News and prayer information from Richard and Pinuccia Wilson

Later today we will be going to Canberra, and we will be there until next Monday. This is when we really start working. We will be presenting the work at two services both Sundays (and Pinuccia has a children’s talk tomorrow morning), and there will be five meetings during the week as well. We will also be visiting some friends and supporters at Canberra. In fact if you are at Canberra, are reading this, and won’t be at one of the meetings, let me know and we’ll meet at sometime. Even better if you know somewhere that makes a real Italian coffee.

This week Pinuccia’s talk at the Ladies’ Bible Study went well; it was good for her to have a ministry whilst here as well. For the children, the highlight was seeing the dinosaurs at the museum. However, the first pangs of homesickness have started to appear, with Stefania missing her best friend and Daniele wanting to go to her home at Lavis.

We have started working now, with a couple of presentations in a church today. From now on the visits will be fairly regular. Pinuccia gets to be the missionary this Wednesday, speaking at a Women’s meeting. Although since the talk will be longer than what she can do in English, I will be translating for her.

The rest of the week was spent moving from my parents’ house to the apartment that the mission owns, setting up home there and doing such tasks. I managed to get the other three members of the family enrolled in Medicare (although I am not eligible), just in time for Daniele who the following day broke out in a rash due to having caught roseola. So we have already got to know the local pharmacist, also because she is Italian and so we have chatted with her in Italian. We have also had some time with my family and doing tourist things.

The trip to Australia went smoothly, although even at its best there is of course a lot of tiredness at the end. Pinuccia and I got over the jet lag faster than usual, although the children have not. So we have been up in the middle of the night for a few hours because they have been waking up, which has been making us tired during the day. Hopefully we will get all our sleeping patterns back to normal soon.

In these first few days we have been staying with my parents, so it has been great to be looked after and have someone to look after Stefania and Daniele whilst we have tried to recover and do other things. But on Tuesday we will move to a house belonging to the mission, so it will be back to normal family responsibilities. On Sunday we will have our first official meetings, speaking in a one of our supporting churches morning and night. We still have not finished preparing our deputation material, but we should manage to complete that this week. After that, the meetings will start becoming more hectic, but I will keep you up to date each week so that you can pray for them.

Someone asked me a few days ago if we were looking forward to our trip to Australia. Basically, we have not had enough time to think about it, let alone look forward to it, until now. I had things to do in church until this morning, whilst Pinuccia worked at school until Friday and is still preparing for the Sunday School camp that will be held in a month’s time. And just to keep us busy, we had some guests who are travelling around Europe for lunch today. Although all this has not kept Stefania and Daniele from getting excited about the trip. But now we are free, so we can concentrate on our trip – on getting ready, looking forward to it, and panicking about what we still have to do. We have all of Monday to do the packing, when we will be sending the children to pre-school, which will give us a bit of time to prepare. Then on Tuesday at 11am we leave our house, flying out at 4pm, and arrive in Australia on Thursday morning. About 38 hours from door to door.

We have made it back home, after another small adventure. Not as big as the volcano induced odyssey a few months ago, but enough to keep us relying on God. We were supposed to leave from Catania airport at 8.30pm, but due to fog there where no flights arriving or leaving. After having our flight cancelled and reinstated a couple of times, and the lifting of the fog, we left almost 6 hours late, and finally arrived home at 6am this morning instead of around midnight. Doing this with two small children kept it more interesting, although as I said in my comment on the April trip, I thank God that they travel so well and did not complain even once. Stefania and Daniele then slept until almost midday, missing the first day of preschool after the break, but Pinuccia had to go anyway in the afternoon to work – so far she has survived.

Our last day in Sicily was also marked by a typical extended family lunch together. This time however outside on the veranda, where many started complaining about the heat. Not usual for the middle of winter! Sicily certainly has some advantages compared to the rest of Europe. But if it is a bit hot in winter, you can imagine what it is like in summer. Anyway, it was good for all of us to get some vitamin D before returning to Trento, and also for the children to have the opportunity to run around and play outside, which they rarely do here because of a lack of both sun and nearby open spaces.

So now it is back to work, although I still have quite a bit to catch up on before I can get into the normal activities. This Saturday afternoon there will be meeting of the Youth Group, which will be the first time that I will do a study with this group, so you could pray for that as well.

We have got through the New Year celebrations now, which of course involved a lot of eating. And which was added to by the way the calendar worked out this year. So on Friday night there was dinner and countdown at the church, then on Saturday the traditional New Year’s Day lunch for Pinuccia’s extended family, and then a typical Sunday lunch for the family. Even though we are well into 2011 now, the eating will not be much reduced this week, as we have quite a few meals booked in the next few days with wider family and friends. Then next Sunday night it will be back home to Trento. And maybe a diet…

The other highlight of the week was getting a romantic night out together. With a few family members here that are willing babysitters, and since Stefania and Daniele can go to bed later whilst we are on holidays, Pinuccia and I got to go to the cinema together, the first time we have done that for a couple of years.

We arrived in Sicily around noon on Thursday, and as always the first few days have been hectic as we have been catching up with all the relatives. So every day there have been lunches and dinners with large groups of people. This week the holidays will be a bit calmer, although not a lot calmer as there are other friends and family to meet up with, as well as the traditional family and church New Year celebrations. On the other hand, I’m not missing the snow. It is not exactly warm, being similar to a Sydney winter, but after the negative temperatures of Trento, going out to sit or play in the sun is nice. This week we will even be going to the beach, no swimming however.

Today was the Sunday School’s Christmas market, raising funds for a school in India. It went well, with the children understanding and presenting the needs in other places of the world, and how much they have to be thankful to God for. I get the feeling that this generation is a lot more socially aware than I was when I was their age. It was a lot of work for a lot of people, and of course Pinuccia had a lot to do supervising everything. I looked after a lot of the practical and technical details, as well as the song that the children sang. It was a good thing that I kept to my policy of never trusting technology, and had brought along a back up of everything. Because the church computer was not available, and I had to use what I had brought with me.

In this period there are, of course, a lot of end of year and Christmas activities. Pinuccia, Stefania, and Daniele had their school end of year concert/presentation on Wednesday, and I the band Christmas concert on Saturday. There should have been a meeting for the Ladies’ group in the church as well, but it got cancelled because of the snow. This week we have a few more thing to wrap up, and then early on Thursday morning we will be leaving for a couple of weeks in Sicily with Pinuccia’s family. Pray for this time away as well.

We are getting ready for our 3 yearly trip to Australia! It is still more than 8 months to go, but I wanted to make sure I got the cheapest fare. It costs enough as it is… So we will be back in Australia next year on June 2, leaving again on August 18. It is a long time away, but we are accepting bookings already, if you would like to have us visit you.

Since we will be in Australia this (northern) summer, we will be missing our trip to see Pinuccia’s family in Sicily. So we will go instead this Christmas for two weeks. Since it is a shorter period than in the summer, we will be taking the aeroplane instead of the church. So that trip got booked this week as well. All these trips certainly made a dent on my credit card… I also checked in for my flight to Madrid next Monday, but more in my next message.

In the meantime, Daniele started to go to preschool full time this week, which meant also having a sleep after lunch. Like Stefania before him, he has not slept during the day for a long time, but at school enjoys have a little siesta in the afternoon. And naturally he has no intention of having a nap on the weekend whilst he is at home. He is also starting to learn that he will have to vary his diet, because if he does not want to eat what the school provides (which is often the case), he won’t eat anything. But gradually he is getting more varied tastes, just like Stefania did when she started eating at school.

We arrived at Trento on Thursday evening, after a pleasantly uneventful trip, apart from occasional heavy holiday traffic. I am so glad that our children are so good at travelling! Since then we have been sorting out things at home, and now are preparing the house for our first visitors of the new year, with one of Pinuccia’s cousins (plus family) coming to stay tomorrow. He is a missionary in Romania, so it will be interesting to talk with him about that.

We still have nine more days of school vacation, so we will be doing some things as a family this week. Pinuccia will be going to a meeting on Friday, where she should find out if, where, and what hours, she will be working this year. We are praying that she will be offered a good job, suitable for our needs as a family.

I did get a surprise at church this morning, as all the musicians were away and on two minutes notice I was asked to play the piano. I haven’t done that for a long time, what happy memories! Especially as the lady leading the singing I had played with a lot over the years. I was certainly a bit rusty, and without my music books I was rather limited in what I could play, but it was good fun, and the congregation certainly sang better with my playing than if I had not played.