May 15, 2013

Ciao from Genova!

Today we are in Genova.  Like I told my family on mother's day we came back to Genova to work on the passport issues for Anziano Mustaferaj but as of now things are not looking too well hopefully we'll be able to figure something out.  Anyway this past week went really good.  Our baptism date Austin looks like he will be baptized for the 25 of May so we are super excited about that!  We had a lesson with him and it went great, we explained the importance of baptism and told him how it was the first step to open the door toward eternal life.  He's super excited as well.  He brought his wife last week, Sofia to church and they really liked it.  It's cool because they are married with a little boy about 2 years old so it would be great to see a family get sealed!  We found another cool investigator this week also.  His name is Evan and he is half Italian and half Sri Lanken.  Really cool guy looking for some love in his life and I know he'll be able to find it in the church.  Funny how we found him, it seems like every time we're about to go home something like this happens.  Right as we were about to go home Evan waved us over and we had a conversation with him about the plan of salvation it was a really cool miracle!  Here in Genova we also saw another cool miracle.  So we got here last night and in the morning we had to do a few things for Anziano Mustaferaj's passport and all of the sudden we bump into Dritan!!  Dritan is also from Albania and I met him here when we were in Genova with Anziano Webb.  What had happened was he had nothing here no work and was sick.  We started teaching him and the ward took him under their wing and in the end they helped him return back to Albania.  The crazy thing is he's back here in Genova because someone from his country gave him work and now he's working has somewhere to live as well.  It was such a cool miracle because he was only in Genova for one day and we just so happened to meet each other the same day.  He was so happy he grabbed us and pulled us into the nearest bar and bought us a soda and a brioche (cream puff)  he told us how he was so thankful for our help and was soo happy to see us haha he lives far away from the church now but as the church grows he'll be ready to accept.  He's upset that he's not able to come to church though.  Super cool! 

Mother's day was great as well.  I skyped at our bishops office.  I was the only one that was able to skype because Anziano Mustaferaj's family was in Germany getting sealed in the temple!!  He was a little bummed that president didn't give him permisssion to go though.  He'll get another chance!  Skype was great it was great to talk to the family and also talk to Daniel.  It sounds like he's doing good and he's learning Swahili pretty good as well.  I was glad to see my mom and was happy to thank her for all the love and support she has given us as kids!  Things went well though. 

Before mother's day was a little stressful though.  Last Wednesday we ended up getting locked out of the house because one of the locks we had somehow closed and we didn't have a key for it. So we tried every little way to get it and we were almost to the point of breaking a window to get in but in the end at 10 30 at night we took a bus all the way to the other side of Torino.  That night we were super tired and stressed because the next day we had conference that we were in charge of and all of our notes were inside the house.  Anyway that morning I called a locksmith and we met him at our house and he told us it would take 2-3 hours to take care of everything and also it would cost us about £150-200 .  I thought it would take 20 minutes to fix, just making a spare key but he's like nope I'm going to take everything out the whole lock so we were like no we have a conference in 1 hr we have to go then he tried to charge us £50 for coming but we settled everything out and were okay.  We got to the conference and it went pretty good for not having notes we were lucky because the people in our Zone participated and it ended up being a good experience for everyone.  So after we were so tired finally we said enough lets break the window.  We get to the house and just as Mustaferaj lifts up his foot to break it he sees some nails around the window, takes them out, lifts up the window and we get in!!  Haha broke into our apartment.  But I was so happy to be home.  This Thursday we should be heading back to Torino but I'm loving Genova I can't believe I back here again so nice but hope you're all doing well thanks for the love and thoughts!

Anziano Thomas