Well thank you for the letter about grandma. Obviously, I wish I could be
there to help out in whatever way I could. At the same time, it in some way
makes it a little easier for me to be here and to always be so busy to, I guess, keep my mind off of things a bit. It's good to know that she isn't in so much
pain anymore, and I'm especially glad I got to see her before I left.
I guess
all I can do now is tell you how this past week went.
Last Monday night we went out to the Branch President's
house for a little family home evening. He lives out in a village about a 30-minute bus ride outside of
Rivne. We actually did the same exact thing on my very first Monday here in
Rivne 12 weeks ago, so it was nice little bookends to my 12 weeks of training.
I was definitely able to understand quite a bit more than I could that first
night, but I still can't understand all that much. He's a super funny guy (I attached a picture from the baptism a while ago -- he's the guy on the far
left,) so it's always fun to go talk with him. We always try to bring cookies
or something like that when we visit people, but he also decided to bring
cookies. So we ate a bunch of cookies. He also bought a 2-liter of Sprite,
cause it's American and so obviously we'd like it (it doesn't really even taste
like American Sprite) and he made us drink the whole thing. I had to pee
reallllly bad on the bus ride back to Rivne.
On Tuesday morning, my old companion Elder Loveridge went
back to L'viv to start working as the Assistant to the President. That meant
that I was with Elder Sanders, the other new missionary in Rivne, until my new
companion got here on Wednesday night. We didn't do too much besides walk
around town and try to talk to people, but we did meet up with one guy who had
come to English practice. He actually lived in America for like 15 years so he
more or less knew perfect English, but he wanted to brush up on it before he
took an English speaking test to see if he'll be able to immigrate to Canada.
We just talked for a while about churchy stuff (he's very religious) and
it was cool to hear his opinions on stuff.
Wednesday night we went to the train station to pick up my
new companion. They originally told us that they'd be here at 4:00, but then
called us and said it would be closer to 8:30. So we got there at 8:30 and
ended up waiting about an hour out in the cold for the train to arrive. We
found out why when we saw it pull up--apparently it had somehow lost electricity
(which is pretty bad, cause it's an electric train) so they had to have an
actual train engine come and tow it all the way here from L'viv. Anyway I
picked him up from the train station and then we went back to our apartment and
he started to unpack. His name is Elder Jones and he's a super nice guy. He's
from Utah and he did a year of school at BYU before he came out
here. He's been out for a year and a half already (he came out the same time as
my last companion). He's helpful and friendly and nice so all is well.
On Saturday all of the other brand new missionaries came in
after they finished the orientation in L'viv. I'm not sure exactly why, but for
some reason there's two pairs of sisters here now, which is weird cause a few
of the cities don't have any sisters. I think it had something to do with some
new missionaries that are just waiting on visas to go to missions in America,
so they just came here. So having eight missionaries in one city will be pretty
interesting and will hopefully help out a lot. The new missionaries are: Sister
Morris -- from Louisiana, she's been out for about 6 months I think; Sister
Fedotova -- she's from Odessa in southern Ukraine and she's waiting on a visa
to go to the temple square mission (I think), she has a hard time speaking Ukrainian cause she's so used to speaking Russian at home (apparently it's hard
to make that switch for natives) so it's pretty tough to understand her and she
doesn't know English super great; Sister Dishlanian -- she's from Kiev and she
is also waiting on a visa, but she's been here 3 months already sooo idk if
she's ever going to get that visa; Sister Jones -- I think she's from St George
and she just got here from the MTC; Elder Aslanian -- he's from Armenia and he
just got here from the MTC also. Elder Aslanian is being trained by Elder von
Niederhausern, the other missionary that stayed here from the last transfer.
Elder Aslanian is great cause he already speaks/understand Ukrainian way better
than I do cause he knows Russian (everyone in Armenia knows Russian) and
they're so similar so it'll be nice to have him around. I haven't really gotten
to know any of them super well yet, but i'm sure I will over the next 6
weeks.
As for weather here, it had been relatively warm for the
past couple weeks, and then this past week it got really cold all of a sudden.
Everyone I've talked to said it's the coldest winter they've had in a long time. Something like a foot and a half of snow fell in one night last week.
It's interesting cause when there's that much snow, and when that many people
walk over it, it basically just packs down into ice and you don't really notice
you're walking on snow. You're just walking on like half a foot of solid
ice--sometimes it can get pretty slippery but I haven't fallen since my first
week here so I'm trying to keep that up. I think it's actually supposed to get
above freezing later this week, so maybe all of this accumulated snow/ice will
eventually melt.
 |
| Dressed up for a Primary activity |
On Thursday last night, we were invited to help out with a
primary activity. The activity was about prophets, so they needed a couple
people to come and dress up as modern-day prophets. So Elder Jones and I came
dressed as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. We didn't have very many materials
for making any kind of costumes, and I have no idea where to buy cotton in this
country, but somehow we figured out a way to make a beard out of paper. The
costumes weren't great, but it was fun to go talk to the kids for a little bit (and they
gave us some pizza afterwards too.)
I don't think I've mentioned this before, but the last few
weeks we've been helping out with an English-speaking club here. They came to
our English practice and asked if we could help with theirs, so we said sure.
Basically we just go and sit with them and tell them about America -- pretty easy
cause it's all in English. They're mostly young people, and they seem pretty
fascinated with America. It's nice cause there's not too many opportunities for
service, so we do whatever we can really.
I'm sorry I don't have more pictures this week. But I can share some observations I've made
since I got here:
- In the winter time, instead of using strollers, people just push their kids around on sleds. I never thought of that before, but it make perfect sense when everything is nice.
- It took me about 4 weeks, but I finally found something that tastes pretty close to string cheese in America. I had to go through some pretty nasty salty and smokey and weird cheeses to finally find the one that tasted right.
- Ukrainians loooove sour cream. They put it on everything. Like on fruits and toast and anything you can imagine. It's actually not as bad as you might think though.
I love you guys and miss all of you. I know this is a hard
time, but you will all be in my prayers.
Alec
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