Leaves, New Arrivals & Transfers

Well, the sister missionaries just barely left to  head home from serving their missions. We actually went to the train station at 6:00 this morning to see them off and help them carry their luggage. There are 12 new missionaries coming in this week, which is about a third of the entire mission, so there are lots of transfers and moving around going on this week. I'll be staying here in Rivne, but my companion is going to L'viv to be the Assistant to the President. My new companion is going to be coming here from another town called Chernivtsi. He should get here on Wednesday, and then there's going to be another brand new missionary in Rivne from Armenia, so that should be interesting. And then for the sister missionaries, there's going to be 4 here actually, which is interesting because some cities don't have any sister missionaries. There's going to be one from Louisiana, one from Kiev (or somewhere in Ukraine), and then two new missionaries (I think one is American and one is Ukrainian.) So we'll have the most missionaries out of any city, which should be interesting.

Most of the people we talk to on the street are not that receptive. Most people just keep walking past us or say they're in a rush or they don't have time. Every once in a while there's someone who's willing to stop and answer a few questions, probably about 1 in 10. And then not many of those are actually interested, but every once in a while it happens. Most people here are religious from what I can tell. Most people belong to the Eastern Orthodox church, but there's plenty of other sects, too.

My Spanish was definitely the first thing to go when I started learning Ukrainian. English and Ukrainian are pretty separate in my mind, but Spanish and Ukrainian definitely get jumbled. It doesn't happen so much now, but whenever I don't know a word in Ukrainian, my brain would automatically replace it with the word in Spanish. It was especially weird cause I would try speaking in Ukrainian and my brain would put in the Spanish articles, even though there aren't any articles in Ukrainian. But it's definitely getting better now. I don't know a lot of Ukrainian slang really, at least not any that's super cool. One that is pretty funny (I think it's actually Russian) is for an exclamation like "dang!" they just say "pancake!" 

This past week I finally got the letter from Aunt Elaine! It was a nice Christmas card and a UNC notepad--very nice of her to send.

So this past Monday, we went to a member's house (the same one we went to on Ukrainian Christmas Eve) for the sister's last Family Home Evening in the country. We basically just hung out and played with their cute little two-year old son. The food was good - the family made mashed potatoes and we brought the rest of the food. It's pretty interesting how different things are here than in America for missionaries. You would never imagine missionaries in America bringing food to a dinner appointment, but here it's very normal (and we usually prefer it actually.) 

We also stumbled across a pretty impressive monument last week. You can see it from the road and it's about a half a mile walk from there to the actual monument. 

It was basically a huge tower with a giant statue at the base. I'm not sure what it's for exactly (obviously something about WWII) but I heard that it's specifically about the holocaust. Not entirely sure about that one though. 

Behind the monument, there were also a bunch of old WWII tanks and artillery just sitting there. pretty interesting to see and definitely different from what you'd find in America. 

We also went out to dinner for the sisters' last couple of days so here's a picture of that.

Hope everything is going great back home! Thanks for the kind words and I miss you guys!

Alec