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