Ukrainian Thanksgiving

Alec finally gest his birthday package.

The week almost kind of felt like a holiday week. We got the first bit of real snow falling from the sky (it's actually snowing right now,) but so far it's been too warm for any of it to stick, so it's just cold and wet everywehre instead.

I did get your package on Tuesday though, Thank you very much for that. I'm drinking some hot chocolate out of the cup y'all got right now. The hand warmers are very much appreciated, even though I'm sketching a little bit about the electronic ones. That seems very much like it's just a disaster waiting to happen. Intentionally overheating batteries just seems like a bad idea. Oh well, so far they work really well, so I hope the Amazon reviews were positive. Also super funny y'all sent that Milka Oreo Chocolate Bar. That's straight from Belgium and they sell Milka Chocolate everywhere here.

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We also had our big "Thanksgiving" activity on Saturday. It was very much not Thanksgiving and very much just a bunch of Ukrainian food. It was just a big pot luck with the branch, and I was super super surprised that people actually brought food and it ended up working really well. After every one ate, we showed the Christmas video and explained how the Light The World program is going to work and tried to get people excited for it. We're planning on going super hard with it this year, so hopefully it works out. The good news is that they ended up making new localized versions of the videos for a bunch of different countries, and the Russian/Ukrainian ones fixed the super bad spelling mistake, so we don't have to deal with that anymore. You can find the new video on the Ukrainian page of mormon.org, They just made some minor changes, but it's pretty well done. 

Speaking of the video, we also worked with an advertising company to get it set up on a big screen right in the center of town. It cost about $250 to get it to play twice an hour all day long for the entire month, so we decided why not? And now we've already got it up there playing, and I attached a couple pics of it.

Light the World playing in city center.

 For Thanksgiving itself though, I decided to go out to a restaurant and just get a bunch of food to celebrate. It was very Ukrainian food, but all pretty tasty. I attached a pic of my apple streudel dessert--it was almost like apple pie.

And then the other big thing for this past week was the mission president visiting on Tuesday. During my interview with him we talked about pharm school, and he said I'll be able to make it back in time to get started, which is a pretty big relief cause in the past with other missionaries he has been very much against missionaries going home even a couple weeks early for school. So definitely very relieved all that worked out. Now he just has to write a formal request to get it approved by the missionary department (aka a member of the quorum of the twelve) and then everything should be good to go (that's why I needed the dates last week.) Definitely a big relief. If the first day I have to be on campus is August 1st though, there's a pretty good chance that I'll get home that Wednesday and then pretty much go straight to Chapel Hill from the airport. That'll be fun.

The only other cool thing from this week was that I saw the new Star Wars poster. Idk, maybe everyone in America already knows about this, but there was a veryyy interesting thing I learned from the Ukrainian translation. In English jedi can be plural or singular, but in Ukrainian there's two different words for singular and plural jedi, and so I noticed on the poster that it's plural. Idk maybe everyone already knows about this, but it kind of blew my mind.

That's about it for this past week. Here's some pictures of our Thanksgiving activity . . .

. . . and from hanging out with some people from English . . .

 and the first snow and a pigeon. 

Hope y'all have a great week!

Alec

Another Week in Ivano-Frankivsk

Alec and his companions in Ukraine.

We don't really have anything planned for Thanksgiving. The branch is doing a lunch thing on Saturday, but it will not at all be like a real Thanksgiving. We'll probably just make something.

We did a little bit of service for our interesting Canadian member, helping him finish his greenhouse before the winds come and world war 3 starts next year. So good thing we got that all ready for him. Last time we were there it was super cold and raining, so at least the weather was nice this time.

We also did some more service helping the branch president's mom get her visa ready to go to England. For some reason, she thought it would be a good idea to get a new passport (to change her last name to match her husbands) right in the middle of the visa application process. She wanted to know if that would have a negative impact on her visa application decision. Well, of course, that will have a negative impact on her visa application decision, but we still had to spend 3 hours calling a bunch of different people and emailing people to get a solid confirmation of that from the embassy. British English is almost as hard to understand as African English too, so it was a lot of fun. But now we'll probably have to restart the application process from the beginning when she gets her new passport.

Other than that we had a good, slightly unorthodox sacrament meeting. Our former branch president was giving a talk and he started sending text messages to members of the congregation and having them stand up and read them as an object lesson. Right in the middle of sacrament meeting. That's Ukraine for ya.

Some of our friends from English practice have really started to like Bananagrams. we play it during our game night with them and they seem to like it. They use the most ridiculous words sometimes though.

Game night at English practice.

I have a couple pics, just a cool house in downtown Ivano-Frankivsk that looks a lot like downtown Raleigh . . . 

. . . and a car with a Connecticut license plate. 

I don't know if I sent these already but there's also some pics of the university where we do a special English practice every Wednesday (at top.)

Have a good week and Happy Thanksgiving!

Alec

Sore Muscles

The big highlight of this past week was a baptism on Saturday. The second counselor in the branch presidency's son was baptized. He's 10 years old and for the past forever his mom hasn't allowed him to be baptized or meet with the missionaries or anything, but just recently she gave him permission to do "whatever he wanted," so the other elders had been working with him and he was baptized on Saturday. 

The building here doesn't have a font either, like most of them here, but we do have a portable font, basically just a big portable jacuzzi looking thing that they ordered from baptistry.com. Lol.

Also, on Friday night, the night before the baptism, we got a call from our branch president asking for some help. Apparently he ordered a bunch of concrete to his house on Saturday and he forgot about the baptism and he was gonna need some help getting it all unloaded to make it back on time for the baptism. So we take a taxi out to his house on the outskirts of town, expecting to be unloading bags of dry cement mix from a truck or something. We show up and there is a full-blown cement mixer pulled into the tiny road in his village pouring concrete into a wooden form in his front yard. So we go and basically spend a couple hours shoveling wet cement and getting it all in place and everything in time. Definitely ruined my tennis shoes, but it was a pretty interesting experience.

I was kinda sore after that, but definitely not as sore as I was after our investigators invited us to go to the gym with them. This was actually last week, but I forgot. Basically, this couple is super jacked and they decided to invite us and show us how they work out. I haven't done any kind of weight lifting in well over a year, so after doing some squats and dead lifts, I was pretty destroyed for the entire next week. Super cool but super uncomfortable for the rest of the week.

And then, lastly, last night we had a big birthday party for the brother of the branch president, a recent convert. His mother made a huge meal for us, and it was actually the first time I've had a classic Ukrainian meal in quite a long time. Probably since last winter in Rivne. Of course she brought out the classic meat jello. This is only the second time I've had to try it, and it was actually a little better than the first time, but I still almost threw up trying to swallow it. But she made a pretty good cake afterward.

Other than that, not too much happened this week, none of the computers here have card readers, so I can't really upload any pictures just yet, but I'll attach some and some videos from our science activity last week. Some of the videos are super long and in Ukrainian, so don't bother watching all of it. Just don't make a video montage to some weird song this time.

Also, here's some more pics from last week. I don't know if I attached them last week or not but basically we went out to the branch president's house to do some service and helped him use concrete to fill in some holes on the side of his house. He has some chickens and bunnies, the bunnies names are Christmas, New Years, and Mark's Birthday, if that gives you any idea what the bunnies are for​.

Hope y'all have a great week!

Alec

Science & Religion

Alec uses his Morehead Planetarium Science Show skills to teach gospel lessons to children in Ukraine.

This week was pretty busy here. I have a ton of pictures, but as of now no way to upload them cause the computer in this library doesn't have a card reader, so those might come later. 

First of all, on Monday for p-day all the missionaries got together to do some pumpkin carving. It was surprisingly difficult to find good pumpkins for carving but we managed to find a couple good American-looking ones. Ukrainians make no distinction between pumpkins and squashes, so we ended up carving a few squashes as well. I ended up doing the basic UNC symbol, and honestly I think it turned out pretty OK, considering the fact that I did it totally free form with no reference to go off of.

Then on Wednesday we had MLC in L'viv. So we woke up at 3:30 in the morning to make it to the train station for our 5 o'clock train. But at least we could lay down and sleep for the three-hour trip. So then we got to L'viv and went to the mission office for the missionary leadership council meeting. It's basically all the zone leaders and assistants to the president and sister training leaders (only like 8 people in total) who meet and talk about the mission and about what we should be doing better. A lot of the time was talking about the new #lighttheworld campaign for Christmas. We're trying to go pretty hard with it. Apparently, it only costs like 80 bucks to get an ad spot on a huge TV screen in center for an entire month, so we might look into that. The videos not available yet to the public but we watched it as missionaries. It's pretty good, as usual--just one unfortunate problem. There's a part where they show different boxes marked "donations" in lots of different languages and stuff. One of the languages is Russian, and the word for donation is пожертвование. I guess they didn't know how to pluralize Russian words, so they just decided to add an "s" to the end, пожертвованиеs. That letter doesn't even exist in Cyrillic, so that's kind of unfortunate. other than that though it's a great video.

So yeah, it was a pretty interesting meeting, and the mission resident's wife made us taco soup, and everyone sang me Happy Birthday, and one of the senior couples gave me a piece of Texas sheet cake, so all in all it was pretty cool. Afterwards we got some dinner in L'viv, then hopped on a train back to Ivano. We got back around 8 and had a little time, so we stopped by the L'viv chocolate cafe and got some drinkable melted chocolate to celebrate my birthday. 

The next day, we celebrated a bit more with the rest of the missionaries here. I realized I've never tried sushi in Ukraine, so I decided to go for it. We ended up going during happy hour, so we got a lot of sushi. It definitely wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting, and 2 dollars for more sushi than I could eat is not too bad, either.

The next big thing this week was a branch activity Saturday night. It was just a fireside with one of the families in the branch. Before I had even arrived in Ivano, one of them heard that I did science type shows before the mission, so he decided to do a science-themed night. He called it "gospel laboratory." So he ended up doing a couple demonstrations, and I ended up doing a couple things from my shows. I did the one with the big long bag you have to blow air into, and the one with the leaf blower that can hold the ball up in the air. I also did the thing with corn starch and water to make a non-Newtonian fluid. It was super fun and people seemed to actually really enjoy it. The idea was to do a science experiment, explain it,  and then relate it to some gospel topic. Turns out my Ukrainian is definitely not good enough to explain complex scientific topics, so we pretty much just went straight to the gospel parallel. It was a super fun activity, and it was cool to bring in some skills from before the mission. 

On Friday we did some service on for the branch president, but it'll be way better to explain it with pictures so I'll wait til I can get those uploaded. 

I do have a few pictures though, mostly from our pumpkin activity a few weeks ago. And a few from the science night, but I'll have some more and some videos a little bit later.

OK, have a great week!

Alec