TRANSFORMERS! or, Why Missionaries Should Have RV's

I am learning the value of a traveling home as, in these days, we our gradually moving our home into our car. It's not like we want to -- but we've been doing all this work in Sant'Agata, which is an hour away, and if we leave in the morning it really isn't effective to drive home for lunch/dinner. So instead we just stay out in Sant'Agata the whole day and drive home by 9 that night. I've discovered that our car has many different functions than just a means of transportation (in other words, it's a picnic spot, office, study area, bedroom, and meeting hall in disguise). We are in the car all the time, either driving to and from our cities, eating, sleeping, etc. It's exhausting.
 
Thus, I propose that all missionaries should have an RV. That way we wouldn't have to spend money on rent and gas... just bundle it all up! It would be great. We could even set aside a little meeting spot to meet investigators if the weather gets bad!
 
But, for now we have our dear Sorella Benzina. And she's not bad, in fact she's a really blessing and helps us get to a lot of places and do a lot of things. For example: Thanksgiving! Our branch in Mistretta still doesn't have their church building in the city, so they haven't been able to do any activities. So instead the missionaries in Palermo invited us to the festivities there. At first we didn't feel like we should go, since Thursday is a great proselyting day and we'd be driving all the way to Palermo just to eat food... but we both thought about it and for whatever reason it felt right. So we saddled up ol Sorella Benzina down the highway to Palermo Thanksgiving. We brought mashed potatoes (with the famous Fuller recipe) to accompany all the other traditional dishes brought, namely: 10 lbs of sausage by the elders (turkey was too expensive for the missionary budget), pizza, cous cous salad, and pastaries. Just like the Indians made! While we were there we ended up talking to a girl who has been thinking about going on a mission but is up in the air and wanted to know about our experiences. So we talked, we ate, and right before the sausage triptophane kicked in, we scuttled in the car back home. Nice. We think that girl might have been the reason we went. But. Chissa? (Who knows?)
 
Also the car is great to teach all our different people. We just started teaching this man and his family of four. 
 We also got to teach an adult family this week. We have one contact named Brigitte, who's from France but has been living in Sicily with her family for years. We've been teaching her at work and offered to share a family night with her (i.e. bring a treat, teach a lesson, play a game) and she accepted. We show up Sunday night, treatless (I burned the zucchini bread....) but with UNO in hand to find that two of her grown daughters had their boyfriends over and one of the boyfriend's mom as well. With Brigitte and her husband that made 7 adults who, as soon as Brigitte called them all together, sat down intently focused on us. It was intimidating for sure... what was supposed to be a five minute movie about happiness turned into an hour long discussion... and we didn't even get a CHANCE to play UNO. But it was good. Good things were said and hopefully we'll be able to go back and teach the few of the seven that were more interested.
 
Ok, thoughts of the week: it's been a hard week. Probably because it's the first week of a transfer (a transfer is a six week period where you for sure stay in one zone, in this case Mistretta). I think it's hard to just get geared up again when I've already been here three months. But, the time does fly. And I think... sometimes it's crazy that I'm doing this. Running around Sicily doing, in the words of Sorella Christensen, everything my parents taught me not to do (knocking on doors, talking to strangers, giving out my phone number, etc.). And I've been thinking about why Heavenly Father asks me to serve a mission... after all, if He is God, why does He need me to do this work? Why can't he just help people see the light on their own?
 
I haven't fully figured it out yet, but I'm prone to believe that this whole "mission thing" is a lot for my benefit. ...it's not so much that I'm going out, doing good and helping peeps. It's that, in the process of doing all this, I am becoming something that Heavenly Father needs me to be. There's a scripture that says that others' salvation is essential to our salvation (to parphrase D&C 128:15). I don't think that means going out and teaching people the gospel will rack me up "salvation" points in the next life. But I think the mission is teaching me things I need to learn to reach my highest potential. Yes? Yes.

Disco Sberna

Hello all,

Hey! Great week in Mistretta/Sant'Agata! The work is really exploding! We've found more new investigators and met more interested people this week than we have in my past three months here. I feel this is a good sign for opening up the city of Sant'Agata. There are people here prepared to here the good word!

One of the reasons for our success is the work past missionaries have done. Missionaries in every area keep track of the people they contact and potentially have interest and record them in an area book. We are then able to follow up with these people even years later to see if they remember us and if now is a good time. It's always so funny to look through the area book and the descriptions old missionaries write down about people. My favorite this week: "We met Pippo on the street one day. He is a gunseller searching for truth." I can see it now... "Pippo X: GUNSELLER OF TRUTH. COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU."

The other important thing to remember when you're looking people up is that in Italy, women usually keep their maiden name when they get married. So you have to make sure to ask both the man and his wife for their last name if you want to find them. We had one woman we were trying to contact forever before we realized that she had already been taught by the missionaries, but had been put under her maiden, not married, name. I like the maiden name keeping because you can get some great name combinations... this past week, we rang the doorbell of a "Re" and her husband "Aragona," which translates to King Aragon. They didn't answer, but I just assumed they were off protecting Rohan. (I attached a picture of their mailbox so you know I'm not making it up.)

However, we are stumped in our olive reaping service opportunities. EVERYONE in this area has a little countryside where they grow olives that they gather every year and press to make oil that will last for the rest of the year. We've asked everyone if we can come help them and everyone says yes, yes, they'll call us, but no one has taken us up on our offer. This week we were SO CLOSE... one of our investigators said we could come help him and we hadn't seen him in several weeks so we were extra excited for the opportunity. We even got all suited up in jeans (only the third time I've worn them on the mission) and drove out to the spot where he was going to meet us. He called us fifteen minutes late to tell us he wasn't going to do olives today since it looked like rain. OH! Soooo close! We were more crushed than an olive in an oil press. I never thought it would be this hard to serve people... Yet. We keep trying.

This week we had Stake Conference, which meant we all got to go to Palermo! Because most of our members don't have money for gas, the church reserved a private Sberna bus for our whole branch. That's right, all 15 some of us piled in a bus for an hour and a half ride to Palermo. I attached a picture of us and our branch, whoooo! That's Mistretta! Coming back was the FUNNIEST -- first the branch president and his wife started singing traditional Sicilian songs in the back. This quickly turned into the bus driver turning up the music and everyone shouting song requests. THEN the bus driver turns on these FLASHING DISCO LIGHTS. What short bus is equipped with DISCO lights? (It was the emergency LEDs just flashing from blue-green-red.. but still). The whole branch went crazy and everyone joined in for a round of "What Is Love?" (the answer is charity! the pure love of Christ!) Me and my companion are a little frozen, since we haven't heard any music besides hymns since we've started our mission and we're thinking, "Is this okay? I mean, the relief society president is dancing to 'Waka, Waka' in the back of a church bus..." But our poor branch hasn't had an activity in almost six months because their church still isn't ready yet. I think they deserved a little fun.

Every week we meet with the male missionaries from Palermo. Usually they take the train to us or we drive to them, but this week we decided to meet halfway in Cefalu. Since we don't have a church building there, we have an improvised meeting on the coast, which has to be the most spiritual spot. We really do work in the most beautiful area in the mission, with our nothern shore and sea side villages. I am VERY LUCKY.

OH. Letter shout out to JESSE SHEETS for your beautifully stationaried letters (as always) and TAYLOR JACKBOY and your package of joy... you know me too well! Also, I apologize to everyone who has sent me a letter that I haven't responded to yet. I have all of your names written down, there is just so little time. But you are not forgotten and everyone will get a letter sooner or later, hoepfully sooner.

Alright, that's all for this week. Say a little prayer for me and my companion. We have a lot of work ahead of us and we need lots of energy.

And in the words of my favorite Japenglish tshirt: "Smile and the world is happy!"

lots of love
Sister Fuller

Saint Aggy and the Lonely Hearts Club Band

This week!

To put you in the shoes of a missionary, we have a very tense day every six weeks when we receive a call from the mission president about if we will stay in our area or leave for another. It's always a wild guess because even if the mission president indicates we might stay or go, the decision can always change at the last minute.

So Saturday comes and we were both playing it cool, since we never get transfer calls before 2 pm. But come 9:30 am the phone rings and to our immense surprise it's our mission president. He had called to tell us he had received permission from the stake president (a local Italian church leader) to open a new group in our area, Sant'Agata. He said with this change, I was guaranteed to stay, but Sorella C. (my companion) might stay or go. Several hours later we got the official call that we would both stay in Mistretta to start building this new group in Sant'Agata.

It works like this -- Sant'Agata is an hour away from Mistretta, but much larger and more central to the other big cities on the island (as opposed to Mistretta which is up in the mountains). While missionary work goes forward in Mistretta, it's hard to teach people in Sant'Agata and ask them to come to church every week an hour away, especially when they are just starting to investigate the church and aren't committed to it yet. Lately we've been seeing more potential to grow in Sant'Agata and, while the church would remain in Mistretta, we proposed opening a "group" in Sant'Agata. This means that the church will rent a building where we can hold church services (at least sacrament meeting), our free English course, activities, etc. The stake president agreed and decided to do a trial run of six months -- if we see growth and progress in the area after six months, the church will make something more permanent in Sant'Agata.

We're super pumped for this and started doing a flurry of work in Sant'Agata right after we got the news. What's awesome is that this "group" was an idea my old companion and HER companion had about six months ago. Although they aren't here to see it realized, I know that it was their work that is making this possible.

I'm learning that change is slow and hard, especially here, but it does happen. I know that change doesn't come easily to a lot of people, but I know that when we are open to change is when we grow the most. I've met some real examples here in Italy -- people that make far more sacrifices and work when the conditions are much more adverse. I'm told that when the first Mormon pioneers came to Salt Lake City, Brigham Young said it was a "Good place to raise up strong saints" because it was such a hard land to work (that's a parphrase).

Strong, brave, impressive people aren't made in soft, easy conditions. If we are to fulfill our full potential, it has to be hard. And I think Mistretta is like that, both as a member of the church and as a missionary. I know that this is a hard area to work in and I'm tired. It's hard when it's a small town, where everyone knows everyone and is afraid to change. It's hard that there's not large groups of people we can talk to, but we have to walk along empty streets until we come across one person who (hopefully) will want to talk to us. It's hard for the members that they don't have a church building in their own town where they can hold activities and church. Instead, they have to spend gas money they don't have to a church building they have a half-hour away.

But I also know that I have all the more respect for these church members and people we're teaching because of what they will give up. These are people I will never forget. And I know that I'm here in this area to learn things about myself and from them. I hope to be able to help those around me here as well. And hope to be stronger (than yesterday). Or in the words of my companion, "If you want to meet awesome people, you have to do awesome things."

Anyway, in the end, life is good in Mistretta! Even if I can't see the distant scene, I've seen enough of the Lord's miracles to know that the small work I'm doing now will eventually have a larger impact on the future. Just like Grandmother WIllow said to Pocahontas: it's all a ripple effect, every action!

Love you all! Watch Pocahontas if you can, as I cannot. 
Peace,
Sorella Fuller

(1) Sick (2) Olives and (3) The Most Important Things

Hello all,

Arright! This week:

(1) Sick (2) Olives and (3) The Most Important Things.

(1) I was a little under the weather (which might explain why my email last week was a little jumbled) and spent many, many hours sleeping it off this past week. I had the opportunity to ask our branch president (the local church leader) for a blessing of healing. (In the LDS church, all worthy men hold the priesthood and are able to give special blessings of heal, comfort and counsel). He said he would and we went by another member's house who would also participate. But when we showed up, there was a return missionary visiting that served in Mistretta four years ago, as well two other of our church members. Needless to say, it was a party (for Mistretta, 10 people is definitely a party). I was able to receive a priesthood blessing of healing from the branch president and the two other members and return missionary participated. And then I got a giant pot of honey that I was instructed to drink with herb tea until I felt better. Needless to say, I was a pretty happy missionary/Winnie the Pooh.

(2) It is olive gathering season here in Italy! We were invited by our branch president to go to their countryside lot and help gather olives. The process is thus: they lay giant nets on the ground and then climb the trees, combing through the branches with rakes until all the olives fall on the ground. Then we (the weak ones/missionaries in skrits) gather them in buckets. They will then be squished and made into oil. Great!

(3) Laying in bed a lot gives you some time to think. This was the first "break" I've really had since being on my mission. As missionaries we have time for meals, in the morning and evening to prepare, and a half-day to do shopping, write our families, clean, etc. But missionaries, for a year and a half to two years don't get a vacation day. Unless we're sick, we are working to teach, serve, and strengthen people in our area the whole time we're serving. Which. Is not a healthy way to live your entire life. Mentally, physically, emotionally... it's very natural to have hobbies and recreation, down time and social time, time with family and friends. And it's not that I don't miss those things. So why did I take a year and a half out of my life to focus soley on these things, leaving behind family, friends, yoga, Moab, world news, nachoes, and all the things that I love?

It's because that all of those things are great and they are wonderful, beautiful ways to fill my time. But when I am home -- sad and crying about a horrible day, or depressed and alone because everyone in my life is busy, or angry because I didn't do well at some random project --- it's not yoga or nachoes that give me lasting peace and comfort. It's not trips to Moab that tell me it will be ok. It's not world news that tell me WHO I am.

It's kneeling in prayer and speaking to my Heavenly Father. It's communicating with Him and trusting and knowing that He gives me answers. That He made me and thus knows me better than I know myself. And He can give me advice that I can trust.

I promise that He does. He speaks to us today, personally and privately. And that's why I've taken this year and a half. Because I have the rest of my life to perfect my yoga poses and learn how to kayak. But now I get to share with anyone who will listen how to access the same lasting peace and happiness that I have found. And that's the thing that is most important.

Thanks so much to Hayley Paul... I finally got both of your letters, delayed, because I live on an island of the sea and they don't believe in forwarding us our mail in a timley fashion. But I loved what you sent and I have faith in all that you do! You're inspiring!

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and love.

Peace,
Sorella Fuller