baci baci.

Tuesday was out first normal day on campus and I was real excited to go out and meet some new Italian friends! My group is going to La Sapienza every day, which is the largest campus in Rome. We’re basically going up to people and saying “Ciao! Parli inglese?” (Hi! Do you speak English?) and then introducing ourselves. At some point in there we tell them we’re with Agape (the name Crusade goes by over here… and you pronounce it Agah-pey instead of a-GAHP-ey… that fun fact comes free of charge) and that we’re in Rome for like five weeks to just meet people and have conversations about God and spiritual backgrounds and Jesus.

So I heard from everyone that Italians are very easy to talk to and friendly and all that, but my first conversation was nooott that. Haha. I was in a group with one of the leaders from Miami, Kristen Ebsen, and other girl Ashley, and we were wandering around looking for a group to talk to. Since we were only girls, we wanted to talk to a group with at least one girl, and so we went up to a group of two guys and one girl. We started talking and they weren’t really very responsive even with normal conversation… they were really nice but we had to ask most of the questions and control the conversation which I now know is not really normal here. Anyways, after maybe three minutes the Francesca left and we were left with Roberto and Daniele. They were all raised Catholic but were now agnostic. Daniele said that he was skeptical about the existence of God because he didn’t think that you could experience God. So that was interesting… from there the conversation turned to music and movies and things like that and we ended up sitting with them for a good forty minutes since they invited us to sit down with them. I think they might have just been more quiet people, because they didn’t seem to feel as awkward as we felt. Haha… we met two more of their friends, Andrea and Amelia while we were sitting there, and when we left they baci-ed us (the kiss-kiss thing on the cheeks you see in movies). We also met Virgilio, who seemed like he already knew Jesus, so we gave him some names to get connected with Agape here in Rome. That was awesome.

The way that Apage does ministry in Rome is a little different in Rome than in the US because here there are no student organizations on campus. Because of this they can’t really have weekly meetings or anything. Instead, the strategy is to meet a network of friends and reach all of them through a few people by raising up leaders within those networks. It’s really really relational ministry. :]

Anyways, today (Wednesday) we were able to meet up with some people my friends Melanie and Ben met yesterday. We ended up hanging out with them all afternoon and playing cards with them and talking even though they had exams to study for. Haha! I’m really excited to meet them again, and we’re hoping to plan something fun with them this weekend.