a great companion. We're getting along super well, and what teaching appointments we manage to have go fantastic! And plus, he's a great cook, and he's gonna teach me a few of the things he's picked up here and help me out a bit there over the next few weeks for lunch. Sweet... :) By the way, the food here in L'Aquila is actually quite different from down south, it really does taste fantastic down there. But it's still really good here!
But ok, L'Aquila has been a really hard city in the past. The last baptism was about a year ago, and he's still going strong. The thing that's been hard is that the people here are just hardened after that earthquake in 2009 that destroyed a lot of homes and demolished centro. A lot of people had to move out to project housing, like Sassa. But that completely hardened people, instead of humbling them like you would think. So I came into the city with 1 iffy investigator, who we're actually gonna probably have to drop (she told us specifically to come and preach to her, but to not leave her anything to do. Yeah... that's not gonna happen. We'll try to go slowly, though. But still go), and then a lot of door to door to look forward to.
But these past two weeks have been CHOC FULL of miracles like I've already told you, and we now have FIVE investigators, with something like TWELVE potentials and TWO referrals we've got to contact, one of which is from one of our investigators, another from a missionary from the branch who wants us to see his family! Anziano Esplin also is getting tired of just doing house all day every day, so we took some time to come up with a few other proselyting activities that we can try, I'll let you know how they turn out!
But dang, work just EXPLODED here, and we're gonna have to figure out how to visit people as much as we can. I'm so psyched, and SO thankful to the Lord for helping us find all these people! One of which was a guy who lives out in Sassa that we left a biglietino (pass-along card) with him when he said he wasn't interested, and he called us back a few days later saying he was sorry for that, and would love to have us over! He's apparently under house arrest for something, and will be until March. But he apparently seems really sorry for what he did, and actually tried to understand in the lesson that Anziano Esplin and this one other missionary gave him (we had a scambio, an exchange). DANG, IT'S AWESOME!
And the Zone Conference was good, Elder Richards is great! He really emphasized clearly teaching, not necessarily going over everything it says in Preach My Gospel, but making sure they understand the basic doctrinal points. We've been applying it as much as we can, and it's been helping a lot, I feel!
I love hearing from you, again. The church is true, I promise! :)
Ciao ciao!
Anziano Trey
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