Ostia Transfer 14 Week 5

Service, Apple cake, and more service!

I can’t believe transfer calls are in just one short week! It’s crazy! After this call, I only have one more call left! I can’t believe how fast it’s going... but I still have plenty of time and this week was a good one! 

On Monday night we went to the Cevallos family, they’re my favorites! We have dinner with them almost every Monday night, Sister Cevallos is a great member and they have three boys 16, 12, and 3 years old and they’re so much fun! They all give us big hugs and we do a little family night usually starting with their English Homework and then a game, dinner, and a spiritual thought! We’re going tonight and I’m goin to try to remember to take a picture! 

Tuesday we had District Meeting in the morning and I had Sister Wyatt give the training. She did a great job and we talked about aligning our will with God’s will and working hard, as well as working through trials and being open to learning from them. We also got haircuts before! Mine is a little crazy but I like it, it’s still pretty long on top but not on the sides at all! Anyway, Then we all got kebab together and Anziano Empey and I had to go to the Doctors again! So we did a little finding and went to Rome, got picked up by Elder Knies one of the Senior couples who is so fun! He’s from Texas and doesn’t speak a lick of Italian but he’s a Texan through and through! Everything went well at the appointment and it turns out the stitches are dissolvable and now they’re all gone. Today was the day I made the apple cake during lunch! Something is wrong with our oven so it gets way too hot... so my cake was getting crispy on the outside and it was raw on the inside so I had to bake it with the oven door open and then I turned the oven off and just left the door closed. Anyway we made it through! It actually turned out pretty well! 

Wednesday was kind of rough... we decided to do weekly Planning because for one reason or another it hasn’t been happening on Friday! So we got that done in the morning, had lunch, did language study and comp study and then did some finding! We went to the other Cevallos family which is the Mom of the other Sister Cevallos for dinner. So her husband is Italian and he has been investigating the Church for 7 years... he comes to Church every week, has us over almost every week but he’s not ready to be baptized yet. Also he’s 82. So we used a piece of paper to map out what was happening in the Bible in conjunction with the Book of Mormon. It was really good to help him understand how they coincide. Then Mamma Cevallos made us wonderful Ecuadorian food as always. Who knew there were so many different ways to make rice??? Have you ever had a fried banana? They’re pretty good! 

Thursday. Thursday we went to Caritas (Carità means charity in Italian) to work in the soup kitchen (Except we’re in Italy so it’s a pasta kitchen but it’s the same idea!) We had a good time, we just help prepare food for the homeless and take their trays and clean them and that’s pretty much it! It is really nice to serve them though. They’re not all necessarily homeless but they are very poor and so it’s a great opportunity to serve as well as get to know some of the great people that serve there as volunteers. They make us eat too, the food isn’t bad! There was pasta with sauce and a big mozzarella ball and some pretty good bread and baked fennel. (They eat a lot of fennel in Italy) We took some pictures on the pier in the rain and then went home for studies. Then in the evening we talked to some way cool people before English Course. 

Friday I’m not really sure what happened but we did something in the morning. I didn’t write it down. I think we just went finding? Then home for lunch and studies and then in the afternoon we went to help the Durango family clean the Church. We had a dinner appointment with them so they took us to their house and we had a great time with them. They are from Colombia (I promise there are Italian members here!) but they lived in Canada for a long time and so the language they speak at home is either Spanish or English. Their English is perfect and the kids go to an English school here in Rome. He works for the United Nations as an auditor and he travels all over the Middle East to do it. They’re a great family! We wanted to help them do some family history but the website was down so our spiritual thought was a bust for that! We’ll try again next time! 

Saturday was an awesome service project! So we found this group on Facebook called “Retake Roma” and they just get together and do different service projects. We got 3 youth and YSA members to come with us and the Sisters and we doubled their group! We went to this park and filled trash bags with so much garbage and empty beer bottles. We planted some plants as well as painted some benches! It was a lot of fun and we got to talk to so many people! I took some pictures but I’m not in many of them because I was taking them! 

Anyway then in the afternoon we had a bomb appointment with this guy named Ibrahim. He’s from Morocco but he’s been here in Italy so long that he doesn’t really speak French anymore, he is pretty assimilated into Italy. We taught him outside a cafe and it went really well. We’re excited to keep teaching him! 

Sunday is always good... I got to give a talk in Sacrament meeting and I talked about the Book of Mormon. I brought my Italian Book of Mormon which you can’t even read the cover it’s so worn out and my Book of Mormon from my Mom from when I was baptized and I talked about how a Book of Mormon goes from being a BOM to my BOM and it has to do with the time we put in to it and how we personalize it by marking the spiritual promptings we receive and really making it out own. I also talked about how there is power in just one verse and I shared a few of my favorites. 

After Church we came and made lunch and then we went to this place called Acilia to go and find some Potentials. It was a bust for one of them and the other the bus doesn’t run on Sunday to get there so we did some finding, ran into one of our investigators and talked to some really cool Romanian people. I think it’s going to be so weird to come back to Potsdam and Logan and not have so much diversity... especially here in Rome it seems like there are more not Italian people than there are Italian. It’s a melting pot for sure! 

I hope you all had a great week! Here is a saying in Italian “Break boxes” it means to like reprimand or reprove someone in Italian you say that you are breaking their boxes. Well Mom broke my boxes about not taking enough pictures so I’m trying to do better! Here we go! 

Love,

Anziano Jacob Bellucci

Missione Italiana di Roma