Christmas In Ukraine

Christmas here was pretty normal. I opened the gifts you sent me in the MTC and then came to church - just normal church because people celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January here. I gave out American candy to all the kids here, so I ended up having little kids coming up and begging me for more. We stuck around at church doing tithing/accounting work and then Skyping and then the missionaries all got together and made fajitas for Christmas dinner at the church. After that we had a white elephant gift exchange, and I ended up getting a pretty sweet cat shirt from Sister G. I think the present I gave was the best though - a little jar of nutella. It was super, super expensive: ~$1.75. 

That's pretty cool about Holly and Matt getting engaged. We all knew it was going to happen, it was just a matter of when. I always figured it would be sometime toward the end of senior year.

I haven't really noticed any of the Americans getting Ukrainian accents. I think the languages are so different that you don't really get them mixed up in your mind. Spanish and English are pretty similar, so you might get some of those sounds confused.

Thank you for the updates. I always like hearing about what's going on in the real world. The only news I've heard lately is that some Russian ambassador was assassinated in Turkey and apparently it's a big deal.

P-days are definitely a nice break, but we're usually super, super busy. Like today, we had a lesson planned (that didn't end up happening) and we also had to help a member pick up packages for the church building from Nova Poshta  (an in-country postal service where you can ship a box across the country in like two days for a dollar or two.) There ended up being about 30 gallons of cleaning fluid and 6 or 7 huge boxes of who-knows-what. and the post office is a ten minute walk away. So between the five of us it took 3 trips back and forth to get it all, so my arms are a little tired. But, Christmas is more or less like any other day on a mission. You still have stuff to do.

My companion got a package. He got some candy and some ties (so we have matching ties today) and two huge things of peanut butter (that's a great Christmas present - they don't have peanut butter here.) And, yes, I gave him his stocking, don't worry. We haven't played the ping pong ball game yet - it looks really hard.

The constant companionship thing isn't really as bad as I thought it would be. You kinda get used to it pretty quick. I had a pretty bad cold about a week ago, but I'm feeling better now. It's luckily warmed up a bit the past couple days. I didn't think we'd have a white Christmas, but it actually snowed a ton Christmas Eve, so there was snow on the ground. I think that's the first time I've had a white Christmas. 

Sounds like ya'll a pretty sweet Christmas. Maybe you'll get some Ukrainian souvenirs as Christmas presents in a few months. 

Oh, yeah, something I was gonna ask for - if you have any ideas for easy recipes or just general cooking ideas I'd love to hear them. They have mission cookbooks in all of the apartments, but we're running out of things to make. Anything that doesn't require brown sugar, peanut butter, or vanilla is great. Also there's no canned soups here, so hopefully they don't require any canned soups. We definitely get lots of borsch here. It's super good though, so no complaints. 

I go back to Ivano-Frankivsk on Wednesday, but we're doing the train this time instead of the 9-hour bus ride.  

My Christmas present to you is going to be a ton of pictures. There's a ton so I'm not gonna bother trying to explain all of them. It's from a lot of Christmas stuff. Some with our Christmas sweaters:

Some from L'viv:

Some from our Christmas activity here in Rivne.

Here's a short video and picture from the Christmas caroling we did in Rivne after the activity. The song is Ідіть усе вірні - it means literally, "go every faithful."

Here's some from our wrapping Christmas gifts for our activity. Wrapping paper is pretty expensive so we pretty much just put them in big boxes and taped them shut.

Here's also one of our district on the train to L'viv. Sister S. made us a pumpkin pie, so we just sat there and ate pumpkin pie from our laps the first half hour of the train ride.

And, finally, here's a few random pics from Christmastime in Ukraine:

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Gotta go, but Merry Christmas!

Alec

9-Hour Bus Rides & 12 Days Of Christmas

The last day or two here haven't actually been all that bad. and by not all that bad I mean that it's been hovering right around freezing. I'm sure it'll get much colder in the next couple months. 

The traveling to Ivano-Frankivsk was pretty interesting. Everyone has to do registration paperwork when they arrive in the country, and so they send the paperwork to where you're assigned to be serving. Apparently I was originally supposed to be going to ivano-frankivsk, but that got changed to Rivne last-minute, so all my paperwork was in another town. We had to go there to sign a couple forms. Our bus left at 6:00 on Tuesday morning. We woke up at 4:30 and took a taxi to the bus station. We got on the bus, and it turns out they don't actually have any heaters on the bus. so the first few hours of the bus ride before the sun came up were super, super cold. I was sitting next to the window and my jacket actually froze to the window -- it was really cold. Luckily, I was prepared and had worn warm clothes, so I was able to sleep a little bit at the beginning of the ride. Then for the rest of the day we just rode on the bus, making stops at every little village along the way. There were probably something like 20-30 different stops. It was cool to see some of the smaller towns in the countryside because we really only spend time in the cities usually. We also had a 45 minute stop in Ternopil at lunch time. Ternopil is actually one of the biggest cities in this part of the country, but there's no missionaries there. So it was cool to see a part of the city that other missionaries don't get to see. 

We arrived in Ivano in the middle of the afternoon, did some paperwork, went to dinner with some of the missionaries there. (I tried chicken stomach -- it was pretty good.) We then went to their English class in that town. For the return trip, we managed to get on a train instead of a bus, which was way nicer. The train left at 5:00 in the morning. We woke up at 3:30, walked through the city (that we aren't familiar with) for half an hour to the train station, bough tickets and got on the train. Fortunately though, we had a coupe to ourselves, so we had beds to sleep on which was super nice. That was about a three hour train ride to L'viv, and then from there we got on another 3-ish hour train ride back to Rivne. So the return trip was a bit shorter and definitely more pleasant than the trip to Ivano. We have to go back next week to finish up the paperwork, so we get to do it all over again.

I didn't get any pictures, but I wish I had. I was super tired and I thought I would be coming back the same way the next day so I didn't think to take any pictures. It was also pretty hard to see anything out of the frozen windows of the bus. A lot of the places look the same, but there were definitely some cool towns in the hills. Ivano-Frankivsk was also a super cool city. It was just a lot more modern than Rivne. It's nice to know that not everything looks exactly the same as here.

On Thursday we had exchanges, so I was with another brand new missionary. We fumbled our way around the city. We were able to talk to a couple people on the streets who gave us their phone number and said they might be interested in meeting, though, 

We also taught a couple lessons this past week to some interesting people. One of them was super cool because he spoke Spanish (he lived in Spain for 7 years) so I was able to talk to him about that. It was super interesting, when he would speak Spanish I could understand everything he said no problem, but then if I tried to speak Spanish back it would just come out as Ukrainian. There's only space in my head for two languages, I guess. 

The other lesson we taught was with a guy who called us and said he wanted to meet. We met up with him and started getting to know him. Turns out, he told us he had a vision where he saw all of the lottery numbers for the next day in America, and I guess the missionaries were the only Americans  he knew of, so he called us to meet so we could help him buy lottery tickets. Well, we told him we weren't allowed to do that, but if you hear anything in the news about a Ukrainian guy winning the lottery, let me know.

Not much else going on today. We have a lesson with the guy who speaks Spanish tonight. For the past few days we've been doing a 12 days of Christmas thing with a few families in the branch where we just go drop off some sweets or some fruit or some toys or something at their door each night. So we'll be doing that tonight. It was supposed to be a mystery who was actually doing it, but I'm pretty sure all the families know it was us by now. Mostly because this isn't a thing that Ukrainian people would do--so they know it must be Americans. either way it's still nice to do something nice for people.

Sounds like there's a lot of fun stuff going on at home. Glad to hear that Cocoa is still going strong. There are no Mexican restaurants in Ukraine. They are very afraid of spicy food. They do have pretty good pizza though.

Ok, I gotta head out soon, but I'll talk to you guys on Sunday! Hopefully you have a great Christmas. I'll be in l'viv a few days this week for a mission conference and a Christmas party (or something like that) so I'll tell you all about it on Sunday.

Alec

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Church was fairly interesting this week. They had some sort of primary program, so all of the primary children (all 6 of them) gave talks in sacrament meeting. It was nice because I can actually kind of understand when little kids talk because they speak so simply, so I somewhat had an idea of what was going on. After church there was a member that came who spoke pretty decent English, so I spoke with him for a while after church and helped him with some English questions he had. 

So mom is gonna be pretty jealous of this, but after the New Year all of the branches in this mission are moving to a 2-hour church block schedule instead of 3. We're not sure exactly how it's going to work, but that was a decision made by our mission president, since so many of the wards are so small I guess. So we're just gonna try it out and see how it goes.

Alec and the snow in Rivne

Up until yesterday, it actually looked a lot like Christmas. There was snow everywhere, but then it warmed up yesterday and all of the snow melted, so now it's just wet and muddy everywhere. Today, though, (literally in the last few hours) it's gotten super cold again, so maybe it'll start snowing again and look more like winter time. It's interesting--they don't really celebrate Christmas here very much. They do, however, celebrate New Years like we celebrate Christmas in America. I forgot to get any pictures, but at one of the big shopping centers and the movie theater they put up giant New Years trees and lights and stuff, so it does look a bit like Christmas time. In lots of the stores they play American Christmas music, too, so I hear a lot of that also.

We haven't done much for P-day yet and I don't think we'll have time for much today. We're going to visit a couple of our investigators who are in the hospital (two different hospitals on opposite sides of town) and we have to do some paperwork for my visa. Tomorrow actually, to finish the paperwork, we have to go to another town called Ivano-Frankivsk to finish the paperwork (apparently that's where I was originally supposed to go so all of my documents are there or something). It's a 9-hour bus ride to get there that leaves at 6 am tomorrow. And then the next day we'll take a 9-hour bus ride back.

This week was also interesting because both of the trainers in Rivne had to go to L'viv for a conference, so I was here with another new missionary in the city all alone for almost three days. We had a few lessons we scheduled (which went pretty horribly because we can't understand much) and we spent the rest of the time trying to contact people on the streets (which also went pretty bad,) but at the end of the day we did manage to survive in the city all alone. We bought food and we rode busses and we didn't die, so that's good to know.

We had a branch activity on Saturday night. We watched 17 Miracles. Unfortunately, it's only available in Russian, so I couldn't understand much (and it was a really tough translation, with just one guy doing all of the voices, even the women.) Luckily, I had watched it a month or two ago in the MTC, so I knew what was going on. 

As for the people we've been teaching, one of them was able to leave the hospital and go home, but then we got a call Friday night that he had to take an ambulance to another hospital for an emergency surgery. so we visited him Saturday and he seems to be doing ok. But, he still has to stay there to recover for another week or so. so since neither of them have been able to come to church, we pushed the baptismal date back to sometime in January when both of them are feeling better and out of the hospital. 

Alec at one of the "imposing" statues

I attached a few pictures from this week of stuff around town. There are a ton of really big, imposing statues here. There's a ton more around town so I'll try to get more pictures as times goes on. They're all super interesting.

Something weird that I found out a couple weeks ago. There were missionaries here from another town on exchanges and I was talking to one of them who's been out for almost two years. He was talking about how he played a TON of foosball in college before his mission. Well, I remembered when I was at BYU that summer, people in my dorm would play foosball until like 4 in the morning. So, I asked him where he went to school, and it was BYU (of course) and it turns out he was there at the same time I was. Not only that, but we lived in the same building, on the same floor, and on the same hall. He lived a couple doors down from me that whole summer. I didn't remember him at all, But, we had a lot of the same memories about stuff that happened that summer. It's kind of a crazy coincidence that I ran into him here in Ukraine like three years later. 

Hope everything is going great at home and that everyone is in the Christmas spirit! Love you guys and I'll talk to you next week!

Alec

Non-Stop Snowing

Last week was pretty interesting. We had our zone conference here in Rivne, so all the missionaries from the northern cities (Ivano-Frankivsk, Rivne, and Lutsk) were here on Tuesday. It was pretty cool to see a bunch of the other missionaries from the MTC again. A couple of them stayed a couple nights here in Rivne to do exchanges the next day (since my companion here is a zone leader) so we all stayed at the other apartment here in Rivne and basically had a big slumber party. Only problem was that the next day, my companion and the other new missionary Elder Sanders' companion were both on exchanges, so I spent the whole day with Elder Sanders. And neither of us can speak the language very well, so that was a little bit of a disaster. And there's more exchanges in L'viv this week, including the sisters, which means me and Elder Sanders will be the only missionaries in this city for three days. So, I'll let you know how that goes. It's pretty weird not knowing the language, though. People will ask me a question and I just have no idea what to say. Luckily, I have my companion with me all the time to help me out, but it's still a little weird not knowing what's going on. It doesn't really bother me, I just don't like not knowing what's happening.

So it's been pretty chilly the past week or so. It's been almost non-stop snowing here. I'm definitely not used to this much snow at all, but it hasn't actually gotten all that miserably cold. 

Alec in snowy Rivne

I've attached a couple pictures of the snow. This was on our way back to the apartment. We usually take the bus, but we decided to make the 35 minute walk that day. That was a mistake, because it started snowing super hard. It wasn't the hardest I've ever seen it snow, but it was the hardest I've seen it snow while I was walking outside for 2 miles. This picture is on a bridge that goes over the trainyard. You can't really tell, but it was snowing very hard, I promise. 

I've also attached a picture of the view from outside our apartment. I think I sent one before the snow. Honestly, it looks pretty nice.

View of the snow from Alec's apartment

The only problem is that it's this cold, and it's only barely December. so it's gonna be getting a lot colder. We hardly ever go into anyone's home, but for the most part it's pretty warm when we do. When we did service a week or two ago out in the villages though, this guy's house was not warm at all. But, everyone in the city lives in huge apartment buildings and they keep those pretty warm.

You can definitely find cheap clothes here. There's tons of second hand stores and we actually went to a couple today looking for ugly Christmas sweaters. We didn't have much success with that, but I did find a pretty interesting t-shirt from a restaurant in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Not sure at all how it found it's way to Ukraine, but I thought it was pretty cool.

So, I was wrong. It sounds like we'll be Skyping on American Christmas after all, instead of Ukrainian Christmas. So it'll hopefully be sometime in the middle of the day your time. I'll try to find out exactly when in the next couple weeks because we'll have to coordinate it with the other missionaries here because there's only a couple computers we can use.

There are a handful of active members here, and they are super helpful and willing to help out with whatever. We've had members come in and help us with every lesson that we've been teaching the two investigators at the hospital.

We've been listening to Christmas music, and the speakers you sent are working perfectly so far. Thanks a ton for that. It's been very awesome to have.

P-day is technically over at 6 o clock, so it's just about over. It was a somewhat interesting day though. We went to Second Hand looking for Christmas sweaters or whatever, and then we went to a православний church (eastern orthodox, the main religion here) to see what it was like inside. It was pretty interesting. They are very ornately decorated and they have tons of pictures of saints and people (called icons) around the church that they go up to and pray to (and kiss.) It was cool to see. Most interesting thing was that they don't have any seats there, so people go to church and stand for the whole service.

After that, we met up with the sisters and went to a place called L'viv Chocolate. It's like a sit-down restaurant, but all they have is chocolate. All I got was a little tea cup of hot chocolate. except hot chocolate here is not like in America.  It's litereally just melted chocolate. It's super good, but it's kinda hard to drink just pure chocolate.

Ok a couple pictures and some stories from this week.

So we were staying at the other apartment on Thursday and we were doing our studies in the morning. We were in the kitchen, and we started to smell something strange. We got up to check it out and it turns out there's a pretty huge gas leak from one of the gas lines in the kitchen. We had to call their landlord and they sent an emergency gas leak company out to fix it. Everyone else just wanted to stay in a different room of the apartment to wait for them, but I had to convince everyone to get out of their ASAP. No one wanted to wait outside in the -2 C weather and falling snow. But we got out and they came quickly to fix it. Just a regular day in Ukraine.

Last Wednesday, there were a ton of missionaries here because of the zone conference, so we went Christmas caroling in the center of town. Lots of people gave us weird looks at first (because Christmas isn't for another month and half here) but, I think a lot of people actually really liked it.

Christmas caroling in the center of town

 Okay, I have to go now, but I love you guys and hope all is going well.

Alec 

Baptisms & Bull's Blood

Everyone here seems to know about Thanksgiving - they all ask us about our "den podyaky" (day of thanks) and why we celebrate it, but no one celebrates it here, of course. We did kind of celebrate it a little bit with the other Elders and stopped to get some cake on our way back to the church. When we got there though, it turned out the Relief Society was having an activity with a dinner, so we kinda accidentally crashed that. They invited us to stay, so our Thanksgiving dinner was meat and rice wrapped up in cabbage leaves - actually pretty tasty. I think it's the same thing that Mrs. Graham served on Christmas Eve. It's called halopsy (or something like that) which is funny because it's almost exactly the same as the word for "young boys," which is what people say to us all the time when they want us to stop knocking on their doors. We went and hid in a closet to eat our cake afterwards, since we didn't have enough to share - whoops.

Alec's homemade Ukrainian pizza.

Most of our meals are at home. We've made pizza, chicken and rice, chicken sandwiches and stuff like that. We made the pizza in our apartment one night - it turned out pretty good, but there were way too many tomato slices in my opinion. It's interesting cause they have most kinds of food here like in America (except peanut butter) but it's all slightly different. Like the milk tastes different and the sugar tastes different. Not necessarily bad, just different. 

I can also get eggs at the store. They're actually one of the more expensive things which I was surpised about. It's about 6 or 7 cents per egg.

As for other food, I haven't actually eaten dinner at a member's house yet cause there's not that many of them, but my companion has had me try a couple crazy things. The first one is called selo (or sele I'm not sure), and it's served with garlic on a piece of bread. I ate it, and it was pretty tasty -  almost like cream cheese. Turns out it's just pure fat, but before I knew that it actually wasn't that bad. He also bought this candy bar kind of thing at a store and had all the missionaries try a piece - it was pretty good, kind of tasted like an energy bar. Of course it wasn't just an energy bar, though. It was congealed bull's blood. Not all that gross, though. 

We did go to a member's house way out in a village outside of town to do service and he gave us a little bit of food. Just some bread, applesauce and "tea." The "tea" was hot water mixed with applesauce.

Most of our trnsportation is by bus. Our apartment is about a 30-minute walk from the church and from downtown, so most of the time we take the bus there. It costs about 10 cents and the buses come every five minutes, so it's not too bad at all. 

I haven't heard a whole lot about the church's #LIGHTtheWORLD campaign.  Those things are kind of tricky sometimes because they aren't always translated into Ukrainian. I know we have to wait like a week or two afterwards to watch the Christmas Devotional in Ukrainian.  

The weather hasn't been too awful. It's stayed around 5 C most days, which isn't so bad. We did wake up this morning with snow on the ground, and tons falling from the sky. but it's already almost completely melted by now. So really, it's not too cold, but I know it's gonna be getting so. I did buy a coat last p-day. The most expensive one I saw was like 200-300 dollars. I ended up just getting one for like 60 or 70 bucks. It's actually pretty nice and it's served me well so far. Hopefully it holds up when it starts getting colder. 

Our apartment is plenty warm enough. It's actually a fairly decent apartment, except the hot water heater doesn't work super well. We get about 4 minutes of lukewarm water before we have to relight it with a match. It's supposed to have an electric starter, but that doesn't work, so we just use a match instead to light it and then we turn the gas all the way on. I think it's pretty safe and we have a carbon monoxide detector, too, just in case. But really, though, it's not bad. We even have a washing machine in the apartment so we don't have to go to a laundromat.

So, we actually have a couple investigators now. My companion is the 1st Counselor in the Branch Presidency, so we do branch business sometimes. We went to a hospital to visit a member and help him pay for some of his medications. After walking up and down five flights of stairs, going to different pharmacies to get all the drugs, we brought them all up to the member's hospital room, which was a room with eight beds in it. He asked us if we wanted to share our message with all the other people staying in that room, and so we gave the entire first lesson about the Restoration to a room full of people. We handed out a couple cards with info about the church and our phone number, and we left. We've been back a couple times since, and a couple of the guys staying there were interested. We left them with a Book of Mormon and asked them to read it. We came back for the third time today (in the middle of our p-day - oh the sacrifices we make) and read from the Book of Mormon with them. At the end we asked them if they wanted to be baptized, and both of them said yes. So, right now the plan is for them to both be baptized on Dec 24th (that's not actually Christmas Eve here, btw.) There's still a lot of teaching we have to do and a lot of things that have to happen before the baptism, but it's still nice to get a baptism date.

 I attached a picture of the hospital. This room with the tables is where they get their meals. 

Here's a picture of the view from the hospital window as well.

We spend our days looking for new people to teach and visiting members and stuff like that. Every morning we have 3 or 4 hours of study time, and then we usually head out around lunch time. One of my favorite things we do is teach a free English class for people here. Lots of people want to learn English, so there's usually a pretty good turnout. My companion and I teach the advanced class, so we're working with some pretty good English speakers. One girl that comes is actually getting her masters in romance languages, so her English is basically perfect. It's kinda funny, though, because she likes to show off, so she uses a ton of idioms. They're all used correctly, but she just uses way more than a native speaker would. These classes are a lot of fun because I actually know how to speak English, so I feel it's something I can actually do. The English classes are open to everyone. I think about 20 people came, but only 3 people were brave enough to come to the advanced class, so we had a pretty small group.

Ok, I gotta go, but I love you guys and hope everything is going well!

  

Alec

First Week In Ukraine

​Alright, so we did make it safely to Ukraine, as you saw by that picture they sent. What time is it there? Like 4 o'clock in the morning now? The flight from Chicago to Vienna wasn't too bad. I had an aisle seat so I could stretch out a bit and get a little bit of sleep. It was a 9-hour flight, but it wasn't all that bad really. We landed in Vienna and for some reason the jetway wasn't working, so we took the stairs and then a bus picked us up to take us to the terminal. Then we had like a four-hour layover in Vienna. It was kind of a super boring airport - there weren't really any restaurants or anything to look at, so we just chilled and slept for a bit and walked around. 

View from the Vienna Airport

So after a few hours we boarded for the flight to L'viv. It was a pretty small twin-prop plane and I think our group was about half of the passengers on the plane. It was only like an hour and a half flight, but all of us fell asleep. 

View flying into L'viv

So we land in L'viv and it was snowing quite a bit. We went through customs and we didn't have any problems. We got our bags and then the Mission President was waiting out there for us. We loaded our luggage into a van and drove to the mission office about 20 minutes away in L'viv. It took three different cars to get everyone from the airport. We went to the mission office and did some basic paperwork stuff and put our luggage in the office. After that we went to dinner at a restaurant close to the office called Love and L'viv. It was actually a really good three-course meal and everything. The very first course was borsch, the famous beet soup here. It was actually really pretty good. I wasn't expecting to hate it, but I didn't think I would actually enjoy it.

After dinner we split up between a few different apartments in the city - some with senior couples and some with other missionaries. I actually got to stay with the Mission President and his wife. They have a really nice apartment - like even by American standards. By Ukrainian standards it is super, super, super nice. We stayed there and went to bed at like 8 o clock. 

LDS chapel in L'viv

The next day Sister R. made us breakfast and then we headed to the church (it's a giant pink building) for our full day of orientation . It was alot of presentations and spiritual thoughts about teaching and a whole lot of stuff that I'm afraid I don't all remember, because I was still so tired. But it wasn't all that bad - I'm pretty used to sitting in a classroom all day by now. 

We met our trainers. Mine is Elder Loveridge. He's from Utah and he's been out about 16 months. He's a cool guy and he's been super helpful so far. 

So we had two days of orientation/training and each night we would go out on the street and go contacting for an hour or two. That basically means we try to talk to random people on the street. We didn't have much success, but I was actually surprised with how many people kindly stopped and listened. I wasn't very good at it, mostly because I have no idea what to say and even if I did know what to say I would have no idea how to say it. But this will be part of what we do, since we don't have any investigators to teach as of right now. I'm sure I'll get used to it and get better at it.

Train station in L'viv

After the two days of orientation and two more days of eating at that Love and L'viv restaurant, we left for our individual towns on Saturday morning. My town is called Rivne, it's about a three hour train ride northeast of L'viv. A few days before I got here they had about two feet of snow. There wasn't a whole lot left by the time I got here and it's actually almost completely melted by now. So it's been a bit warmer, but it'll probably get cold again soon. I'm going shopping today for a nicer jacket and some other warm stuff. It hasn't been to bad until now, though. 

So we took the train to get here. It was kind of an old train and it was pretty crowded - especially with all of the luggage we had to bring - but somehow I managed to fall asleep for part of the train ride, so that was nice. We got to Rivne, and took a taxi to put our luggage away in the apartments. Our apartment is about a ten minute drive from the city center/church, so we'll always take the bus to leave it.

Alec and companion arriving in Rivne

The apartment is pretty interesting. Pretty much everyone lives in former Soviet housing, so it's in a big building, but it's actually not too bad. Our beds are lofted way up high in one of the rooms, so that's kind of cool.

Alec's apartment in Rivne

There's six missionaries serving in Rivne, the other elders are Elder von N. who is training Elder S. from my MTC group. The sisters are Sister S. and Sister G., who we met for dinner at a restaurant on Saturday night. They're all pretty cool people. Yesterday we had church and I tried to meet the members of the branch. There were about 25 people who came to church, which is actually a really good number. I tried introducing mysefl to as many people as I could and every single person asked if I was Ukrainian (even though they could tell as soon as I open my mouth that I'm wasn't.) So I had to explain a bunch of times that my grandfather was born here but that I'm American. People were nice about it, though, and they unders,tood that I doin't speak Ukrainian very well at all. 

The language is very hard. I felt like I was kind of decent at it in the MTC. I could understand pretty much everything that my teachers said, but it is way different here. So I still have a long, long, long long way to go before I'll be able to communicate at all in the language. It doesn't help that half the people here speak Russian and then the other half speak a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian. So, it's really hard and it's very, very strange being in a place where I don't know what everyone else is saying and everyone else doesn't know what I'm saying. I've never been somewhere like this so it will take some getting used to.

They gave us missionary debit cards, and it seems like everyone just uses cash so I think we just withdraw our money and use cash to buy everything that way. Stuff here is really pretty inexpensive from what I've seen. Our dinner Saturday night with the sisters was about 300 Hryvinia, which is about 10 dollars for six people to eat pretty well. That was a pretty expensive meal, too.

As of right now, it looks like I'll need a new camera. It started making weird noises when it was plugged into this computer and now it won't turn on. Oops. We haven't gone grocery shopping yet. We're doing that after this. We email from the church here in Rivne. It's in an old shopping center.

My companion is a zone leader, so he has a zone leader phone. I'm technically the district leader, but that's only because the two older elders in my district are both zone leaders, so it had to be one of the new guys. So, I have my own phone as a district leader, too. I haven't really used it for anything yet, though.

Please send me more details about everything!

Ok. I love you guys and hope everything is going well!

Alec

"We love him already!"

Just a quick post to relay that Alec has safely arrived in L'viv, Ukraine. The president of the L'viv Mission and his wife sent us a couple of pictures with the encouraging message that they already love him. We are grateful for their kind service and watchful eye over all of the missionaries in that part of the world.

Arriving in L'viv. After 24 hours of airports and flights, these guys still look pretty fresh!

Alec flew with the other missionaries going to Ukraine, who all had spent the past two months togerther in the MTC. They had arrived together at the Salt Lake City airport about 6am Tuesday morning. A very kind lady passed by, saw them, and thinking of her own daughter on a mission, offered to take a picture and send it to all of their parents for them. What a sweet moment it was as she started collecting their parents phone numbers when both she and Alec realized they were from the same stake in North Carolina, where Alec and her son had been friends for years! Thank you, Dawna Sessions, for being in the perfect place and performing the perfect act of kindness, and for this picture that we'd have never had otherwise!

Alec & Dawna Sessions at the SLC airport.

Alec and his authentic Chicago Cubs hat.

Alec was able to call home from the airport, and we spent a good amount of time catching up with him. It was good to hear the voice we hadn't heard for two months!


They departed SLC and flew to Chicago's O'Hare airport, where they had a couple hours of layover time, and where Alec landed himself a Chicago Cubs World Series Champions hat.




They departed Chicago at 5:20pm, and that was the last we heard of him for awhile. It was a 9-hour flight to Vienna, Austria, about a 4-hour layover there, and then a short 1-hour flight to L'Viv, Ukraine. By the time they reached L'viv, the local time there was 3pm in the afternoon (8am our time) on Wednesday. They had crossed 9 time zones in their journey, and the entire commute took about 22 hours.

About 11:30pm Wednesday evening, we recieved an email from the mission home that he had arrived safely.

Alec with the L'viv Mission President and his wife.

We don't yet know when we'll hear from Alec again or when his personal day (the day on which he can write emails home) will be, but we'll know within the next few days. By then, we'll also know exactly where in the L'viv mission he'll be serving and the real work will finally begin!

"We're All Pretty Ready To Get There"

This was Alec's last personal day at the MTC. He leaves for Ukraine on Tuesday morning, and will arrive there on Wednesday. Here are some of his thoughts as he prepares to leave the MTC.

Well I'm sure there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the outside world. Someone checked the election progress on Tuesday night before we went to bed - so we all went to sleep knowing there was a 58% chance Donald Trump would win. Even still, no one really thought it would happen. So when we got to class at 7:00 the next morning, everyone was talking about it and everyone was pretty surprised.  No one really thought it would happen and none of us were around for the real intense part of election season, so we really didn't have any idea what was going on. Hopefully things turn out better than we think.

There's only five days left here - which is a little scary to think about. By this time next week I could be anywhere in the mission already starting missionary work. It's a little crazy. 

I think I actually got pretty lucky with my district. It was crowded having 13 people sometimes (now down to 11 actually cause of sickness/other issues,) but it was nice to have that many people, because if one person was being annoying there were 11 other people to go talk to. :) Luckily most of the people in the district have actually been pretty cool. They all live in Utah/Idaho, except for one from Kentucky, so maybe I'll see some of them next time I visit Utah after the mission. The good thing is that there's only about 40 missionaries in the mission--and only 30 of them are elders. Eight of them are coming home the same time we go out, so when we arrive we'll be basically a third of the mission. So with such a small mission, we'll definitely be seeing each other a lot over the next two years and I'm sure I'll be companions with some of them at some point.

I've also made a bunch of friends outside of my district. In my zone (which is basically the branch we have church with) there are some pretty cool people and our whole zone (about 25 people) has gotten to be pretty good friends. I've also recently started hanging out a bit more with the other Russian speaking zone who have classes on the same floor as us. There's a guy there from Poland who always says hi and gives me a big hug when he sees me. The other zone is where the guy from Chapel Hill is from, too. 

I won't miss the food necessarily - but I will miss having food. It's nice having three meals prepared for you every single day. I expect so many prepared meals may be harder to come by out there. Also, I'm not really sure how good Ukrainian food is going to taste - the pictures I've seen haven't been super encouraging. 

The weather here in Provo has been way too nice. I was expecting it to get cold here already so I could start adjusting to the weather, but none of that has happened. It's still like high 60s every day. Supposedly this winter is supposed to be the coldest winter that Ukraine has seen in 40 years, so that's gonna be fun. Yeahhhhh.

We've had some pretty good devotionals, President Nelson and Elder Bednar were probably the highlights. We've also had the Primary and the Relief Society General Presidents come talk. The Primary President came on Tuesday and she gave a pretty good talk. On Sunday this week, Jenny Oaks Baker (apparently a pretty famous violinist and daughter of Dallin H. Oaks) came and performed for us. That was pretty cool. She brought her whole family to perform, they were all pretty talented. She would give a short little message between each song, so it was pretty interesting to listen to. 

I think our teachers - at least the one from Ukraine - have made us more excited than scared. She's been giving us little culture lessons about stuff we can and can't do, and then just talking about the country a lot. We're all pretty ready to get there. It seems like everyone else got their call around the same time as me, so, we've all beein waiting like 7 months. 

That's very cool about Evan's chorus solo, definitely pass along my congratulations. I listened to the link dad sent me and it sounded super awesome. That was a cool song. 

All I can think of for Christmas presents would be a watch or something - not really sure at all what I'm going to need. I bet by that point I might appreciate some American food like some taco seasoning or mac and cheese (maybe just the cheese packets and I can buy noodles there or something lol.) I guess if you're gonna try to ship it to Ukraine (sounds tricky) I could let you know what I might need later on. If you're sending something today just make sure it's gonna get here by Monday. 

  

We're all expecting it to be pretty cold when we get there on Wednesday. Hopefully they'll let us buy our coats right away. It also will depend a lot on where my first area is. Our teacher says there's a huge difference between the northern and southern parts, so hopefully I get to go where it's warm to start things off. 

After the first week or so getting up early, it hasn't really been all that bad. People talk about how exhausting and everything it is, but honestly I haven't gotten this much sleep every night in like 10 years. Like actually having 8 hours of sleep every single night makes things so easy. I'm sure it'll be different when I'm doing more than just sitting in a classroom all day every day, but for now I don't feel tired at all. It still takes me like at least half an hour to fall asleep, and I rarely sleep through the night, but I'm not tired usually. I never even sleep all the way til 6:30 cause that's way more sleep than I'm used to. I'll usually wake up around 5 and just lay in bed drifting in and out of sleep for an hour and a half. All these Utah kids who never did early morning seminary complain about not getting enough sleep, but I've never been more well rested.

Love you guys!

Alec

Birthday At The MTC

News from Alec . . .

Hey guys!

That's awesome my friends came over on my birthday and I'm glad it made you feel a little bit better. Unfortunately I can't even take the credit for the idea. Kimberly emailed me last week if I thought it would be okay and I said to go for it. So it was all her who planned it, not me.

Can you guess which one is Alec?

For Halloween there's not too much to do here. In the morning, though, we had Sister H. teaching us and she's pretty relaxed about stuff so some of us brought costumes to clas. She walked in and thought it was all very funny. We took them off right after that to respect the rules, but it was cool to dress up. The rest of the day was pretty normal, except we kept yelling "Happy Galloveen," which is Halloween in Russian, because it's a lot cooler than how it sounds in Ukrainian. 

At night, we went back to the residence and kinda went trick or treating. It turned into more of a parade around all four floors of the building with a bunch of different missionaries joining in on the fun. I attached a couple pictures, one in the classroom building and one in the dorm. See if you can guess which person I am.

My favorite costume was Elder Abraham dressed as a pumpkin. Elder Shuley also had his parents send him a Trump mask, which everyone thought was pretty funny

My birthday was pretty fun, too. Thank you so much for the package with all of the cards and gifts, they were all very much appreciated. I also got a bunch of emails and Dear Elders from others, which I appreciate a lot, too. The cake was a huge surprise. It came in on Monday and luckily one of the people in my district has a mini-fridge in his room(idk why, it's literally the only room in the building that came with a fridge) so I kept the cake in there until my birthday. Every one was wishing me "з Днем народження" all day long. It's pronounced "zdnem narodzhennya" - that first sound is pretty hard to make. It literally means something like "with the day of your birth" but translates to happy birthday. On the message Dad copied from Facebook, Grandpa wrote, literally, "happy day of birth" (but in Russian, not Ukrainian.) I had a lot of Russians say happy birthday to me, too, and I don't know exactly how they say it in Russia, but i get what he wrote. 

After we went back to the dorm that night, we had the cake, which everyone thought was super good, so thank you so much for that. And then my district got me a card and Sister H. bought me a full-page magnifier from the store, cause she found out that I did sciecne shows in Chapel Hill and thought that that was the most scientific thing she could find, even though I have 20/20 vision. Thank you for all the gifts y'all sent too. Looks like there's some excellent hymns and classical music on the iPod and that comfort strap thing for my bag is much more comfortable. One more thing - President Russell M. Nelson was our devotional speaker on Tuesday, too, So, overall it was a pretty good birthday.

So, Game 7 went to 10 innings? That's insane. If you want to get me a Christmas present that you don't have to send to me, I'd love to have an official 2016 World Series Championship t-shirt. 

That's crazy that Obama was in Chapel Hill. That's pretty historic. I doubt he stayed there over night, but if he did, he probably would have stayed at Morehead Planetarium. There's like a presidential suite where all visiting dignitaries stay. 

I attached a bunch of pictures.

We got our Ukrainian name tags a week or two ago. Does the spelling of Martschenko look familiar? I think it's the same as we had on those t-shirts a while ago. 

I hung up those bats you guys sent with all of those extra shoelaces I have now as some Halloween decorations. So far we haven't gotten in trouble for it on room inspections so, they're probably staying up the rest of the time here. 

I attached a few pictures of the temple that I took just for fun.

On Wednesday night, we have PCL (personal, companion, and language study) which is basically just three hours without a teacher. So, we decided for personal study some of us would take a walk to the temple to watch the sun set. My camera is no good so i didn't really get any good pictures but it's a pretty good view because the temple is up a bit on the mountain so you can look down on the valley and see the BYU football stadium and Utah lake and see the sun set over the mountains on the other side of the lake. It's a pretty nice view at sunset, but it gets cold pretty quickly after that ,so we walked back to the MTC. 

We also decided to do our temple session early this morning instead of in the afternoon, so I here's a picture of walking there in the dark this morning. 

Here's a picture of my birthday card from my district. Lots of the notes are in Ukrainian and it's blurry but you can try to read whatever you want. 

Also here's a picture of the Christmas lights they put up here in the MTC. Unfortunately, they've only had them on for that first night and they've been off since. I guess they're waiting til after Thanksgiving, but I'll be gone by then. Speaking of that, I should get my flight plans tomorrow. We did manage to get some pictures with the lights though that first night. It was pretty cool, everyone was out there hanging out and some people were singing Christmas carols, too. 

I think that once we get the flight plans they actually let us email home real quick to let you know when. Most likely I'll be flying out very, very early Tuesday morning (Nov 15), arriving in Ukraine sometime between Wednesday and Thursday, but i really don't know for sure. They do let us call home from the airport, so i'll let you know what time to expect that. You might have to wake up in the middle of the night if you want to talk to me. There's 12 of us, so i would be impressed if they fit us all on the same flight, but apparently they usually do. But they usually don't have that many missionaries going to the same place all at once though, so who knows. Some of the other missionaries I've known have had some pretty long layovers, so hopefully we'll be together if we get stuck in an airport for 18 hours.

Gotta go, but love you guys!

Alec

Happy Early Halloween & Birthday!

Our last emails from Alec before he turns 22 years old on Tuesday!

Yes, my birthday is still up there in the corner of the whiteboard, so everyone knows it's coming. Haha!

The World Series sounds pretty exciting. I'm gonna have to write to my friends from Chapel Hill that were from Chicago to see how excited they are. I wonder if either of them will fly home for the last couple games. I appreciate the game updates in the mail. 

There's not really much we can do here for Halloween. We can't wear costumes during the day, obviously. Some people switch nametags with their companions, but that's about it. At night time, though, in the dorms we might be able to do a bit of something. Maybe I'll make a costume out of those glow sticks y'all sent or something. I don't know, everyone has so much candy and food in their rooms that I'm sure there will be some kind of makeshift trick or treating. I'll put up all of those decorations, too - the door cover will be super awesome. We'll probably just all hang out and eat a bunch of food that night. 

Thank you for the package. That was super nice. I haven't tried the Cheerwine fudge yet, but I'm sure it's super good. The guy I met from Chapel Hill lives a couple floors above me and he told me he'd trade me some Cheerwine for a little bit of Cheerwine fudge, so I'll have to make that trade soon. Also, between the shoelaces in the package, and the shoelaces dad sent, and the shoelaces I bought in the store (I couldn't find them at first,) I now have a total of 9 pairs of shoelaces for my one pair of shoes. At least i'll never run out. I've already used some of the shoelaces to hang up some of the halloween decorations y'all sent. 

The first couple weeks we were all very ready to get out of here, and then the next 4/5 weeks I think I was pretty content just chilling here and being fed three meals a day. But at this point I think we're all just about ready to get out of here, even though things are going to be much much harder over there, it'll be nice to not be doing the same thing every single day. We were looking at some Ukrainian towns in Google Street View the other day so that was pretty cool to see just to know what to expect. We have a little less than 3 weeks until we fly out. Some of the other Russian speakers left earlier this week, so now we're the oldest group here, which is kind of strange to realize. 

The American-serving missionaries don't seem to handle much more than 3 weeks. After being here for so long, we've all gotten very tired of them. Every time a group of them leaves, they go around and put shaving cream on all of the doors. It's kind of annoying. 

  

As for my birthday, I really can't think of much else I need, except maybe some pistachios. Someone else got a bag and I realized how great of an idea that is. Other than that I don't think I can really think of anything, unless you happen to be able to find maybe a Ukrainian/English dictionary, but I think everyone says it's just easier to get one of those in Ukraine so I can probably just hold off on that.

We had a little party yesterday for our teacher, Sister H. It was the 14th anniversiary of her baptism day which is pretty special to her. 

There wasn't much we could do for her, but we gathered a basket of food from our rooms and got her a card and a journal from the store. It's obviously not much, but I think she appreciated the gesture a lot. 

We also somehow found hats and balloons in the colors of the Ukrainian flag ​​.

I figured out a way to hang up the hammock, if you balance it right you can set it up between two bunk beds. Elder Mangum actually spent the night in the hammock cause his room has six people in it and he just wanted a quiet night's sleep. Apparently it was pretty comfortable for him. 

By the way, Donny Osmond's nephew is here at the MTC. I wonder if it's the son of the one that asked you out, mom. Let me know when Abbie's Mormon Message is published, so I can check it out.

I have to head off now, but I love you guys and I'll talk to you next week!

Alec