First Convert In Ternopil

Elder Martschenko and the first LDS convert in the city of Ternopil.

 This past week was pretty busy. Starting off on Tuesday, we had English practice in Ternopil, as usual. It was pretty good. My group had about 23 people, which is a bit more than usual. I started off by asking them what their dream job would be, and half of them said doctor. Turns out the reason we had so many was cause one person brought a bunch of their friends from med school. Also, since we had the perfect amount of people, I decided to do the birthday problem with them. It's the advanced group, so we basically just talk about whatever I want. The birthday problem is the one where you only need 23 people in a room to make it probable that two of them will share a birthday. So I started going around the room asking everyone their birthday. Turns out two of the new people that came were twins, so that kind of threw off my point, cause twins don't count. And then no one else had birthdays in common, so it didn't really work, unfortunately.

On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we spent a lot of our time getting ready for General Conference. We had some cool cards printed out that we could hand out to people. We handed out 1000 of them, and no one came because of the cards. Oops. We also had exchanges on Wednesday--I was with Elder Protzman, who goes home next week. After he leaves, the group that came with me will be the most senior missionaries in the mission for almost an entire year. That's pretty weird.

We also had to buy food for conference (and make it. We did sandwiches one day and then pumpkin soup the next day. Ukrainians loved the pumpkin soup, but I thought it was pretty average. We also had to make sure the videos were downloaded, and get the projector and everything set up for it. We did all this Thursday and Friday, because we weren't actually gonna be there on Saturday for the first day of conference, so we had to put it in the hands of our members and trust them to get everything done. I was pretty worried about it actually. There's definitely a bit of a dependence on the missionaries here, but apparently everything went well, so that is great.

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The reason we weren't there on Saturday was because we spent the whole day traveling back and forth from L'viv for a baptism. The man is actually from Ternopil--the first convert ever from that city. He obviously didn't know a lot of members, since there's only one in ternopil, so we all went to L'viv to give him some support. It was in L'viv just cause it would be easier for him to take the two hour train from Ternopil than to try to do this whole thing in some kind of sauna like usual. It was super cool to travel to L'viv for the day, and he's a super cool guy. He's from Ghana, and he's in Ternopil studying to be a doctor. The 9 hours of trains back and forth was kind of a lot, but it was worth it. 

And then on Sunday we watched General Conference with the branch, except we were in the computer room watching it in English, which was much better than Ukrainian. 

This week will be another busy week. We'll be in Ternopil on Tuesday, L'viv again on Wednesday for mission conference, and then Ternopil again on Thursday. We have apartment checks on Friday, so the rest of our time will probably be spent cleaning. Haha.

Alec