Wednesday, July 13, 2011

No place compares to Napoli!


Dear Family and Friends,  

Sorry it has taken me a while to write home. I don’t have as much time here as I did in the MTC. Well, Napoli is awesome!  No place in America really compares to Napoli.  On Monday we were in Possillip, in this park. The park was the point that divided our area from the other elder’s area. This park is the highest point and the very end of this mountain. You can see everything from it.  The park is very beautiful but not well maintained, but then again Napoli isn’t for that matter. I would love to take you to the park but it probably one of the most dangerous places in Italy.




Well with the mafia, don’t worry about me.  I’m fatter and bigger (muscle) than pretty much every Italian here.  I get told it every day plus people here love us. We were walking along the highway on Saturday and everyone was honking and waving at us. We met this guy who owns a super nice restaurant who gave us free ice cream (the best ice cream I’ve ever had.  Sunkist which has real orange juice and a pastry like a croissant with powder sugar on top and the middle had frosting and a cherry.  We got that for free just because of what we are doing and for just being motivated/proactive kids.  We were walking on the sidewalk and we ran into this guy who just wanted to shake our hands for dressing up, looking nice, and not being like other Naptan kids. So people here love the missionaries, especially older people.

So let me tell you more about the people.  The people here are the nicest and most friendly people for the most part. They are very creative when it comes to saving themselves some work.  They are very lazy. Napoli doesn’t have any industry or service that brings money here.  I feel very bad for the kids here.   They have nothing to do but school, friends, and bad things. Because of this they fall into drinking, smoking, and immorality at the age of 12 starting. Its’ Interesting to see kids here smoking that young.  They have very little to motivate them in life and its sad. Every girl here dresses immodestly.  Distracting yes, but there isn’t anything we can do about it really.  Regardless the people here are awesome.

Last Saturday we had a lunch appointment with some old guys we met in Possilipo.  They cooked rabbit for us.  I ate some of its insides.  The rabbit was very good but the insides weren’t as good. They are cooking fish for us, not this Saturday but next. Whenever I’m about to eat something I am unsure about, I pray that I won’t gag or throw up. It’s worked so far! I really want a pizza right now.

We have a lady that gives us referrals and we teach her friends and such outside her food storage shop. So we teach her friends.  One night we were walking through this park and found two college kids which is rare. We’ve been talking to one of them in half English and half Italiano.  He said he’d come to church if when he does he’ll technically be progressing. 

On Tuesdays we teach an English class to anybody who wants to learn. There is one guy there that we teach a gospel principle of the week. Next time we will teach him to pray and give him something to read. If he does the reading then he’ll be progressing along. We have some other contacts but nothing serious so we end up walking around trying to find more people.

So the drivers here are interesting.  Cops do not write tickets.  No stop signs, few stop lights and cross walks. So Italians may appear to be very crazy drivers.  True. But they are some of the best. They drive very aware. I could walk across a street blind-folded and I would be fine. 

So we headed to Pianura to teach.  To get there we take the RG which is a bus. We waited 30 minutes for the bus to come and found out they aren’t running.  So we headed to the Cumana (train) and took that there.  It was very packed.  Then we found out that because the people of Pianura are sick of not having their trash emptied they spilled several locations in the street.  The bus drivers didn’t want to drive through it so they just stopped driving.  (He told us in the past that the 2 mafias are at odds … one owns the garbage trucks and the other owns the garbage dump and they aren’t cooperating with each other so no garbage is being removed.)



I hope everyone is doing well.  I hope this letter gets to you soon.  I don’t know how long it will take, but we will experiments (it takes 6 days).

Love, Anziano Hosford

No comments:

Post a Comment