My little italian companion, SMILING, advertising....

I know I say this every week but what a week!! Holy smokes this week has been awesome. As you know, I got a new companion--Sorella Barbiere and she's fabulous! Oh man, we have so much fun together and we have a lot of the same goals as far as missionary work and our expectations of ourselves. I feel like this is going to be an amazing transfer. I can already tell that we're trying to push each other and be more effective and make missionary work fun.She's hilarious first-of-all. She kind of speaks a little bit of English (not really well) but still every now and then we have to get creative with actions and noises when we want to explain things to each other. I was just trying to talk to her about the vacuum this morning and that was exciting. ha ha She says some things in English that make me bust up every time. She loves the word "lame" and she tells me like 5 times a day "I love you with all of my heart". She's so fun.So from day one together we talked about how we want to step up the finding work and talk to more people. I think it was important that we talked about this from the beginning. On our way to appointments (like on the bus) we sit in different parts of the bus and just talk to whoever sits by us and it's been cool. I don't know. It's like Heavenly Father knew that we wanted to step things up and He's for reals been helping us do it. On Saturday, we had just finished an appointment across town (with some potential investigators) and we were riding the bus to church. Well, all I did was smile at a lady that made eye contact with me from across the bus. She came up to me and asked why I smiled and if we knew each other. I told her that I'm just a happy person and like to smile. Anyway, the conversation kind of ended and then I asked her if she wanted to sit down. We talked and I ended up giving her a pamphlet and got her number! I called her the next day and she'd read all of the pamphlet and wanted to know what the book of Mormon was. It was crazy! We had our first appointment yesterday. She met us in church and we taught about the restoration. She has some interesting ideas. :) But she likes what we're teaching and we have another appointment Saturday and she wants to come to church Sunday. It's so sweet.Also our district leader has been pushing us about publicizing English class. Up until now we've only been taping fliers to traffic poles (wow! WHAT do you call those in English? I honestly don't know...nor in Italian so...lose--lose) But Anziano Herrick and his new companion Anziano Morris printed off like 300 little papers to hand out that have the information for the class on it. They gave the stack to us kind of teasing if we could hand them all out. Well, we made a huge poster and went to the metro stop. One person held the poster and the other walked up to everyone leaving the metro and handed them fliers. We handed like 300 out in 1 1/2 hour. It was rad. So after an appointment we made more and we had Anziano Herrick and Morris join us at the metro and we did DAMAGE! I'm so sad that I can't be at English class tomorrow because it's gonna be PACKED! (Usually there's like 20 people....oh man it's gonna be crazy!)Oh, I won't be at English class tomorrow because I have 3 month conference! I'm actually so excited. My whole MTC district gets to go to the Villa and sleep over on Thursday night and have training and...I don't know what else. Nobody will tell me. I'm so excited to see all my girls again from the MTC. I'm stoked to see how awesome they are with the language and how much they've changed as missionaries. Missionary work has gotten more fun and I'm so grateful. Even Sorella Barbiere talks about how grateful she is that we're companions. I can't describe it but something happened since we've been together. We both feel like new missionaries. Like a fresh new start. I'm just soaking it all in because we both have so much fun together but we're working hard and making it enjoyable.I hope every thing's going great with everyone at home. Be safe and read your scriptures. ha ha I'm a nerd. I'm joking...but not. :) Have a splendid day. 5 scoops of gelato worth of Italian love....from my heart to yours....ha ha
Sorella Mallory Hansen