Hello!

So this week has been an adventure, after an incident with a car, we got to work. While using the chitophono (the device you use to speak to people in apartment blocks), a man didn't get my accent right, and thought I was African, and threatened to call the police, thinking I was a burglar! We left to do another apartment block, and twenty minutes later a man comes up to us, and asks angrily if we were the ones who buzzed him. We spoke for about an hour, he was very apologetic for calling the police on us (apparently he was good on his threat) and now has a good relationship with the Church! I'm not sure why he thought I was African now!

Now, I need to explain a little Italian. When we want to use a word as an adjective, often in Italian we have to add -ale to the end. For example, Settimana means week. If I want to use it to mean a weekly plan, I would say programma settimanale. You may know that male means bad, or badly in Italian, hence MALnutrition, bad nutrition. With one of our Albanian investigators, we made a Baptismal calendar, or calendario battesimale. He read it, and asks, why is it bad? A little confused, we asked what he meant. It says it's bad right there! Reading it I realised what he was reading "calendario battesiMALE"! I had to laugh, then cry when I realised I can't explain Italian grammar in Italian to an Albanian who can't read that well in his own language! However it did teach me the importance of words, and that it's not what you say or write that's important, it's the message received. Our investigator didn't see correct Italian grammar, he saw "bad baptismal calendar". Let us all be careful to always make sure that the person receives the right message and not just send it!

I love you all!

Anziano Nelson