30 Jan 2008

Ciao tutti,

This week has flown by, I feel like I was just here writing you all last week! After email last week we headed off and saw some of the famous sights of Rome, the Colosseum, the ruins by it, and then the pantheon! So fun to see all the history!

Thursday and Friday, my companion had her 3 month conference. This is my 3rd companion who has had 3 month conference! So we went to the villa (mission home) and dropped her off. Then for the afternoon I did an exchange with one of the other Rome sisters. We did some finding work and then had English class that night. Friday morning we went to an appointment that took 2 hours to get to. It was with this cool lady from Moldovia who lives a bit out in the country. We ate with her and then gave her a Book of Mormon. She seems like a really good investigator for the Rome 2 sisters. Then we headed back to the villa to pick up my comp and headed back to our apartment. Oh yeah, for the first time since I've been here someone tried to take something out of my backpack!

I was walking quickly down some stairs in the metro and felt someone totally un-zip my bag! So I swung my bag around and saw it open and saw these two little gypsy girls, one of them quickly taking their hand away. I said, "scusate eh!," excuse me! They totally acted like they didn't do anything. Oh brother. You have to be careful here!

Saturday we did our weekly programming and then did some finding work and searched for a couple inactive ladies. Sunday we had church and then that night we got to go to Piazza Navona with our zone and sing in the piazza. It was a ton of fun and we were able to teach of lot of lessons and introduce a lot of people to the church. We taught a good number of toursits but the majority are Italians who stop to hear our singing.

Monday we had zone conference. It was incredible as always. At the beginning Sister Acerson got up and gave a little tribute to president Hinckley. She shared with us a little of his talk that he gave a couple conferences ago titled, "the things I know." I remembered loving that talk when he gave it because it was so simple yet covered all of the most important truths of the restored gospel. His death is something we all knew would happen but I was still quite sad to hear the news. I'm so grateful for everything he did for the church. One of my favorite one-liners of his comes from a conference talk he gave maybe a year ago. He said, " I will continue to give my best to the task at hand." I don't know why that has always stuck with me but it has. To me it shows that he really gave everything he had and served with all his heart all the way to the very end! What an incredible friend and example. He'll be greatly missed!

The mission is really putting an emphasis on baptism. The assistants gave an incredible training on baptism and how we need to have faith, let go of mind-sets, and focus on finding and teaching with baptism in mind. It was great and we are all really excited to put their council into practice. President and Sister Acerson always give really good talks. President talked about self-mastery and Sister Acerson about obedience. It was a great conference.

In the past two days we've had two dinner appointments. Monday night with a less-active family, the Ramos family. They are amazing and it was fun getting to meet them. Yesterday we stopped by the African girl who let us in last week. We brought her an English Book of Mormon and she was so happy to have it. She didn't have time for us to teach her right then but we are going back on Thursday and hope to be able to teach her a more thorough first lesson. That evening we had a member appointment with one of the sisters in the ward, Sorella Capuano. She's way cool and made us some good food. She's been a member for a while but is the only member in her immediate family. Her sister is a member though and lives in Arizona. We shared a spiritual thought with her and talked a little bit about the blessing of having a living prophet on the earth. She was also sad about president Hinckley but we are all excited to support and sustain the new prophet. I love meeting with and getting to know the wonderful members here.

Today we are meeting up with the Rome 2 sisters and going to see some stuff. We aren't exactly sure but I'm sure it'll be fun. We have quite a few appointments in the next couple days so the work is going on here!

Thanks for everything as always and I'll try to get a couple letters written here soon!

Love you all,

Sorella Boynton