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