Ladispoli Transfer 16 Week 2

Finding in Disneyland, fried artichokes, member present dinner, smartphones, my last zone conference and a little bit of persecution! 

What a week! We had so much success this week, so many big changes, the work is progressing and I’m just soaking it all in! We really did see some big miracles this week! 

Monday for P-Day we went to this beautiful castle in Bracciano, it was so cool! It’s from medieval times, if was built in the 1200’s and is still completely in tact. It was raining but we had a lot of fun and took some cool pictures too! 

On Tuesday we had a really great District Meeting! We went to Ostia and we talked about applying ministering to missionary work and it was a really good conversation and I’m excited to put into practice. We grabbed some Kebab for lunch and headed back! At English Course one of the students got a notification that the International Space Station would be flying over in 10 minutes so we did our spiritual thought and ran outside to watch it fly over. It was pretty cool! 

Wednesday morning we went to Santa Marinella which is a coastal city a little bit North of Ladispoli, about 20 minutes on the train. We got there and tried to go find one of the members and it took a while to get there, turns out he had a real bad fever so we went finding, we found this little spot where we could get down to the ocean and we took some really cool photos. In the afternoon we whipped up some chocolate chip banana bread to bring to Sister Squercia who teaches us Italian once a week. I grilled her with difficult grammar questions for like 30 minutes and then we ate some dessert. Then the coolest thing happened! We got to go meet one of our Potentials to give him a Book of Mormon in Romanian, he’s lived in Italy for 12 years but still reads better in Romanian. So we had a sweet lesson with him and set up a follow-up appointment for tonight! 

Thursday was up early to head to Rome for interviews with President and Sister Pickerd. This was my last normal interview and we scheduled my last one which will be about an hour long. It was really nice though and I enjoyed it. We grabbed some lunch and headed back to Ladispoli. We made another batch of the chocolate chip banana bread and took it to dinner with the Poli family. They invited our investigator Valerio and his wife and daughter. It was an incredible lesson and we were able to turn his wife into a new investigator and they both came to Church yesterday! Lessons with members are the best! Their testimonies were so powerful and at the end she said “So can we meet with you next Thursday?” We were over the moon! It showed us that success is definitely given not earned... two new Investigators in two days! 

Friday was my last zone Conference... definitely a bitter sweet experience. The trainings were great and I learned a lot! We talked about faith and how we can grow our own faith. We also got some technology upgrades! We got smart phones, with data the whole 9 yards! We feel very advanced! Especially because no one in this country uses text messaging, everyone uses WhatsApp which is like a 3rd party messaging app and it’s so nice that we have it now! We’ve already seem miracles! I also had the opportunity to give my departing testimony. I blubbered through the whole thing like a cry baby 😭 but I talked about the importance of bearing your testimony and just taking every moment you have to testify of Jesus Christ. I made a lot of people cry including Sister Pickerd so it was good 😉 then in the evening we had pizza and a lesson with Antonio the new Convert here!

So Ladispoli is known for its artichokes and this weekend was the festival for all Things artichoke and the people swarmed the city! It was a crazy amount of people, ergo the title “finding in Disneyland” there were so many people you couldn’t walk downtown and there were just so many street vendors! They’ve also had “Cotton-eyed Joe” on repeat for the last three days... I’m so glad it’s over! We tried to go finding on Saturday night but we decided to cut our losses and try to get a good fried artichoke... they were actually really good! Anziano Huntsman is obsessed with Cannoli from Sicily so he found one of those too as well as some peperoncino olive oil. Then we whipped up two more batches of that chocolate chip banana bread to bring to the ward lunch on Sunday. We also got persecuted by a man with a mega-phone asking us when our flight back to Utah was... all in a days work :) 

Church was great as always, as I said Valerio and Anita came to Church which was great! Afterwards we had ward lunch and our banana bread went so fast! They ate it all! We had a really great Sunday evening to finish off our week! 

This week was so good, I’ve really felt like a successful missionary and I’m so glad that I still have this time to serve my Savior Jesus Christ.

I love you all, have a great week!

Love,

Anziano Jacob Bellucci