Sister Galli Goes to Washington: "Shape Up or I'll Send You to Africa!" 🌍

The title of this email comes from an experience we had this week while tracting. My comp phrased it so well so I thought I'd just copy what she said:

"There was this one mom screaming so loud I could literally hear her from 3 floors away. I kept saying, we have to rescue that kid! Eventually, I convinced my comp to knock on the door with me. As we approached the door, she was screaming through the door, 'If you don't shape up, I will send you to a boarding school.. or back to Africa!' We knocked and heard her say, 'Clean up your face!' This little 7-year-old answered the door, obviously the one who got verbally abused. Then the mom came to the door, and she had a striking resemblance to Ursula from The Little Mermaid, she even had pointy, spaced apart teeth which was terrifying. She was from either Cameroon or somewhere else. She said they were Muslim and thus not interested. At least we got to give the kid a break." --Sister Vespucci

We've heard that threat a couple times here, now 😶 ...who knew?

The most exciting part of our week was tracting! Woo! 🎉

Just kidding. We did do a lot of tracting, though, and it is exciting to play the game of "listen to the screaming Africans behind the door and guess the country of their nativity"--we're getting really good at it! 😁

Speaking of tracting, we were tracted into by, you guessed it, Jehovah's Witnesses. That was an interesting experience. Because our apartment complex's doors are paper thin, we heard them from 7 doors away, so we were quite prepared and had my iPad recording the audio by the time they knocked on our door. Now don't get us wrong, we are not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ nor that we are members of His church. However, we were curious what they do on a normal door approach so we covered our name tags with our hair.

They knocked on our door and we waited a polite 10 or so seconds before opening the door. We couldn't help but notice that they were dressed head-to-toe in black with one of them sporting a "JW.org" pin.

Once Sister Vespucci opened the door, they told her to come to a "event" that would be 30 minutes long and would discuss the death of Christ. She literally had to ask three times what it was, and they couldn't answer. She asked, is it a play? A musical? A broadcast? Each time, they said, "no, it's a discourse". What does that even mean? We were questioning if they even knew what it was.

Sister Vespucci decided to move on from the topic and politely asked if she could discuss some inquiries we had about their faith.

Around this time, I came up behind Sister Vespucci and stood there a few feet back, appearing to be intently listening. One of them spotted me and said, "hello" and then asked if we were sisters. We replied we were indeed sisters (but we did not tell them it was not in the way they were implying). I told them to continue on their conversation because I loved to discuss religion. (Note: they made no attempt to then ask me what religion I was nor why I enjoyed discussing religion--a seamless opportunity they unfortunately didn't take.)

They continued on their robotic spiel for around 10 minutes, and poor Sister Vespucci was still waiting for them to ask her anything, literally anything, about what she believed or even her name. They asked if they could do a "free, in-home, Bible study" with us, and without letting her answer, went on and on and on. When the lady finally let her answer, Sister Vespucci flipped her hair back, revealing her missionary badge, and said, "Well, I'm actually a missionary right now."

They tensed up a little bit, and the lady stuttered, "are—are you a Mormon?" The thinly veiled terror on their faces said it all. Sister Vespucci took that as a time to explain a little bit about being a Mormon missionary because they were momentarily speechless. Once they recovered from their initial shock, they made a quick get away, abandoning all the other doors in our building, but not before asking, "so...is this your territory?"

After the fact, I remarked that we should've said, "Yeah, this is our territory. Now, Get Out." I never would have, but it would have been priceless to see their reaction. 😁

The next day, we knocked into someone who said, "Are you Jehovah's Witnesses?" We said no, and then the name of The Church. He said, "I'm a Jehovah's Witness. I'm really not interested," and then slammed the door. Well. That's awkward. We spent a quarter of an hour politely talking to your people, and you couldn't even listen to us for 15 seconds.

Judgement Day is gonna be real awkward for some people.

General Conference was great! We were able to carpool with our roommates to the VC and therefore got to see all of our people again! This transfer we got lucky being outbound because we had so many reasons to go the VC and as a result, not feel so utterly and completely isolated. I don't know how all you full-proselyting sisters do it. Kudos to you.

If you didn't get to watch General Conference, even just one session, make it a priority to watch it as soon as it's released online! I think my favorite 3 or so talks were all from different sessions, so who knows what you missed? 🤔

Not a lot happened this week, but we did take a lot of pictures. Enjoy!~❤️

~Sister Galli