New Missionaries, and Soon a New Branch President

In the past 10 days we have had to say goodbye to Elder Johnson and Sister Remund, who are off serving the Lord in other areas of this beautiful vineyard.

Elders Moa, Johnson and Lee

Elder Johnson waving goodbye to Siena

Sisters Salmond, Lee and Remund

Sister Remund waving goodbye to Siena

On Thursday, Elder Moa returned from Milano with his companion, Elder Driver, a brand new missionary fresh from the MTC.  Elder Driver is from Washington, and we think he will be a great addition to the missionary team here in Siena.

Elders Moa and Driver return from a long train ride from Milano

On Friday, after spending time in Milano and Verona on visa issues, Sister Salmond returned with her new companion, Sorella Rincoń.  Sorella Rincoń came to Siena from Verona where she spent her first three months of her mission.  Sister Rincoń is from Florida, with a heritage from Columbia.  Thus, she spoke Spanish in her home and English in school, so her language skills are quite high.  Already she speaks Italian very well.

Sister Rincoń arrives to team with Sister Salmond

Sisters Salmond, Rincoń and Lee

Both of these new missionaries will be great assets to our missionary work here.

We took our Elders with us yesterday to visit a less-active sister that lives about an hour's drive from Siena.  We took the Elders because this sister's friend, who comes from Romania, is interested in learning more about the gospel.  The Elders taught him a great lesson about the Book of Mormon and the Restoration, and Elder Driver, even with his limited language abilities, bore a strong testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel.

On January 19th, our branch added another member!  Not exactly; but Lorena gave birth to her little baby daughter, Eleanor.  We visited her in the hospital, and we even got to hold the little one.  Just look at the joy in Darryl's eyes.  It was ALMOST as good as being able to hold one of the five grandchildren that have been born since we have been out on our mission.  Almost; but not quite.

Lorena, Eleanor, and Darryl

As our mission experience draws closer and closer to its conclusion, the Stake President has decided to call a new branch president for the Siena branch at our upcoming Branch Conference that will be held on February 8.  In this way, since the new branch president will be coming from another unit in the stake, and not from our Siena branch, Darryl will have a few weeks to help the new branch president with all the transition issues.  It will be good to be around while he is learning who the members are and where the greatest needs might be.

To prepare for this transition, Darryl has been very busy in writing and revising the branch history for 2014.  He became the de facto branch photographer also during the year; so he was able to call on his cache of pictures to add flavor and interest to the branch history.  It ended up being about a 60-page document.

In evaluating what we have done while we have served in Siena; some of it has been of the mundane, administrative variety.  But we feel good that we have been able to upgrade some of the equipment and facilities for our members in the little branch of the Church.

During this past year, we have led the way to make the following improvements.

New table and chairs for our Primary

A new storage unit for the Primary

A new bulletin board for our Young Women's room

A new hot water heater and an enclosure to hide it

New cabinets for our library materials

We have a brand new entry door.

And we got  new stove and oven.  But we liked our old gas one better.

A new microwave for our litte kitchen

We also got a good TV and stand

New chairs and tables for our foyer

And new, padded chairs for our little chapel

Today is the first day that we had real snow in Siena.  It came down hard and heavy for a couple of hours, and it even started sticking to the roads.  But the weather has since cleared, the roads are fine, and we are back to normal.

Snow in Siena, who would have thought it?

That is good, because tonight we held our second fireside, in a two-part series, on the evidences supporting the Book of Mormon.  Even though the weather was bad, we had four investigators and one less active member come and listen the very interesting presentation about the Book of Mormon.  After the fireside, Bonnie prepared her special spagetti alla Carabonara, and also a pumpkin chocolate chip bread.  Everyone enjoyed themselves immensely!

Listening to Brother Rotelli explain the evidences of the Book of Mormon

Spagetti alla Carabonara made by Bonnie.

We continue to work with our less active members, and we are starting to see a few of them more and more often at activities and in church on Sundays.  It is great to see!  We love serving these fine members of the Lord's church.