Elder Alec Martschenko: 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.

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 . . .