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