My email title may or may not be a lie.
My greenie and I are both still alive, so I guess you could say week one of training has been a success, yeah?
Thursday, I got matched up with my lovely verdina, Sorella Richards!! We had so much fun moving all our luggage through the metro and around Milano centrale (that's a lie... it was hectic and dumb, but we lived!) and then we took the three hour train ride to beautiful Savona!
Well, 'beautiful' is an understatement, but we'll get to that later😏✌🏼️
We arrived, dropped our luggage off at our awesome apartment, and then headed to English class with the Anziani and our senior couple! Gotta love just jumping right in, yeah? After English class, the Anziani took us to get pizza! (Unnecessary info: It's cool, cuz our district is a full-blooded family, because Anziano Gibb is training Anziano Jones! With mission genealogy, your trainer is your parent, and your other parent is either your district leader or the oldest Sorella in your district. And since our district us just us four, we're a complete mission fam awww❤️ We will now return to our regularly scheduled program.)
Friday started of with weekly planning (which is rather difficult when you're both new to the city, but comunque). We sent off Sorella Richards' permesso stuff, and then met with the Anziani to coordinate stuff for the area. We decided to do some finding, aka walk along the pier whilst talking to people about Jesus🤗🌴 Then we returned home to start finding potential investigators in the area book.
Saturday started off a bit boring, because a lot of it was filled with organizing the area book and making calls. We mixed it up that night by going finding and then meeting the Anziani for gelato 🍦
Sunday, we met our branch! It was a really different experience because my past two areas had wards! Here, it's a branch and our church is really just an apartment that's been renovated. Really cool experience to get to work in an area where the church is still sooo young! The only hard thing is the leadership isn't super organized. The members are great though, and many travel a couple hours to come each week! After church, we walked along the beach to go to dinner at the senior couple's house! Super fun to talk with them, and then we went and visited a less active!
Monday was studies and district meeting. We had two appointments scheduled, but both of them ended up canceling on us💔 so we worked on the area book and called a ton of potentials, some of whom we have appointments with this week! Vediamo!
Tuesday, we went and visited the Garcias, a less active family. They live pretty far out, so the senior couple drove us! It was fun to see more of our beautiful area, and the Garcias are ADORABLE! Then we had an appointment with Maria, a recent convert, and her daughter Aurora who doesn't know much about the church! Ha, Maria speaks really fast which was difficult. I still feel like my Italian isn't all that great. However, talking with my greenie after the appointment, it made me surprised to realize how much my Italian has improved since I first arrived in Italy! Yeah, it's faaaaaaar from perfect! But I can have conversations with people and do basic things, and I consistently feel God helping me when my own abilities aren't enough.
Today for Pday, we decided to explore our gorgeous city! It's amazing here, because you've got mountains on one side and the Mediterranean Sea on the other! Legit, our apartment is like a 10 minute walk from the beach! Cruises dock here, like that's how cool his place is! So we went up in this beach fortress thing, checked out the duomo, and browsed through the little shops in centro (the book store was my favorite, of course!)🌴🗻🚢🏝🏖🌄🌅
Isn't it neat how aware God is of us? I was excited but mostly terrified when I got the transfer call to open and train. I still feel really inadequate in most areas, especially the language. However, I woke up today feeling extremely blessed. He gave me an awesome greenie, and outstanding Anziani and other missionaries. He gave me a beautiful area that definitely needs some work, but is already amazing. He's not making the experience easy, but He has made it doable. And I mean, what more can I ask for?
"We can trust in what our prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, repeatedly teaches: 'Whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies' and 'When we are on the Lord’s errand, we are entitled to the Lord’s help.' Whether we are overwhelmed or underwhelmed, whether we are scared to death or bored to death, the Lord wants us to gear down, power up, and serve." -General Conference October 2016
XOXO
Sorella Smedley
1- Picking up my Greenie, Sorella Richards 2-Her first pizza 3&4-Awkward family photos with our district
5&6- The Pier 7-My comp being a photographer of me & the Anziani
8-Sunday walk on the beach 9-First kebab in Savona 10-Bookstore!!
11-22 Beach Fortress & duomo
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