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