Hello,
hello from England!
As I said last week … I am training!
I went into London on Wednesday to pick up my new companion and his name
is.........Elder Mongelli from Italy!
He is a great guy! I love him and he makes GREAT pasta. He is from a place called Bari in the southeast part of Italy. He is a good guy and wants
to work.
Sometimes I can’t understand him
though. His English is probably a 6
or 7 out of 10, but I can already tell it has gotten better in just a matter of
days. At first people could not
understand him at all, and now people can get the gist of what he is saying.
I love the guy -- he is great. We have had some funny times together. He drove once and crashed into a pole and
popped the tire and bent the wheel a bit – haha. But we fixed it.
[Another
day] we were tracting in this middle-of-nowhere village named Upchurch. It’s really small and it was really dark and
nobody was listening. But then we knocked
on one door and an old lady answered. She
invited us in and we started talking to her. Her dog was sitting on the couch
and Elder Mongelli moved it off so we could sit down. And right where he was about to sit there was
a puddle. The dog had peed all over his
seat. But instead of telling the lady,
he just put a pillow from another chair on it and then sat on that. We didn’t tell the lady, we just started into
teaching the restoration. We asked her
if she believed in God. She said yes and
went on to tell a story about how she knew her husband was going to die when
they got married. We both found that rather strange but carried on teaching. We went on and asked her if she had heard of
Joseph Smith. She said no and then told
the same story about her husband -- word for word. I just kind of thought that she forgot she
told us that story already, so we carried on.
Then later on in the lesson we asked her if she would like a Book of
Mormon. She said yes and then quoted the
same story for a third time -- word for word.
It went silent for a second, and then Elder Mongelli whispered to me in
his Italian accent, “We don’t need to be here anymore. She is already saved.”
So we said we had to go and just got
up and left hahaha. The poor
woman was handicapped and I had no idea until twenty minutes into the
lesson.
I am really excited to train and
serve with Elder Mongelli and to keep doing the Lord’s work.
