Oct. 20, 2010

Subject: ciao from BARI

Ciao Ciao famiglia,

Well, its been a whirlwind of a week adjusting to a new life here in ITALY. I am not gonna lie, i have gone through Sicily "withdrawals" all week. I will Say that it is really different actually. it just "feels" different. Much more refined up here haha People dress nicer, walk faster, speak clearer, go to school longer, have more sophisticated jobs, etc. Just different. I will always love Sicily, but I'm trying to love it here just as much. Even though our apartment is infested with cockroaches, I try to love that too.....

We live on the outskirts of Bari, about a 30 minute walk to get to downtown Bari. The ward here is pretty big, and way on top of missionary work. Pretty impressive actually. We are doing a very different work up here. We are the missionaries assigned to work with the GANS (YSAdults). We do weekly meetings with a senior couple who have a new service calling that is devoted solely to what is called a GANS Outreach center. Basically a place in the church dedicated for the Young Single Adults. We do a report of all of our investigators that are the age of young single adults, and use our ward missionaries (who are all young single adults) to help us integrate these young investigators with this Outreach center. This is something totally new to me. My companion Sorella Tinoco is really on top of it because in Genova she was in the Presidency for this YSA outreach center. these are new in Europe, but we didn't have them in Sicily, because we just barely got a stake there. So yea, we do a lot of work with these young people which is cool.

My companion was born in Peru, but has lived in Genova since she was 11. She is definitely Peruvian, and still claims to be more Peruvian than Italian. It has been an adjustment to speaking Italian all the time, but its been really good at the same time. Funny, everyone up here tells me that I have a Sicilian accent. haha. The Bari accent is kind of weird, but I try to speak like them, and BE more like them. We were able to go over with the Anziani to the Engineering university and do what was called a "Blitz" basically we went over to the campus and walked around and tried to teach people using the initial approach as advertising for English Course. It worked out really well. We found a girl named Anna who told us that she would read the Book of Mormon in two days, and then let us know what she thought! Haha. It is still always just a mind game of telling yourself that these people don't have the gospel, and I might be the only chance they ever have to hear about it--that helps me get over my sometimes FEAR of talking to people, especially walking around a college campus haha Even after a year, its sometimes still hard!

We had a really cool experience with our investigator named Fabiola the other day, who is actually Venezuelan. OK PS, We do like a half hour of spanish every day at lunch, because we have a lot of Spanish speaking investigators surprisingly. So yea, I have been able to start confusing myself again. Fabiola has been here for a few years, but still doesn't really speak Italian. She married an Italian who also speaks Spanish, so hasn't really tried to learn Italian. We went and picked her and her two little girls up the other night, to walk over to a family in our wards house for a family home evening. By the time we got there I was saying things like "andiamos" a mix andiamo (Italian) and "vamos" (Spanish). Her two little girls speak like this weird language of Spanish and Italian. (poor things are so confused!) Haha yea, I just have no idea what I will do when i get home. it honestly stresses me out. oh well.

We have a family here who is investigating. The mom has a date to be baptised on November 6th. her name is Grazia. They have 4 kids. two sons and two daughters. their one son's name is Michele, he is 21 and is pretty interested. Then their little girl Aurora who is 9 is really excited. She and her Mom came to church Sunday, and have come several times. They are a really cool family though.

We have English course Tuesdays and Thursday nights, and lots more meetings than I am used to. I have felt like i haven't been doing as much "missionary work" and its been a little frustrating, but its true that the nature of the work changes in each city, so I just have to get used to it. It has been raining almost every afternoon here.

I love you all, thanks for the love and prayers.

un baccione,

MONICA

...Sorella Miller