To Caiazzo with the Willies

Hey Famiglia!

Just to start, I got all of the letters at zone conference last Friday.  I really like those ward missionary newsletters.  They are very, very cool!

Being in an Italian Branch like this has shown me how different the Church functions on a smaller level.  It used to feel like things magically happened in Utah as far as activities, etc…  Now there’s a huge responsibility on the Elders on helping the branch function and communicate, especially because the Americans and Italians are all integrated!

What a bummer about the Cougars.  I miss the good ol’ traditional passing style offense they used to put up!  Ugh.  Hopefully they’ll have it back once I come back in a couple seasons! 😉

[Note:  The names of the couple in the following paragraph have been changed.]

Anyways something cool we got to do this week after zone conference was go up to Caiazzo with the Willies so that we could translate for them and help them visit a member who lives out there (about a 45 minute drive from Caserta).  The husband is very sick and the doctors told the couple that he would only have a very short time to live.  We had permission from the branch president to take them the sacrament and give him a blessing and did so.  The wife is a member and the husband, Jacob is not.  Rachel cannot make it to church because it is too far and she has to take care of Jacob for the time being.  When she saw the sacrament she started crying and absolutely loved it.  I thought it was a really cool experience to be able to go with the Willies up there to Caiazzo where it is pretty hard for us to get to.  Jacob has had a remarkable turn-around and is doing well for the time being!

On top of that, Caiazzo is absolutely beautiful.  The Willies took us to a little restaurant on the side of Caiazzo that looked over the whole valley as the sun was setting.  Not only was the view amazing, but this little pizzeria was the best pizza I’ve had so far while being in Italy.  It was called Pepe in Grani.  I wrote it down so I can remember it for when I come back!  I still am keeping my little moleskin journal/pocketbook up-to-date with places to remember and come back to!  Up in the mountains is so amazing.  Rolling hills with a bunch of vineyards and classic Italian homes with stones around them make an amazing panorama!

Today for P-day I went to La Reggia again for Anziano Hoover because he’s never seen it before, and I’d only seen the lower half.  Today we did it all.  The upper half of La Reggia was even better.  It absolutely blew my mind!  The English Gardens were absolutely incredible.  We ran into the Senior couple from Battipaglia, and the Battipaglia sisters at La Reggia too, just by chance.  La Reggia is a big hit for all of the missionaries in the Napoli Zone!  Anziano Faggioli bought a football too and was nice enough to let us take it to La Reggia today.  It was a blast throwing it around and just having a good time!  Anziano Faggioli and Morgan had other plans today, so it was just Hoover and I at La Reggia.

Well, Italy is still as incredible as ever!  The weather is cooling down a lot now, and I’m loving it more and more.  Believe or not, I miss snow!  The heat and humidity of the summer is brutal.

Ciao for now!
Anziano Jones

Anziano Hoover, the owner of the restaurant, Sister Willie, and Craig.

Visiting Jacob and Rachel in Caiazzo.

The rest of these photos were taken when Craig and Anziano Hoover went to La Reggia.

Anziano Ballard in Rome!

Hey Famiglia!

So this week was quite an eventful one to say the least.  I’m glad you managed to spot me in the crowd at the conference!  I’ll talk about the stake splitting now first.

Craig is referring to this photo I found on Sister Waddoups’ blog.  It took me about half of a millisecond to find him in the crowd.  (I must be his mother!)

On Saturday evening we got to take a train up to Rome, and we spent the night back in the good ol’ villa.  It was beautiful like always!  Sunday morning we got up at 4:15 and prepared to head out, because Elder Ballard offered to have a special meeting for the missionaries in Rome!  It was absolutely awesome.  I got to shake his hand and he allowed us to ask any questions we wanted.  What an amazing experience.  He had some great advice for us and felt impressed that we should work on talking to the younger population of Italy, which is something we’re going to try to do.  After we had our special meeting with him we headed upstairs for the stake split.

The meeting in which they split the Rome stake.

Caserta is officially a new ward!  Wahoo!  We had to redo all of our stamps etc. to read “Ward of Caserta” rather than “Branch of Caserta”.  We’re pretty excited.  Elder Ballard had some really cool things to say and then charged all of us to work together as missionaries and members.  He pulled us all up front so all of the members could see us, and then had all of the bishops/branch presidents stand up and made the bishops promise to put us all to work. That was a very cool day to be a missionary!

I got to see Anziano Burton and Anziano Rigby in Rome, and I was with Anziano Hoover, so I got to see all of my companions all together in one spot!  It was kind of weird.  I also saw a lot of the Anziani from my MTC district in general.  It sure was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately our washing machine broke this week so we’ve had to take some extreme measures on clothing [I wish he had gone into a little more depth on this topic!], but luckily now it is replaced and all is well.  We still have the two baptismal dates for the 12th of October, the week after General Conference, and we’re looking forward to those!  I’m super excited for General Conference now as a missionary, it will be neat to be able to listen to it.

Zone Conference is this Friday, in two days.  We have interviews with President tomorrow so will actually just be spending the night in Napoli rather than Caserta on Thursday.  The Napoli Anziani are staying in Pozzuoli that night so we get to have their house to ourselves! (The Caserta Anziani).

In other news, Anziano Hoover and I bought a big huge meter long pizza and scarfed it down yesterday.  It was sooooo good, but we were absolutely stuffed by the end of it.  Today we just ended up playing soccer and didn’t really go sightseeing or anything.  We played with all of the Napoli Elders and the Pozzuoli Elders.  It was a lot of fun!  We all ate at a member’s house afterwards.  Italians sure make some dang good pasta!

Craig and his new companion, Anziano Michael Hoover, with their meter-long pizza.

These two photos were taken today after the missionaries played soccer for their P-day activity.

English course is a fantastic way to meet people.  Yesterday we had quite a few new people (thanks to our nifty posters we’ve put up around Caserta :)).  After Anziano Hoover and I did our spiritual thought to close, a couple came up to us and asked us how much the Book of Mormon cost.  That’s one of my favorite questions!  Nevertheless they took one and now we have an appointment set up with them!  Getting new investigators is my favorite.

Well, as far as news goes in Caserta, that’s pretty much it!  I’ve been traveling a lot lately around Italy because of the conference and then Zone Conference coming up.  It’ll be good to get into a more normal routine next week!  It’s made it really hard to schedule regular appointments.

It’s been a busy but good week!

Ciao!
Anziano Jones

These photos were taken on P-day last week.  Craig and Anziano Hoover went back to Capua to see it again.

I’m glad they aren’t serious all the time!

Craig said, “SpartaCane! (a stray that followed us around).”

Stuck in a Tiny Little Elevator

Hey Famiglia!

Wow, that rain storm sounded CRAZY.  Joey sent me a video of it coming down.  I can’t believe how much water there was.  I’m kind of bummed yet happy at the same time I missed out on that!  Right now I’m e-maling from Montesanto in Napoli.  The computer is fine, but this keyboard is awful.  I’m having a hard time typing.  I’m sorry if this e-mail is a bit shorter than usual.  Anyways, the past week has been pretty good!  Anziano Hoover is from Idaho Falls, and we are having a grand ol’ time together!  His first name is Michael.

I also heard that BYU beat Texas!  Yay!  Having American members in the branch is awesome because they can give us football updates. 🙂

Unfortunately on Monday this week we both picked up a bit of a bug or something, and had to stay in on Tuesday.  Our tummies weren’t very happy with us.  But the pizza was still SO good.  In any case it was not the most productive week because we got a little sick.

On Monday night we also went over to help out a less active move some furniture around the apartment, and we got stuck in a tiny little elevator for about 10 minutes. It was super hot and sweaty and not fun.  Elevators in Italy are all super tiny, only room for about 2-4 people in them.  The building manager guy had to come and manually move the elevator to the next floor so the door would open.

Today we are going to the Soterreno in Napoli, otherwise known as the Underground. There’s a ton of ancient ruins, catacombs, and secret passageways and apparently it is super cool.  I’m excited to go see it!  This evening we are going to go play calcietto [soccer] with our investigators, like always.  One of them is the ex-pro soccer player, and he’s bringing us custom jerseys with our names on them just for fun and because he has some cool hook-ups. Anziano Burton got his last week before he left.  They’re pretty awesome.

Well, this next Saturday we’re going up to Rome for the Stake split with Elder Ballard on Sunday.  I’m super excited!  It is going to be super cool.

In any case, last Thursday all of the new greenies came in, officially making me not a greenie!!  That was super exciting for me.  It is kind of interesting to see how far I’ve already come.  They are all super fun greenies.

Anyways, I’ve probably got to start wrapping it up.  I’m sorry for the shortness of the e-mail! I’ve tried my best to get as much out as I could.  We’ve had to push back our 2 baptismal dates because of the Stake split and General Conference.  They’re set for October 12th now.

That’s about all I’ve got!

Ciao!
Anziano Jones

Transfers Today!

Hey Famiglia!

So it turns out that I won’t be with Anziano Burton anymore.  He’s going to Cagliari in Sardegna!  I’ll be dropping him off at 7:30 tonight at Napoli Centrale and he’ll be going up to Rome, then flying off to Sardegna.  He’s been a good companion and it’s sad to see him go.  My new companion will be Anziano Hoover!  Last transfer he was in Pozzuoli so it’s not a very far move for him to come up to Caserta!  I’ve already met him a few times because of Zone Conference and district meetings, and in fact went on a companion exchange with him last week, so I already know him quite well!  He’s a really awesome guy and is very good at Italian.  He’s been out about a year and six months already, so will have lots of good stuff for me.  I’ll be meeting him at Napoli tonight as I drop off Anziano Burton.

Anyways, this week has been a ton of fun.  We’ve been visiting a lot of people and saying goodbye to all of the investigators and members that Burton knows.  He’s been in Caserta for almost 6 months now.  We’ve been super busy going around to see all of the friends Burton has made.  Anziano Faggioli and Morgan will be staying companions in the same house as us.

This week I got to see the Capua Amphitheater with some investigators, and also Casertavecchia with a new convert Burton had grown pretty close to.  They were both so cool!!  The Capua Amphitheater is apparently the second largest in Italy, only behind the Rome Colloseum itself.  I took lots of good pictures of it.  It was huge.  Casertavecchia is up in the rolling hills just northeast of Caserta, and there are amazing views of basically our whole proselyting area.  Our area is too big.  We could spend a whole day traveling just to get to the edge of our boundaries (by train of course).  Our boundaries don’t go very far south because of Napoli, but they go way far north.  Regardless, I’ll try and upload those pictures.  It may be hard because I’m using some sketchy public internet point and I haven’t tried connecting my camera to it yet.

Note:  In the next three paragraphs, the names of the investigators have been changed.

Anyways, the work is going great.  We had two of our investigators that we’ve been working with for quite a while now finally come to church.  They’re the same ones that we saw Capua with.  Their names are Sarah and Abraham.  Sarah has basically successfully quit smoking (just a puff here and there) and Abraham will have quit at the end of this month, according to the program we made for him.  I think Sarah is really close to accepting baptism, but the hindrance is Abraham because he isn’t quite so sure of the Church himself yet, and they both want to go to the same church together.  We’ll see how it goes.  Abraham is the one we play calcietto [soccer] with every Wednesday.  He played on a semi-pro team a while back and so is way good.  He’s actually bought the four of us custom jerseys to play with, with our names and numbers on them and everything.  He gets crazy discounts at sports stores because of his professional soccer hook-ups.  It’s awesome.

One more new investigator that’s been making quite a bit of progress is Matthew.  He was a referral from the recent convert that took us up to Casertavecchia.  He’s pretty sincere in lessons but just needs to ask and find out for himself now.  But he is honestly seeking and reading the Book of Mormon.

We went to eat dinner at the house of one of our other investigators this week.  His name is Luke.  The food was SO GOOD!  They just pour out the food.  They brought out the first course (appetizer) which was like potatoes with fried zucchini, then the second course which was some fried eggplant and sausages.  Then they brought out the mozzarella di Bufala and Fior di latte cheese with breads, and while we ate those they started grilling steaks for us with carrots and other vegetables.  After all that they brought out gelato.  It was incredible.  I gained 7 pounds from that one meal.  I loved it.  Italian meals are the best.  You just sit there and eat for hours and hours.

Well, that’s about it for this week!  I’ll be hanging out here in Caserta for the next couple of weeks, and couldn’t be more happy about it!  Napoli zone is the best.  I won’t be able to get any letters until Zone Conference, which is on the 20th of September.  So if you’re planning on sending anything do it in the next day or two before it’s too late.  I hope everything is going well!

Ciao!
Anziano Jones

These first several pictures were taken in Capua.

Craig with his companion, Anziano Burton, at the Capua Amphitheater.

Craig said:  “This is a pretty cool tomb.  The beds weren’t very comfy.”

These two pictures are of models which demonstrate the kinds of events that took place in the coloseum in ancient times.

Craig said:  “Anziano Burton strolled into the colloseum with the investigator.”

Craig said:  “Here’s me and Busdicker!  He got transfered up to Rome 5 because he has asthma and the air in Napoli is pretty horrible.  He’s a good buddy though!  I’ll miss seeing him on Mondays for DDM.”

Craig said:  “Pictures from Casertavecchia.  Everything in the photo on the ground is basically our proselyting area.  The view was awesome.”

Anziano Burton walking into a church with a recent convert.

A baptismal font.

A view of Caserta.

Craig called this one a “selfy.”

Craig and Anziano Burton with the view of Caserta behind them.

Craig said:  “We passed under the aqueducts that have been standing for hundreds of years that carried water to La Reggia and into Caserta.  I snapped a pic from out of the car’s window.”  [Craig doesn’t have access to a car, so this car must belong to the convert they were with that day.]