This week in Gela . . .

On Saturday morning we had a great service project. We went to clean the local beach! We ended up filling more than 60 bags of trash, not including the stroller, tire, door, and other good finds that were there. The local TV came and filmed a little bit. I haven't actually seen it, but we're hoping to get a copy on DVD. Unfortunately, right before I was going to be given a short interview it started raining so they had to pack up. It was still pretty cool though. It was actually a regional TV channel, so I guess it goes to Gela, Ragusa, Caltannisetta, and maybe some other cities.

We really had a blast. It was just 6 missionaries and Cristian, but we're going to do it again in a few weeks and the city of Gela should be participating. Pretty sweet how much we cleaned up, huh? After we got done cleaning we decided to take some sweet jump photos because there was a good staircase to jump off of into the sand.  : )

I'm seriously becoming a part of this city now. I've been here for five months, I know tons of people really well, and it's just crazy. I feel like I'm actually living here. haha. (In the sense that I moved here or something, not that I'm just serving a mission here.) If I were to move to Italy I definitely wouldn't ever have chosen Gela! But I really love it here.

This week we went to the market again. I was really lucky. Do you remember that gray suit that I brought on my mission? Well, the pants of that suit got a big hole in the knee, so I decided to cut a piece of the pants off to bring it to compare with other pants at the market. I ended up finding a pair that fits me well, is almost identical to the suit, and it only cost me 8 Euro!! Score!

On another note, one thing that frequently stupefies me is how much people can misinterpret the scriptures. It really blows my mind sometimes that people can misunderstand them so much. This morning, as I was reading Joseph Smith History, I read how after he and Oliver Cowdery were baptized they were able to understand scriptures that they weren't able to understand before. I think that the gift of the Holy Ghost is essential to understand the scriptures, so maybe that's why people get so confused sometimes.

There really isn't too much other news this week, we've just been keeping busy and loving what we're doing. I just see a lot of joy in my life, and I see that a lot of people here don't have it. It's really just a pretty simple choice. We were talking with this lady that was complaining about how help is being sent to Libya or something and how they need help here. She said, we don't have any food, what can we do, we're the ones who need help. She told us this right after we had talked about what she would eat for lunch, which was salad, pasta, steak, and I'm sure she had fruit in the end. This is what she eats every day! We need to all wake up and appreciate the blessings that we have. I'll admit it, I eat really well. I'm incredibly blessed. My life is awesome.

Well, I'm happy.

Love,
Anziano Banks