First Missionaries To Hold LDS Sunday Service in Ternopil

Alec and his companion become the first-ever missionaries to attend a sacrament meeting in Ternopil, Ukraine.

A trip back to Rivne - Alec's first city.

This week was pretty busy with a lot of traveling. On Tuesday we left for Rivne for exchanges with the zone leaders. It was kinda weird going back to my first city that I haven't been to in almost six months, but not as weird as I thought. It's definitely a much nicer place in the summertime, which is pretty much true of all of Ukraine. It was still nice to see some people that I remember (even though one or two of them didn't remember me) so it was fun. Unfortunately, though, we had to take a bus there and back (about 5 hours each way) which was very much not fun at all. And we have to do it again this week to go back to Rivne for Zone Conference. I attached a couple pictures from Rivne, but I'll try to get some better ones this week.

Sunday was pretty interesting. Things are just getting started up in Ternopil in terms of missionary work--our mission president had a meeting with some government officials last week to get us officially registered there, so we decided to hold a sacrament meeting there on Sunday with missionaries.

Basically, the way it works is right now we have four elders living in Khmelnitsky, but two of them (the other companionship) are technically assigned to Ternopil. 

The four elders in Khmelnitskiy

Site of the first-ever meeting.

So, those two elders make the 4-hour round trip journey out there almost every day to get stuff ready until they can find an apartment to live in. So, I won't usually be going to sacrament meeting there since I'm assigned to Khmelntiskiy But, as of right now, the only member in the city is a guy from Africa who speaks English, so the sacrament meetings will be in English. And since the other Ternopil elder doesn't speak English, I went on splits out there with the American Ternopil elder that does. So, I don't know if that makes any sense, but, basically I was there in Ternopil on Sunday for the first-ever sacrament meeting with missionaries in that city. So, that was pretty neat. The member there, Samuel, is a super nice guy and he did a great job leading the meeting (with all three of us--which is three times as many as he usually has.) We met in a conference room at a hotel ($8 an hour) and had a nice short sacrament meeting. It was a cool experience being there for that. He also dropped some serious dough on some "American Sandwich Bread" and I forgot how good bread tastes in America. There's a huge difference for sure. I attached a couple pictures of the hotel room we met in, it was pretty neat for sure. 

Alec gives thumbs down to Russian billiards

Also, last p-day we went to a billiard hall to play some pool. It would have been super fun, but our native Ukrainian missionary convinced us to play Russian billiards instead of American billiards, which was  huge mistake. I don't know if you know the difference, but basically American is fun and Russian isn't. The Russian balls are more like bowling balls than pool balls, so it's super difficult to hit them hard. Also the table is wayyy bigger (you can see the American table in the background for comparison) and the worst part of all is that the pockets are tiny, so you have to hit the ball in perfectly to get it in. So, basically, it's super, super, super hard, and unless you're super good at it, it's not a ton of fun. We played for an hour and only got like six balls in. Fortunately, we had a bit of time left to go play some American pool, so it wasn't a total loss. 

Well happy birthday, Mom and Evan! Sounds like y'all had fun--except for that shark movie, that sounds extremely lame. I'm finally gonna be sending a package home today, so you can make sure Evan and Mom get an extra share of the candy when it gets there. 

There's an escape room here in Khmelntnistksy that we're probably gonna check out sometime, too. Unfortunately, it's all in Russian, so we'll have to make sure to have a native with us. Think you could have solved it if all the directions were in a different language?

Being first counselor in the branch presidency will be very interesting. Since there's no stake here, there aren't any high priests in this mission at all, except possibly some people from America or from Kiev. I imagine I'll actually end up doing a lot less here than I had to do in Uzhhorod, just cause there's an actual branch president here to handle all of the hard stuff, whereas in Uzhhorod we did everything. 

 

Anyway, hope y'all have a great week! (Shouldn't the kids be starting school this week lol?)

Alec