6/26/2013 - Week Two in Italy!!! :)

Ciao!  

Had a great week this week, and we did sooooo much!  We went to St. Peters Basilica (the Vatican) last pday.  It was sooo beautiful.  We went in the prayer room as well and prayed for a few minutes.  It was really special to be with so many other people who want God in their lives and desire to have His Spirit to be with them.  Pretty cool :)

And, I HAVE to tell you this first because I do not want to run out of time for this one:

So, we take weekly trips to this beautiful town called Latina which is about two hours away.  (Ostia is a HUGE area, and includes many surrounding cities that are quite a ways off.)  We are currently trying to establish a ward there because there once was a ward, but it was dissolved into the Ostia/Rome 4 Ward.  Crazy stuff.  So, last week we saw this really nice nun.  I said, "Hello, Sister" and smiled at her, and she smiled back at me, nodded her head and said "hello."  That opened the door for my very chatty comp, Sister Lovell to ask her questions about her order that she is in and a little about what she believes.  Well, this past week when we went to Latina again, we saw the Nun on the bus in the morning on the way from the train station and again on the way back from the station.  SO CRAZY.  I was thinking, "Okay, there has to be a reason why we are coincidentally seeing her so much."  My comps told me, "Go talk to your Nun friend!"  I was a bit apprehensive at first because I felt a bit awk, but it ended up going really well, and we really got to know her better.  Her name is Natali and she is from Burkina Faso.  The first time we talked to her, she said, "I can tell that you are all servants of Christ because you are kind.  Most people here won’t talk to black people so I can tell you are kind because you cared to speak with me."  (She said this all in Italian, of course :)  Buuut she came all the way from Africa to learn skills here to share with people in Burkina Faso.  Long story short- she is way cool.  Communiqué, we were talking with her on the way home on the train (because we sat together there too!) and we got on the topic of religion when I had asked her about the ring she was wearing.  She told me it was a "Rosario" and asked me if we say prayers to Mary in our church.  It was crazy because she was surprised that I did not know what her ring meant.  Wellllll, after this, she started asking questions about our religion, and Sister Lovell, being the awesome missionary that she is, changed it into a short lesson about the Restoration. 

 CHE FORTE!   It was sooooo powerful!  The nun listened sincerely to what we had to say.  Wow, and a little after this, THE FANTASTIC NUN SAID SHE WANTS TO LEARN MORE!  She even offered to have us come over to her house and teach her the lessons!!  It was a really special experience and, veramente, un miracolo!  Wow!

Other stories really quick:

We found this ancient (from 2009...lol) binder with Schedas from members from the old Latina Ward.  It was sooooo cool!  And we only found it when our shelf broke!  ahaha.  Again, un miracolo!  Because we were able to find information that saved possibly hours of pointless relapping work.  I called it the "Libro D"oro in District meeting, and erryone thought it was funny.  Love this stuff! 

Andrew!  (My Brother!) You would love Carmellos son, Emiliano!  He goes fishing every day, and is wayyyy funny!!!  Lol, I talk to him in >English sometimes, and we have a good laugh talking about penguins.  Seriously though, dude, you would be buds!  Please learn Italian now so you can be his friend in the near future!  ;D  Haha, so fun! 

I don’t really know what else to say except that miracles do happen, but we need to be willing to let them happen.

OH!   Almost forgot!!!  lol, so our investigator, Mario, we invited to church last Sunday.  But, he did not come.  haha, we found out today, however, that he had come to the Metrop station by the church, stood there for a minute, decided that his stomach hurt, and he went home....  Lol, so crazy.  We have another appt with him after exams are finally over, but it is really cool to see his progress. 

ANDREW, AVRI, AND MEGAN

Wow, I love you guys!!!  You rock for going on Trek!  Lemme just say, It changed my life, and I hope it had the same impact on you all.  Write me about your experiences and send pics if you can!  Email me if that is best.  Also, my Ma can show yall how to <dear elder if you want, but email is wayyy cool too.  :)  Love you guys.

Andrew!  I have to hear all about your Trek family!  Please tell me all about it!  Gahhhhh, soooooo coool!  And dude, we might baptize a nun!!!  This Church is sooooo true!!!  I can’t say baptize yet because we still need to teach her and have a specific return appt.... lol, but it is looking way awesome.

CRAZY FHE the other night.  So, Carmello cancelled on us, so we ended up just getting pizza with the Anziani that night.  Well, whilst we were in the Pizza place, a member, Barbara passed by.  We were already planning on visiting with her, so Sister Lovell went to go stop her.  Soon after, we went with Barbara, ran into Carmello and his son Emiliano, went to Barbaras house, and had FHE there.  Anz. Smith gave a Spiritual thought, and we thought, "Okay, awesome, we shared our thought so now we can show Barbara some Genealogy stuff and get home on time.  wellllll, after that, we ended up having a wayyyy heated way long discussion about Temple Prep because Carmello thought that people who are not worthy should not go to the Temple, and he thought that his wife should not be able to go because of something she had done.  WOA it got crazy because he kept repeating certain points he did not understand and it took Sister Lovell telling her divorce story a second time (because he did not understand that the story was about her and not someone else the first time) to get him on good grounds with prepping for the temple.  ANNNND when I tried to share a scripture in the middle of all this, he went bizzerk and said, "NO! Missionariers should be like Christ and only listen!  That is not appropriate right now!"  Shortly after, Elder Smith wanted to read a scripture, but thought twice because of how Carmello reacted to me...  Oh well, the point is that we acted on our promptings according to the agency of the people who we were teaching. 

About our investigator, Mario:
Also, he accepted our challenge to pray for the first time ever, and he said that he "even closed his eyes once."

Altre cose:

I really love and miss you all soooo much... I was thinking about you guys yesterday because I was this young girl on the train calling her Dad, and I said, "I wish I could call my parents..."  But it’s cool because we are soooooo busy here.  Which I like because it is a good kind of busy in which we get to help people feel peace in their lives and invite them to come unto Christ in a variety of ways.  Missionary work truly is a labor of love, and is 100% not what people make it sound like.  It is 100% good, and if we follow our promptings and the rules, we will have success and we will be happy.  I know this with all my heart.  I really wish everyone could serve a mission because they would learn so much about how to just love people and not let selfishness get in the way of anything.  I know that Christ would do the same types of things we are doing (lol, of course he would proooobably do it better, but we try ;) and I know that he will strengthen us.  I also thought today, as I was praying, that it is selfish to think "what is my impact here?  Shouldn’t I be having a more major impact?" because we may not know now nor in this life the impact that we truly have on people and situations.  We may not, at times, think that we have any impact.  But I know this: when we live the gospel and stand by Jesus Christ, we do and always will have an impact that we may not even know about.  Know this, and live the way Christ would live.  Follow the examples of the Prophets of old in praying always and having a heart full of Charity for people all around us.  I love yyou guys soooo much.  Nel nome di Gesù Cristo, Amen.

DAD (and Mom if you think this is cool too!  I think you will.) 

Start reading Jesus the Christ!!!  Seriously sooo great  :)  You will find the origin of the name of Christ and a whole new perspective will be opened to you (ch4)  Love you guys!  Have a great week!!!  Email and write me!!  I want to hear about your lives! 

Con tutto il mio cuore,

Sorella Corey Anne Cherrington

FIRST LETTER FROM SORELLA COREY ANNE CHERRINGTON IN ITALY!!!!! :) :) :) JUNE 19, 2013

Ciao tutti!  

I am officially in Italia and in my first area here.  It is this city called Ostia that is about 30 to 45 minutes outside of Rome.  It is right on the coast, so we get to see the beach and the coast a lot.  It is also cooler here because of the breezes from the sea.  Lol, does not mean that it is not hot, but it is more mild.  Seriously though, this place reminds me of Stockton and California in general.  It feels like I am at home climate wise, and just the overall feeling reminds me of CA.  It is really cool, and I feel used to it here already.  I adjusted well to the time change too because I prefer to live on the time zones here; it feels more natural for me for some reason.  BUT enough about me!  I need to tell you all about the people we have been meeting with here and how awesome they all are.  :)

Hmmmm... I will start with Fratello Mangiacotti.  So, each week, the Missionaries in Ostia go to lunch at Fllo. Mangiacottis house where he feeds us wayyyyy too much, and makes fun of you if you don’t finish all of the food (lol, trust me, I experienced it first hand, haha :)  He is really funny, lives on his own, is in his late 60s has many cats.  He is awesome! 

Then, there is "Mama" who is this really nice lady in our apartments who says, "I am always the Mama here (for the missionaries)!  You are my daughters!"  She "bocces" us when we see her, and she is fantastic!  (Note: We basically :"bocc." (boch) aka kiss people on each cheek, all the time!  Only if they are female of course, because we are mission approps, but yah!  It is pretty cool.) 

Sooo, there is also the Family Blas who is a less active part-member family.  Sister Blas is so great, she is studying to be a nurse and she fixed up my knee for me after Calcio (SOCCER!!!  :D).  Her kids are way funny too, and one of them is basically my new bff ;) He kept acting like my scraped knee scared him, lol, and I tried to keep him quiet during the lesson, so we had fun whilst I was distracting him :)  PS the Blas family is Peruvian but they speak Italian. 

Same with the Padilla family, who I also love!  :D  We went over to their place the other day to make Pizza, and had tons of fun!  Then, we played Calcio with Brother Padilla and some of his sons friends so we could help them invite some friends to church.  Seriously, it was soooo fun to play soccer with them!  I loved it.  I was scared at first, but I actually ended up being able to play pretty well!  Not the best, lol, but I was really in the game!  FUN!!!  :D  It was really great too because practically all the people we played Calc. with spoke Spanish and were talking in Span. a ton whilst we were playing.  Lol, it was so great!  There was also this really nice young man, Mike, who is Andrews’s age and would totally be good friends with Andrew if you guys lived here!  Also, there is another young man who is Andy’s age who is tons of fun.  His name is Emiliano.  He is the son of Carmello who wrote a famous church song in Italy called "I Missionari del Mondo" (The Missionaries of the World).  Their family is SO great and wayyy hilarious!  We go over to their house once a week too for Family Home Evening.  This last time, Carmello made us this STELLAR pasta with crab in it.  But it was still in the shell, so we had to crack it.  Lol, it was not an issue for me, but Sister Hibbert (one of my lovely Missionary companions) was sooooo funny about it, and was scared to touch the crab for a while.  They were tiny crabs, so she kept saying "I am afraid they will crawl off my plate!!!  Lol, she is very jumpy too, so she would freak out every time she heard a cracking noise near her.  She is great :)  Sister Lovell (my trainer and other comp) is really fantastic too!  She gets us going and always has a Plan A, B, and C.  She is pretty cool :)

(PS we get to play guitar at Carmellos house because he is really big on music!  Love it!)

SO!  What else to say....  :)  Well, we are going to the Colosseum today and the Roma forum!  :D  Pretty stoked for that.  And OH!  I forgot to tell you about the Agomeri family!!!  I love them sooooo much!  They are a less active fam, and we often go to visit Sister Agomeri (the grandma, who I LOVE and is Sicilian!  :D) and her lovely granddaughter, Evylin.  Sister Agomeri is really great though, and we have a special bond.  Gah!  I just love these people here!

OH!  And here are some more details about my city:

There are so many people here from around the world, and we get to give out books of Mormon in diff. languages.  We are giving an Arabic Book of Mormon to this one man in a Kebab shop in the next couple days, and we are trying to get a German Book of Mormon for one of our investigators, Mario, who is a German student here on Study Abroad. 

There is also Giorgiana who is Romanian, speaks Italian also, and has a really cool little daughter named Isabella who is also my new bff  haha.  I played with her in the park and wrote "secret messages" of flowers and apples with glasses.  It was pretty  fun.  I also learned a bit of Italian from her!  I bambini sono molto bene con aiutando le altre persone di diventare meglio con la lingua!  It is pretty cool how that works out.

Allora, I am basically out of time for e-mail, but I will write again next week, and I would be delighted to hear from you! 

Sinceramente,

Con Amore,

Sorella Corey Anne Cherrington

Blog for 5/29/2013 and 6/5/2013

 Ciao tutti!  :D 5/29/2013

This week has been pretty great; we got to go to the TRC again to share a thought with some LDS Church members who volunteer each week.  It is always nice.  We also got to teach Fratello Taylor for the last time on Tuesday because he left for an internship he and his wife are doing in Italia!  :D  They actually leave a few days after we do, but they are heading up to Alaska first, I think.  Communiqué, in our last class with il notro insegnante, Fratello Taylor guessed where each of us would go for our first area in Italia.  It was really cool. :) He guessed that I would go to "una piccolissima citta" called "Mistretta" where the descendants of the first Italian to acquire a Book of Mormon live.  It was soooo cool.  I was the only one he guessed would go to Sicilia first from our class, so that was pretty interesting/cool/awesome.  :)  It was a great class period though: he invited his wife to our class so we could meet her, and they told us stories about how he proposed to her (Tangled-style on a river in a boat with floating lanterns around and the song from Tangled playing in the background.  Our class thought he was "super pro" for that, lol).  His wife (Hermana Taylor) also told us this really cool story about her mission in which she ran into a little boy, trying to give him a Book of Mormon.  He said, "I don't need it- my Grandpa reads it to me every night." She and her companion, being shocked, asked him a couple of questions and asked him to be baptized.  He agreed and was baptized two weeks later.  the Crazy thing is that they almost didn't stop to talk to him because they were late for a lesson.  Wow, right?!  After Hermana (Sister) Taylor left, Fratello Taylor showed us TONS of really cool pictures of his mission in Italy and told us lots of funny/spiritual/awesome stories of his mission days.  Hands down, best class-time ever at the MTC.  After class, we were all stuck in a daydream of Italy-ness.  Oh my goodness, I cannot wait to finally be there in Italia!  Less than two weeks left at the MTC!

A couple days before all this (Sunday, I think) our District and a few recruits from the Romanian district die the "Eternal Life" Challenge where we ate an entire cafeteria-sized container of Life cereal.  Holy cow.  Crazy/funny stuff!  One of the Elders in our Distretto ate NINE BOWLS of life!!!  :O  Then we had one sister and an elder who ate 6 bowls, and... it was crazy!  I was not going to do the challenge at first because I am super health conscious with food, but my district got me to do it because I saw that they were suffering... literally, lol.  They had about 3/4 to a half of the container left to go when they started saying, "Come on Sister Cherrington, go for it!"  or "Come on Cherri!"  Lol, so I got myself some almond milk and contributed to the cause.  ;)  After we had finished the container (yes, we succeeded!)  Sorella Stephens said, "Yah, that was the best thing ever when you joined in!"  So cool :)  We have lots of fun in our distretto.

Buuuuut, we have noticed lately that we have reached our "Mid-MTC Crisis," as Sister Mathews calls it.  We literally were starting to go nuts the other day during class when Frat. Guest was teaching.  We have been kind of slugging along since then, but things are starting to look up.  We have a new District leader who really wants to maximize our potential with study time, so that should be good.  But, in all honesty, it has not all been fun and games this week.  We are all wayyyyy tired because of our weird schedule, and we have been a bit all over the place lately.  I think Fratello Taylor's awesome class yesterday uplifted us though, and I am so grateful for that.  the devotional last night also helped a lot with that because it reminded us that we are representatives of Jesus Christ and His church, and we have set District goals for the week to have the classroom be a "learning zone" which I think will help a lot.  I am excited to see the progress that we will make as we strive to study, thinking of the people of Italy and God first.  It's all about forgetting yourself here.  And, as some of us were discussing earlier, when you forget about yourself and go to work, you are far less likely to be offended.  Interesting thought, that serving others can make one more peaceful.

Oh!  And the other day, one of the Anziani (Anziano Brown- Morrone;) challenged me to a California Slang-off.  He thinks that, because he is from Southern CA, that his slang is better than what we have in Northern CA.  I said "No way!"  And agreed to get together a list of the N.CA slang that I know that would be wayyy better than his!  I am still working on it, but I am going to need all of the help I can get!  So all of my N.CA buddies out there- help me out!  That includes you, little bro and friend(Andrew+ friends)  :)  ANNNNNND Alana Conatser and Avri, Niz, Nai nai, etc.  As long as it is appropriate, you can send it to me so we can win the challenge!  Lol, just something goofy here that we are doing to stay sane.  After all, it is tough to be in such a small space with so many other people for 6 weeks.  Lol, "good times" as Elder Jensen used to say.  :) 

Felice questa Settimana!  :D

So this week, I have been wayyyyy happy and I cannot explain why!  Lol, actually I can.  First of all, I have been focusing more of my time on reading the Book of Mormon and on studying the scriptures, which has greatly improved my mood and my receptiveness to feeling the Spirit.  I have also been striving to learn by the Holy Spirit better by praying more often and by praying to read the things in the Book of Mormon that will help someone in Italy when I go there.  When you pray for other people, you are truly more strengthened in yourself.  It is amazing.

Other than that, I am learning tons here, making great friends, and having a great time serving the Lord.  :)

Ciao for now!

Con amore,

Sorella Corey Anne Cherrington

Caro i miei (parents),  6/5/2013

Ciao, ciao, ciao!  :D  I miss you guys sooooo much!  We had such a great week this week.  Me and Sister Mathews taught some stellar practice lessons yesterday to Fratello Carrington   and a new teacher (forgot his name).  We invited our first "simpatizzante" (investigator) to be baptized and he accepted!  :D  so cool!  And our second lesson was on the Restoration and the first vision.  It went fantastically!  :D and I also got to act as "un membro" (a church member)  in Sorella Kippen's and Stephen's lesson.  It was so great; in their lesson, when they gave "Danielle" a Book of Mormon, he tried to pay them for it and said (in italiano) "Do I have to pay money for this?  I would be willing to pay."  Lol, they had no idea what he was saying, so they just stared at him, al freaked out and what-not when I discretely shook my head "no" to them.  They responded "no, no."  Then, I told him, "It's a gift" in Italian, and he understood.  And after the lesson, I was telling some other people in our District about how their investigator wanted to pay them for the Book of Mormon, and the two sisters I helped out said, "What?!  He tried to pay for it!"  it was pretty funny.  I really love the Sisters in my district and I love helping them out.  :)  It is so fun!

Ahhhhh!  And Sister Mathews and I think Sister Kippen have told me that the past couple of nights, I have been sleep talking in italiano!!!  :D  Wow!  What a blessing!  I am so excited to be making good progress with Italian.  I really love this language.  Also, I can express about 80-90 percent the things I want to say in Italian!  It is so awesome!  :D  But I know that it is not just me, but that the Lord is helping me every step of the way.  I know that I could not possibly have learned this much in 6 weeks on my own.  It kind of reminds me of the "Footprints in the Sand" poem that Grandma Earlene always had hanging up in her house.  I will never forget that.  I've been thinking a lot about her this past week, by the way.  I'm not quite sure why, but I think about her all the time.  Interesante. 

So we saw Elder Noho, Elder Interaminese (from Brazil), and their other MTC English-learning buddies!  XD  they always bring tremendous joy to our days!  Lol, I love it!  So Elder Noho taught us a five minute lesson in which he practiced what he would say in English if he were to talk to someone at a bus-stop.  He did soooo great, and thought it was less than 10 min, both me and sister M. felt the trueness of his message.  Sooo cool!  And he used an analogy about prayer that we thought was cool.  He said, "Do you like burgers?  [a funny elder from the Philippines responded "No!"  right then ;) ] No?  Well, I like burgers!  I realllllly like burgers.  So, prayer is like burgers because we all have the same top, and we all have the same...  [he looks over to one of his friends and asks "what is the one you call that is not the top?" Another Elder: "Oh!  The "Down"! E. Noho, "Thank you!"] And we all have the same down.  We may have different meats in the middle and we all add different things to them, but we always have the same top and the same down."  It was really great!  Lol, we love Elder Noho and friends :)  they are such an inspiration to us because they came her knowing NO ENGLISH and now they are basically fluent and can share lessons and thoughts with us.  I hope that I can speak italiano 100% fluently someday (maybe even sooner than I think!). 

Last night after the Devozionale (Devotional), we got to have a District meeting with President Willis and his lovely Italian wife.  It was probably the coolest Riunione del Distretto that we have had yet because they told us tons of stuff about Italy basically the whole meeting.  It could not have went better because now we all know so much more about what to expect when we get to Italy.  Also, Sister Willis pointed me out in the Middle of the meeting and said (in her beautiful Italian accent) something along the lines of, "Yah, you look like you could be from Northern Italy or Rome because there are so many redheads in Italy! Wow!!!  How cool is that?!  I know for a fact that there is no other place I could have gone on my mission except Italy.  I know that my mission call was prayed about and inspired.  It is great to be a missionary!

We made our last Temple trip today too.  It was sooo nice, and we actually got to go with the Anziani (Elders) in our District this time because we coordinated better beforehand.  :)  It was very delightful.  I always love the P-day temple trips.  It will be our last temple trip for about 17 months though, so that will be crazy. We are all praying that the Rome Temple will be finished by the end of our missions though!  It is not looking pretty right now because they are having some issues with the building standards being met 100%, so they have estimated a drawback, making the completion date sometime in 2015  D: But we still have time until the original completion date comes along, so we are hoping and praying that it will be finished in Summer 2014 or before then.

And OOOOOOHHHHHH MYYYYYYY GOODNESS!!!  XD When we arrive in Rome, we will be staying at the Mission home, no?  And this mission home just happens to be the ex-palace of Benito Mussolini!  :O  Holy goodness, right!  There is soooo much history in Italia, and I am excited to finally be there!  We are all way excited to find out what our first area to serve in will be!  I cannot fully explain how awesomely-happy we all are!

One more story: So, the Sisters in our District like to prank the sisters in the other districts, and the other night we decided to target Sorella Jones.  I had found a random gift bag in the give-away pile, we put an empty box of tissues, a fortune from a fortune cookie, a Mexican candy, and this creepy/hilarious note that Sisters Mathews, Stephens, and I collaborated on.  Sister M wrote on it," SORELLA JOOOOONES!  WE LUH YOU!", Sorella Stephens kissed it, and I put a mustache on it and drew a face around it.  It was a pretty amazing gift.  ;)  So, we doorbell-ditched it to her, whilst we his in the room next door with some of the other Sisters from our Zone.  Lol, when we left to go back to our room, Sister kippen had disappeared!  Haha, Sisters Wiltbank and Pancheri said, "Sorella Jones Kidnapped her!"  So, Sis. M and S. and I went to go get her back.  We arrived at Sister Jones' room to see that S. Kippen was being forced to tell stories about her life... lol, so random.  S. Jones called her Wendy Bird and had a pillow case halfway over S. Kippen's head.  So we leave S. Jones' room with kippen, but Sister Jones insisted that she had to escort S. Kippen herself.  She put the pillowcase all the way over "Wendy Bird's" head, and walked Sister Kippen back to our room.  It was fantastic.  Haha, we love Sorella Jones!  XD 

Communque, my time for e-mail has almost run out!  Sooooo Arrivederci per adesso!  the next time I e-mail, It will be from ITALIA!!!  XD

Con Amore,

Sorella Corey Anne Cherrington

Two Gingeys

Viva Italia!!!  June 11th 2013

Peeps of the same District!!! :)

Beautiful Flowers at the Provo Temple.  :D