belle ragazze, forza! forza! forrrrzzaaa!

That's what a nice man driving by said while we were running nice and early Monday morning and we've been laughing about it ever since.

I can't believe Canoecopia has come and gone. We were SO busy this last week (we taught 27 lessons), and this week, we really don't have time to see all the people we need to, so it wasn't until the night time when I was getting ready to sleep and I thought "Right now, hundreds of people whom I love are in the Alliant Energy Center, what?" It didn't seem real at all. I guess the other side of the world just feels kind of far away sometimes. Ha.


I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to make a disc of pics but I'll keep trying to send a few every week. Including pics for mom of our apartment, this week I send our bedroom pics. Also pic of our first cannoli break and my fav lego man.

ANYWAY...

Bergamo is so great. I think Spring may actually be here, no more back and forth warm and cold. And our ward is so solid. Today we're going to go have lunch and grab a kebab with one of the Young Women, 17, who is struggling a bit, and I'm going to help her with her math class (in Italian), we'll see how that goes.

We got to teach one of our investigators, Marisol, that we haven't seen in a bit because of work on Monday and she and her family are having some serious trials right now and we ended up scratching our original lesson plan and just talking about the atonement and I had this little moment of revelation and recounted the story of Ammon and Aaron out doing missionary work both of them ended up teaching kings how accepted their message and were willing to change, but Ammon's success came pretty quickly while Aaron was first imprisoned. Sometimes we have to wait in our version of prison before whatever is next, but there's always a way out. Hopefully that makes sense.

Remember the lady we met in the Kebab shop? Irma. We'll we go and teach her and her daughters, 14 and 18 every Saturday. Irma is usually a little distracted but wants to listen and has good comments. Giovanna is 14 and has never really gone to church. Irma's been here for a while but it was only 10 months ago that her daughters came over from Bolivia, and while they were there with Irma's sister they never really had any religion in their lives. The 18 year old, Faviola, is the most engaged I think. She's having a bit of a hard time moving to Italy and having all new friends and stuff so this week we're going to try and bring Nichole, who we're having lunch with today. But the point of this poorly told story is I feel like I finally got through to her this Saturday.



We were waiting for Irma, because she's kind of a space cadet, and I was asking her about music and we were talking about Rihanna and she started telling me how much she like Justin Bieber and started playing One Less Lonley Girl on her phone and I was singing along and then I started translating the lyrics for her a bit. They've been struggling to read the Book of Mormon so after that we read 1 Nephi 1 together, stopping and talking about what we were reading and why it would be important and when we committed them to read at the end of the lesson, she said she would right away, so quickly in fact that her Mom was surprised: Wait, what did you just say? I just have a good feeling about her and I'm glad I was able to show her that you can be a real person and listen to real music or whatever and have God be apart of your life. I feel like too often missionaries forget to be real people and make real connections, but people have to see that they can have a testimony of the gospel without being a cyborg.



I think that's all for now. Much love, obviously, especially for the alien in mom's foot. I'm excited to see your new boat dad, but I mean, if you want, go ahead and send me pictures of things besides boats.

Vi voglio un sacco di bene!

sorella bush