Sorella Nelson: Week 37

(Week 7 Bari)

Pasqua is in arrival!!!! This Sunday was Palm Sunday. A tradition is
to give palm leaves to someone in order to make "peace". All over Bari
on corners of streets there were little stands to buy your palm
leaves. There must have been many quarrels...

It was another super fast, great week here in Bari Poggio Franco.
Transfers were Thursday and it was super sad to see Sorella Taylor go.
We saw lots of miracles and learned a lot together. She will be
awesome in Messina though. I'm glad we are both young in the mission
so we will hopefully see each other again. :)



Goodbye Sorella Taylor!!!





Hello Sorella Jones!!!

Sorella Jones!!! She's
great! Her fire/desire to do missionary work is still high so I'm
excited for this transfer. She tells me that before she "dies" she
wants to soap box preach and teach repentance to an entire bus so this
will be great. She is 100% obedient while still cracking jokes
throughout the ENTIRE day! She is from Elkridge, close to Payson Utah,
speaks Italian soooo well, and has 8 siblings! She loves the Barbie
movies as much as I do and loves eating delicious Italian food as much
as I do. More importantly, we are both very focused on our work and
becoming better missionaries together.

The start of the week was filled with some goodbyes for Sorella
Taylor. It was great, running all over Bari seeing people. The dear
Tonti family fed us pranzo the day before she left. Members here are
incredible and I'm super grateful to have good relationships between
the missionaries and members. 

The wonderful Tonti family!!

Great experiences from this week:
We were traveling on a bus one day and I sat down and started talking
to a woman named Maria. We eventually exchanged numbers and set an
appointment for the next day. We went to her house and she has
literally the nicest Italian apartment I have ever seen. It is massive
and she lives there alone. She has everything decorated perfectly and
all her random trinkets have a special place. We all sat down on her
leopard print couches and started to talk about religion. She hates
the saints, and thinks it is wrong that they don't marry and she
talked about how she is just looking for peace. We had an awesome
prayer with her at the end. We had taught her how to pray and she
wanted to try. After each step she would look up and ask is what came
next, it was awesome!

Angelina... Tried over and over to get me to drink her chocolate
liquor drink... I've never had someone pull the "just once won't hurt"
thing with me. We ate weird fried artichokes and drank orange Fanta
instead :)

Sorella Magno is one of my favorite sisters in the ward. She is the
cutest little old woman with the sweetest just mellow voice. We passed
by her house one afternoon and caught her on her way out to do spessa
(grocery shopping). We went with her and helped with her bags and
everything! It was so fun! Alla fine we got to share a message and she
gave us a referral for a family!!!! Blessings for obedience again!

Sunday night we saw the Lagattolla family, Angelo and his wife. What
an awesome couple! They are both inactive but they have the biggest
testimonies. We shared the new Easter video and just talked a lot
about how blessed we are for the knowledge that Christ LIVES!!!

During gospel principles class Sunday we talked about the Atonement of
Christ. We discussed how grazie a lui we can overcome not only
physical death, but also spiritual death. Sorella Jones and I were
later talking about all around us we see statues of Jesus on the
cross. So many people are focused on a dead, sacrificed Savior and a
statue representing that is what they worship. How wonderful is it
that we know He suffered for all of us so that we can try again, but
He also lives so that all of us can live again. He now has a body that
is perfect. Jesus Christ lives and guides this church today. He is
Risen!!!

Happy Easter weekend everyone!!!