News From Italy

I thought that it was about time I updated you on all the latest news from Italy.

Studies in the Mountains

Snowy creek on the way to Bocchigliero

Di and Victoria had a couple of really good studies Rita and Lydia, up in the mountains about 2 hours drive away (1 hour 47min according to Google) in a hilltop town called Bocchigliero.  It is a beautiful drive that takes us through the Parco Nazionale della Sila national park up into snow country. It had snowed the night before so it looked fantastic with the trees covered in snow, but I must admit I got a little nervous a few times because were weren’t expecting to encounter snow as we had been there just the previous week and there wasn’t any about then and I didn’t have any snow chains. But we managed to make it without incident.

Bocchigliero is a really nice little hilltop town that is so typical of some of the country villages in rural Italy, I always feel like I’ve travelled back in time.

Di’s study Rita

But as tends to happen with a lot of the refugees, they have since moved on to Germany. That is a real shame as they were really progressing well. That is unfortunately how it is with the refugees, they only seem to remain until they get their “papers” that will allow them to remain and then they move on to greener pastures as there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of work in southern Italy.

The reality is that this will happen quite a bit. We are really just planting seeds because they move on as quickly as they can or in some cases they are moved to a different camp by the authorities. This just happened with another of my studies, Zion. They give him absolutely no notice, he sent me a text and said that he was already on a bus bound for a small town near Naples and was literally told the night before that he was being moved. He was doing well too, he had just started coming to the meetings.

We will try to find out where they end up so that we can contact the local brothers so they can hopefully continue their studies.

Italian Residents

Di has just managed to get her residency for Italy, it was a long drawn out process as the Italian Beurocracy tends to distrust all things digital. All the forms required are photocopies of photocopies of photocopies and they don’t give you a list of things you will need so multiple trips were needed. Anyway it is good to get that sorted out and know that they won’t deport us. It certainly was made a little easier having Marco and Victoria help with the language barrier. Very few people in southern Italy can speak English so it was invaluable having someone to be able to translate for us, without them I doubt we could have done it. 

Weekend Away in London

On the 23rd of February we are heading over to London for the weekend to visit the cousins (and Auntie B) so we are really looking forward to that. Seems weird saying we are going to London for the weekend. It’s about a 3 hour flight so it’s not a long trip at all.  We are leaving Friday morning and will get back Monday morning. The flight leaves from Lamezia which is about an hour and a half away by car. Marco being the sort of helpful person he is is willing to take us to the airport and we will take the train home when we get back. Thanks Marco.