Mission Conference & Exchanges

The tripanionship in Uzhhorod

No one really seemed to care about it being an American activity last week. I'm sure we'll do something bigger for Ukrainian Independence day anyway. Honestly, people here seem to be pretty neutral towards America. You gotta remember that most people dislike Russia pretty hard, so any one who's not Russia is pretty well-liked.

As for English though, technically most people learn it in school. However very few people actually know it well at all. Everyone will know a few words, but most people can't really speak or understand at all. You do find some people who know it decently, and those are the people that really want to speak English to you. That's something we've been doing in the mission for the past few weeks--focusing really hard on making contacts through English, cause that's something we have to offer that people actually want. So we try going to English schools and asking if they want native speaker help and stuff like that. The education system here seems pretty average. It's very different than in America. They start "college" when they're like 15. I think it depends a lot on the school you go to. Based on my conversations with people though . . . some of the schools are not so good. I got in a disagreement with a whole room of Ukrainians (including a history major) once cause I told them Mongolia was close to China and they just absolutely would not believe me.

A lot of our time is spent doing normal church administration work and work with the members. Even though there's only like 8 here, there are often issues we have to address. It's even harder now that there's only one companionship in the whole city. We rarely have time to teach any investigators. 

For this past week, we were pretty busy. We had Mission Conference in L'viv on Wednesday and exchanges in Ivano-Frankivsk on Thursday. So we left Tuesday afternoon for our train ride to L'viv. Got there at 11:00 Tuesday night. We went and stayed with one of the senior couples who actually just got back from a month long trip to America helping our district president from Rivne get a very needed back surgery. Then we had conference with everybody on Wednesday, and right after hopped on a train to Ivano. 

Alec on the court

In Ivano the missionaries there are getting ready to host a big 3 on 3 basketball tournament, so we spent a lot of time helping them get ready for that, including trying to play basketball with some people. Unfortunately we came at the wrong time, and ended up accidentally crashing some 9 or 10 year old basketball camp. So that was kind of awkward, but the coach was nice and let us warm up with them. I can now say that I've balled on the court of a professional Ukrainian basketball team.

After that we took our train back to Uzhhorod and got in super late as usual. Much of the last few days were spent preparing for an activity that's gonna be in L'viv this Saturday. It's basically a big pioneer day festival. It's gonna be pretty big with everyone from the whole mission, so it should be cool. While all the other branches rent out private buses, we don't have enough members to warrant that. so we've been scrambling the last couple days to get train tickets for everyone. Thanks to the help of one of our awesome members, I think we're almost all ready for it. We ended up pretty much having to have them add a whole extra car to one of the trains just for us. So that should be fun. I used my credit card to buy some of those tickets cause I didn't have enough cash on me, and I'll probably be using it again to buy more tomorrow, so don't be surprised if some charges finally show up on the mastercard. I'll get reimbursed

I've attached some pictures, mostly from L'viv. There's a chain here called L'viv Croissants, and they let you write stuff on notes on the wall, so i wrote one.

Alec leaves his mark in L'viv

I got a picture in front of the L'viv opera house, which is on the 20 gryven bill.

The L'viv opera house - also on Ukrainian currency

And a bunch of pics from the top of the tower.

View from above L'viv

Sounds like y'all are having a fun trip at the beach! I definitely miss all of you! Pass along my love to everyone. let me know if y'all do anything fun, like go to any strange stores with tons of huge taxidermized animals or something like that. And tell Evan to shave his face or he'll regret it whenever he looks back on all of his pictures. 

At Mission Conference in L'viv

 

Hope y'all have a fun week!

Alec