CIAO!!!!

It was so great to see and hear you today!!!! Crazy, I did not realize how much I love and miss you until I heard your voices! I am so excited to talk to you on Christmas! So the plan is that I will call mom, dad and sam first at 3pm my time, so 7am your time and I will talk to them for half an hour and then I will call Olga and Randy and then Alex and Rosie. My skype account is eva.comollo.

I am so excited to focus more on reaching goals. I think a good goal that we really want is having our sweet investigators reach their dates. Right now for Mike it is not looking like he will get baptized this month, he is still struggling with the law of chastity. We had a really great experience with him with other night. After our lesson with him on chastity we told him we are going to call him everyday, make sure he is doing alright and give him lots of support. Well, at like 22:30 one night he called us. I was saying my nightly prayers when the phone rang, so I answered it. He asked us most urgently to pray for him and just let him know that he can do it. We talked about how he is strong and what he learned in the Book of Mormon. I then told him that he was an answer to my prayers. For I had been praying at that moment for help to not get so distracted in my thoughts and my answer was through Mike, that I need to make sure I pray for him and my other investigators more urgently, harder. Talking to him is kind of difficult, with the language barrier, but I know that both of us felt support from each other that evening.

One of our investigators, Giovanni, made a comment that got me thinking. We were talking about former missionaries and he said that it is cruel that we come and go so quickly. Right after he said this a member of the bishopric motioned for me to go talk to one of the investigators in church that was alone. This made me consider our role here even more. We are here in transition and members are here for the long haul. They really need to work to befriend those who come into the fold. The missonaries must of course make sure this occurs, since we are the ones finding them. This experience gave me a new drive to have members more involved in the work and also made me realize just how little time we have in each area to make a difference, either in a positive or negative way.

We went to Matera today. It was gorgeous! It is the city where they filmed The Passion. We had a funny encounter. This lady just walks by us, as we were laughing and taking pictures of the antique ally ways and says, It is cold do you want some tea, I just live around the corner. I accepted right away, without thinking (I always just assume the best and I struggle denying people, oops). Well she leads us to her house, which is right in front of the Chiesa Madre. When we got in there and she closed the door that is when it hit me that this situation could potentially be scary. She started making the tea, we made sure that it was an herbal infusion first, no worries;) She asked us to take off our coats and make ourselves comfortable. We kept them on... and awkwardly sat on the edge of our chairs. She started talking about being a femminist and christian. She went to the window and told us to look at the rose window on the cathedral and how it is like the wheel of fortune. Sorella Preston watched my back while I peered through the window and I did the same for her, so we could see if this woman was going to knock us over the head or something. When we got our tea I glanced at sorella Preston, we waited for Maria to take a sip, than I took one. I did not keal over, niether did Maria, so sorella Preston started sipping her drink. She started talking about poetry and how pride poisons the mind, then she offered us cookies... Since she was talking about poison we both declined the cookies...:) It ended up being a pleasent experience, we got to tell her about our message and why we are here. She talked about angels. At the end before we left she told us that she believes in them even more, since God sent her two to have tea with her. It was sweet:)

So somethings we need to talk about next week is the trip to Italy for those who are thinking about coming, I have some information from the mission president to tell you. Also, I wanted to talk to you guys about helping me get back into school, so like applying for scholarships or FAFSA and enrolling me and the like. Oh logistics and bauracracy, gotta love 'em. We are also going to talk about how much I love you all, no worries!

Love you all too much! Have a safe trip to AZ and be sure to give Grandma and Grandpa lots of hugs for me!

with Love love love,

Sorella Comollo

Here are the 3 pictures asked for 

1) Proselyting

2) Bari sky, taken from our apartment

3) Sorella Comollo (right) and Sorella Preston (Me, left) making cartolatte with the members (Sorella Maria Antonia Bellomo) at our ward christmas party

FAMILY! How I love you so! I just want to talk to you to tell you all the things that happened because writing them just doesn't do it justice! I shall try!

We had our Christmas/Sweet decorating festa and it was great!!!! About 80 people came, including investigators, almost all of our English Course came (they did a special preformance, we sang Christmas songs in English for everyone), many less actives and a ton of members. It was so chaotic and so wonderful. We had a new convert from Africa demonstrate an African dish, fufu and a fish sauce that looked like slime, it went well and everybody supported her by tasting it. It was sooooo spicy I thought my mouth was going to fall off. Randy would have loved it! It was the consistency of mucus and the fufu is not chewable, you just got to pop it in and move it around your tongue and then swallow it. We waited forever to eat so after the prayer was said all 80 of us pounced to the table, like lions lunging after a deer. There was so much food, so many yummy sweets! One lady from English course came in late, we had already started singing the songs, she stealthily put the beer she brought on the table and pranced up to the stage to sing with us. As I glanced from the beer to the members I couldn't help but stop singing Rudolph the red nosed reindeer and laugh, for the looks were of horror. We later gave her back the beer and thanked her a ton for the thought. It was a great segue to teach the word of wisdom:) One of the members later told me that I was not a very convincing singer since I laughed too much during the performance, o'well:)!

We did a ton of less active work this week, because we wanted to invite them to the party. It was nice to see all of those people. It was also kind of sad seeing how bitter some of them have gotten since growing far from the gospel.

Our investigator, Mike, the one from Ghana, is working so hard to overcome his temptations of breaking the law of chastity. We had a great lesson yesterday with him, letting him know that we are here to help and over all God is there to help him. He is stronger than he thinks. He is taking change seriously. I love africans. This is how Mike says to partake of the sacrament = To chop sacred supper. Mike also made an interesting correlation. We talked about not looking at pornography and he said, wait does that mean I can't watch TV!

It has been difficult to keep our investigatores lately, because our phone broke, we lost our numbers and it seems like they are all busy for the holidays. However, I know that we need to keep making sure they know that the gospel is to be a part of life, not just something to focus on later. Many of the talks and lessons in church lately have been about not saying "one day", but preparing now. I couldn't agree more. I want to work on that too, doing the things today, not putting everything off for tomorrow.

I gave a talk on Sunday about following the prophet. I realized just how simple it is to follow them, starting with the little things. Like President Monson's advice of taking a step back and looking at the positive things in life. Doing that is in essence following the prophet. I always get so nervous during my talks, however I make up for it by making them laugh. I forgot the word for behind so I started doing the action and walked backward from the podium. The ward has so much patience with crazy me!

I love the book of mormon!!!! I cannot get over how much I love it! I am trying to finish it in Italian by christmas, so far not so good... But now that I am reading it even more than usual I am getting into the story. This morning I read in Alma 43, about how there were a ton of Laminites and not many nephites to battle against them. Well, they did not let that stop them, also they had special armor to protect them. What if they would have gotten scared at the differences in number, letting that stop them from defending their lives and families and faith? In the end they succeeded to drive away the laminites. Sometimes we see the future or the work we have ahead of us and it looks overwhelming. Just remember we have a special armor and we must have confidence to go forward, putting our confidence in God, and we will succeed in driving off our enemy or over coming our difficulty. I would like to apply this to missionary work. When I step on the bus and I start hearing the snickering of ragazzacci, or the scoffs of vecchietti, I could very well be discouraged and stop. Well, that is not what God wants, he wants those youngsters to know that they are his children, he wants those nonnas to know they can see their grand children even after they go a di la', and I want what God wants and he has given me and you tools to help these people! So Non scorragiarti mai (or as dad would say it non scorregiarti mai, just kidding!)!

I love you all sooooo sooo sooo much! Have a lovely week!

Love,

Sorella Comollo

Lehi and his dream

Sorry, I ran out of time today so this is going to be short.
Something wonderful occurred! I am learning more and more how to teach by the spirit, letting him guide instead of me getting nervous and over thinking everything. We were deciding on what to do for the spiritual thought for English course. I said a little prayer, because I had no idea what to do for it. The idea of doing something about Lehi's dream came to mind shortly after. In the morning I studied the chapter and the talk given by Anziano Bednar about the different types of people. I had in mind what I wanted to do for the thought. However, when I was presenting the dream as I looked for the scriptures that I wanted, it felt right to use some other ones. I did not know exactly what I would say about them, but I read them anyway. It ended up being perfect. The words that I needed to say about the verses just flowed out, I didn't have to strain to think of something clever. It was all just natural, talking about Lehi praying, then finding the tree, partaking of the fruit and wanting to share it. I talked about prayer, feeling the love of God and then boldly testified of the Book of Mormon and offered the students to read and pray about it. It was a wonderful experience and was topped off by one of the students before leaving asking Anziano Larsen for a copy of this book that we seem to think is so special. I love the spirit and I love learning more how he works in my life.
I love you all so much!
Have a great week!
Love,
Sorella Comollo