Many people ask “how our mission is going for us” and then
ask “what we do every day”.
Well, the answer to the first question is easy, it’s great. We love serving in Italy, we love serving
alongside the young missionaries, we love doing Italian Family History work and
records preservation and we love living in this beautiful country.
To provide a better explanation for our daily, weekly and
monthly activities, I suppose a short description of our mission assignment and
responsibilities would be helpful. We
have been called as Family Search Records Preservation Specialists. We also support the Italy Milan Mission. Our mission then is a blend of these two
responsibilities.
Each of these assignments comes with a few recurring
meetings in which we participate:
Recurring Family Search Meetings: weekly Italy Family Search Team Meeting, weekly
Italy Camera Operations Update Meeting and weekly Italy Family Search Operations
Italy Milan Mission Meetings: weekly Mezz’ora Miracoli Meeting, weekly District
Council and every six-week Zone Conference.
We also attend baptisms in our District and for those whom we provide
apartment ministering (more on that later).
Mezz’ora Miracoli
Monday morning at 9:00am we participate in a mission-wide Zoom Call, Mezz’ora Miracoli (A half hour of Miracles). This is a meeting for every missionary serving in the Italy Milan Mission. The meeting starts with a prayer and a brief report from Presidente and Sorella Wood on the status of the missionary work in the mission, significant events for the upcoming week and then Sorella Wood tells us who is having a birthday during the week.
Following the Wood’s, we see photos of all those who have been baptized in the last week and hear from each of the missionary companionships about how they found these individuals, highlights of their teaching and about the baptismal service.
Each Zone has a Facebook Messenger chat where they share their
miracles that occur in their missionary work each day. We listen to our Zone’s miracles everyday as
they are posted, but we are not able to hear the miracles from across the
mission. Therefore, Presidente and
Sorella Wood select a few miracles from across the mission and invite a handful
of companionships to share a few specific miracles on the mission-wide Zoom
call on Mondays following the baptism miracles. Listening to these miracles is
truly inspirational. We are in awe of
the faith, dedication, boldness and devotion of these young missionaries and are
blessed to serve alongside them. Many
are approaching the missionaries asking to learn about the Gospel of Jesus
Christ and some are even seeking baptism from their first meeting. Presidente Wood reminds us of President Nelson’s
plea to not “miss the majesty of the moment” as we have a weekly opportunity to
see those making covenants with the Lord through baptism and witness His hand
in leading the gathering of Israel.
I will say that the name of the meeting, Half Hour of
Miracles, is really a misnomer; the meeting always lasts at least 45 minutes if
not a full hour. In reality, the meeting
could go on for hours, but we usually end around the hour mark. Following the miracles, we get any final
words of encouragement or counsel from President and Sorella Wood, then we
kneel in prayer as a mission to start the week.
We have to say that the Mezza’ora Miracoli is always a
highlight of our week. We didn’t know it
when we started our mission, but our interactions with the young missionaries
is certainly an added blessing that we hadn’t anticipated as we thought about
serving a Family Search Genealogical mission.
Italy Family Search Team
Meeting
We typically have a couple of virtual
Family Search Meetings on Monday afternoons via Microsoft Teams or Zoom. The first is an Italy Family Search Team
Meeting. This consists of Family Search
Employees as well as full time and services missionaries currently serving in
Italy. Currently the missionaries are
the King’s, Castellano’s, Anziano Mateo DePonte, a new couple in Napoli (D’Apuzzo) who are
joining the team as service missionaries, and us.
Family Search Team Meeting, the D’Apuzzo’s camera didn’t work, also missing Anziano DePonte
The second meeting is the COW meeting. I’m not sure what COW stands for, but this is
a meeting with Andrew who is in charge of Family Search camera operations in
Italy and several European countries. We
discuss the status of the camera operations and as well as any issues regarding
the collection of digital images that we might help with.
District Council
Each Tuesday we have District Council which is a face-to-face in person meeting with our District to discuss the status of their missionary efforts the last week, share goals for the coming week and get some training. When we first started our mission, we were in the Verona Zone, and we held our District Council meetings in Bergamo and sometimes Brescia. We have now switched to the Milano East Zone and our District Council meetings are in Milano at the Cimiano Chapel. Our travel time to get from Bergamo to Cimiano is about an hour, depending upon morning traffic. This meeting starts at 10:30 am.
In addition to reporting on our Family
Search Activities, we have started sharing apartment cleaning tips with the
missionaries to help them keep their apartments clean and organized, especially
prior to apartment inspections. When one
of the missionaries in our District has a birthday, Jodie loves to make a cake and
invites the other missionaries to sing Tanti Aguri (Happy Birthday) during our
meeting. We are getting a lot of milage
out of the 2-0 and 2-1 candles that we purchased at the dollar store.
After the District Council and the
follow up Zone Discussion end, we typically eat lunch together before returning
to Bergamo. When we don’t have extra
errands to run in Milan, we pick up the Bergamo Sorelle and give them a ride to
and from District Council. This speeds
up their trip and allows us to spend a little time with them each week as we
travel. By the time we eat lunch and
then travel back to Bergamo it is usually mid to late afternoon.
Our next regularly scheduled
meeting is on Wednesday afternoon. We
typically have an Italy Family Search Operations Meeting on Wednesday
afternoon. This is a meeting with the Italy
Family Search Team as well as individuals in Salt Lake City, Utah who support the
Family Search efforts in Italy. We
discuss anything from the status of camera teams, upcoming opportunities to
capture additional records, legal issues, agreements, problems with metadata,
gaps in record acquisition, experiences of individuals in Italy using Family
Search, etc. etc. The topics in this
meeting vary week to week.
Each Sunday, we also have our normal Sunday worship meetings. We attend the Bergamo Ward meetings. There is only one ward that meets in the Bergamo Chapel. Sacrament Meeting starts at 9:30am and is followed by Sunday School/Priesthood/Relief Society Meetings (depending upon the week). We are blessed to have a very nice chapel here in Bergamo. Our most sacred time is partaking of the sacrament and singing praises through the Hymns. Even in a different language, we can feel the Holy Spirit and rejoice together.
The baptisms are usually on either Saturday or Sunday. We are fortunate to have a baptismal font
here in Bergamo, so we have baptisms for the Bergamo and Treviglio ward's here. We’ve also attended baptisms at the Muggio
and Brescia Chapels to support the Merate Anziani, the Lecco Sorelle and the Brescia
missionaries. And you know what a
baptism means, right? That means that Jodie
makes some sort of treat to share afterwards; banana muffins, sour cream sugar cookies, and gingersnap
cookies seem to be among the favorites.
We have been assigned stewardship for seven missionary apartments: Brescia Sorelle, Brescia Anziani, Bergamo
Sorelle, Bergamo Anziani, Lecco Sorelle, Merate Anziani and Treviglio Anziani.
Every six weeks, usually the week before transfers, we visit
each of these apartments. The goal of
the visit is to check on cleanliness, identify issues needing repair, making
minor repairs, replacing worn out, missing or broken items, and an overall
check on the missionaries living there. As
part of our visits we typically rotate eating lunch, getting gelato or bringing them a
treat as we visit.
As part of our ministering efforts, we also like to attend their
baptisms, celebrate their birthdays and generally keep in contact with each of
these seven companionships. Our goal is
to provide physical, spiritual and emotional support for them during their missions. We appreciate how we begin to feel like bonus parents/grandparent figures. They are truly remarkable and inspiring every time we get together.
We hosted all of our missionaries in our district for the October General Conference for a meal and then to watch the Saturday and Sunday morning sessions of conference – we are 8 hours ahead of Salt Lake City, Utah (Mountain Time). We had a wonderful time hosting them and watching these conference sessions as a group. We served them roast and potatoes for one meal and then taco salads for the next. One thing about it, we didn’t have to worry about left overs.
Singing Happy Birthday to Connor via FaceBook Messanger.
Part of the Apartment Ministering means shopping. It seems like we are always shopping for
something. When the mission added a 3rd
missionary to the Bergamo Anziani companionship, we needed to get an extra bed, chair,
wardrobe, shelves, etc. We ended up
ordering the supplies from IKEA and then borrowed the mission van to transport
the items to their apartment. The
Anziani were good sports and helped us pack everything into the apartment and
put it together.
Miscellaneous Family Search Activities
As far as Family Search activities goes, we have done a
variety of different things. As reported
in a previous blog, we create Digital Reading Rooms for records already
captured. For the moment, we are caught
up making Digital Reading Rooms so we have turned our attention to a variety of
other smaller projects.
Jodie is currently working on a gap analysis along with Sorella
King for the Piacenza Diocese. The Diocese
has recently asked that Family Search return and digitize records in several
small parishes where records have not yet been captured. Before this work can begin, we need to know
which parish records we are missing so Jodie and Sorella King are reviewing the
records captured against the records available to find the gaps. Once this analysis is complete, Family Search
is hopeful to arrange for camera operators to capture images in the missing parish
archives. Parish records are vital as
they often contain valuable information prior to 1866 before the state started
to keep records for the newly united country of Italy.
A few weeks ago, we spent several days dividing
microfilm. Many microfilm images are currently
available on Family Search; however, the images are divided based on a
microfilm roll which can hold as many as 3000 images or so. A complete microfilm roll can be daunting to
look through when searching for records, particularly when there are a varitety
of different kinds of records contained on the roll. Family Search asked that we review and divide
microfilm rolls for an area. As an Italy
Family Search team, we divided up the microfilm and reviewed each roll,
dividing the roll into individual books.
This essentially splits the microfilm into smaller sections that can be better
labelled for future research. We
anticipate that we’ll be asked to do more of this kind of work in the future,
but that all depends on other needs and priorities that come up.
This past week, I added City, Province and Region
information to a spreadsheet containing all of the Digitization Project that Family
Search has completed in Italy over the past several decades. There were 765 Projects in the
spreadsheet. I enjoyed this activity as
it helped me get better acquainted with the various Provinces and Regions
across Italy.
As time permits, we have also spent time taking photographs
of headstones in cemeteries for Billion Graves (see a previous blog post on
this). We first make sure that Billion
Graves has the cemetery on their website, we take photographs of the
headstones, and then when we get home, we upload the photos and then transcribe
data from the headstone into the Billion Graves database. We have found this to be quite
rewarding. We have focused our efforts
thus far on small cemeteries where Jodie’s ancestors lived.
Zone Conference support.
As mentioned previously, every six weeks we have transfers in the mission. About 2 weeks after transfer, the mission holds Zone Conferences for the eight zones in the mission. Two Zones meet together in these Zone Conferences. We support the Milan East and Milan West Zones as they meet together in Milano at the Lampugnao Chapel.
The main support that Senior Missionary Couples provide for Zone Conference is the meal at lunch time. This involves a lot of planning and preparation. Senior couples take turns planning the meal with all of the Senior Couples taking assignments to set up, cook, prepare and serve lunch. We are blessed to have four Senior Missionary Couples between the Milan Zones so we are able to spread out the work and assignments. We also have two of the largest Zones so we usually plan to feed about 60-70 people each conference.
Baking.
We also do a lot of baking. Between baptisms, Birthdays, District Councils, Zone Conferences, and miscellaneous activities, Jodie does a lot of baking.
Miscellaneous project.
It seems like something is always broken. I spend a lot of time trying to repair or put things back together again.
Shopping.
Between grocery shopping,
apartment shopping and zone conference shopping, it seems like we do a lot of
shopping.
And then there is gelato.
From time to time we need to
stop for gelato!
So there you have it. Yes, we love our mission. And yes, we stay busy. What a pleasure and privilege it is for us to be serving a mission as a couple at this point in our lives. We love our Savior Jesus Christ. We love His work. We are grateful to witness many miracles as He gathers His children on both sides of the veil.
