Kirbys in Catania

This past weekend Alan and I traveled to Roma to visit the church there per their request.  Typically, couples don't stay and work at the Bible School here in Florence.  They usually get invited by a few churches to come and work with them, and the couple picks one to go and work with. We went down Friday and spent that day just sight seeing around Rome.  Naturally, we took tons of pictures and we enjoyed seeing the city.  This is my second time to Rome and it was Alan's first.  We toured the Colesseum, the Forum, and Altare della Patria.  Alan was still a little sick, so we didn't run around to see everything in one day.  We stayed with the Vitalone's.  They were so sweet to invite us into their home and we really appreciated their hospitality.  The weird "connection" I have with Rome, is this is the same church that my mom (along with her older sister) came and worked with for two years back in the 70s.  So I actually met quite

Two weekends ago we had a lock-in at the church building.  This was the first lock-in at Florence.  We had 7-9 kids attend, ages 5-12. We colored, had a photo both, made individual pizzas for dinner, did some crafts, and watched Toy Story in Italian.  The kids and adults had a fun time. On Monday, we started our second course in Italian.  We have two new teachers: Carlo and Paolo.  They speak to us only in Italian all of the time.  It's pretty overwhelming.  Prayers that we continue to learn the language and to not get discouraged in this process, would be much appreciated. We continue with our Bible classes, and are starting to get to know our students better. Each Thursday we try to spend some time with a student or an acquaintance we've made.  This past Thursday, we did something a little different.  We went with Peter to the Nursing home that is just around the corner from where we live.  They were having their Carnevale and we participated.  As soon as we wa

Fyi, I wrote this blog on the 4th, but am just now posting it.... Last week Megan, Lindsey, and I went to this Italian civic class that is a new requirement for immigrants (yes, we keep forgetting that we're immigrants now!).  In this just lovely four hour video class, we learned (from and American, mind you) how to get our visas and do all the paperwork for our permessos that we already had to have done to have gotten to this point.  Oh well.  Did learn one interesting fact that I have seriously started looking into.  Apparently, if your heritage is Italian as close back as your great-grandfather, you can claim Italian citizenship and have dual citizenship.  So, since my grandpa is Italian and I have both of the cities and names of where my great grandmother and great grandfather came from before they took the boat to New York, it shouldn't be that hard for me to claim citizenship here.  So I'm seriously looking into it so I don't have to go through all these paperwo