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