Monday, December 18, 2017

A Quick Visit Back to Uzhhorod

Alec returns to Uzhhorod to help train new missionaries.
OK, as for stuff over here, we spent most of our week with our exchange in Uzhhorod. Mission leaders don't usually leave their cities to do exchanges, but the mission president made exchanges cause there's only two missionaries down there, both pretty new, who don't really understand each other cause one is Ukrainian and one is American. So we went down to Uzhhorod to help them out. It was super sweet to get to go back down there, it was kind of like a little vacation for me to go back to that city and see some people there. 

Christmas activity at the branch in Uzhhorod.
We left Thursday morning and got there in the afternoon. We helped them with their English practice (which they kind of need, it's hard to do English practice with only one English speaker). Then the next day we spent most of the time preparing for a Christmas activity we planned with them. We kinda wanted to do the same stuff we've done here in Ivano-Frankivsk, so we made some salt-dough ornaments and gingerbread houses. Not a ton of people came (a ton of people never come in Uzhhorod) but it was still a fun activity. 

The coolest part of the exchange was the next day, though. We just happened to be there the day of a baptism. It was the mother of a member that I had become good friends with when I was there, so when they found out that I was going to be there on that day, they asked me to baptize her, so that was neat. It ended up being an eventful baptism, with her almost fainting as she tried to walk out of the water, but in the end everything was OK and she was still smiling, after she took a few minutes to recover. That's the kind of thing that only happens in Uzhhorod. 

Alec performs another baptism in Uzhhorod.

 
I attached a ton of pictures from our time in Uzhhorod. It was a cool little break and a great chance to go back to a familiar place.

Elder Podvodov, an area 70, was at church yesterday and he had a meeting with us and the branch mission leader about helping missionary work in the branch.

Farewell to the sister missionaries in Ivano-Frankivsk.
This morning we went to the train station to say goodbye to one of our sister missionaries who is heading home. Unfortunately, since she's leaving mid-transfer, that means we won't have any sister missionaries in the city for the next month, which is super unfortunate. But also now that she's gone home, my MTC group is now officially the most senior missionaries in the mission, so that's neat.

Not super surprised that Abbie won Fear Factor at Universal Studios. If I could do it I'm sure she could, too.

For the Skype call I still don't know exactly. The thing is on Monday the branch is doing a caroling activity in the afternoon and then we got invited for a Christmas dinner with a couple of the families in the branch, so we don't really have a ton of time. And there's only one computer in the church so we have to coordinate it with all the other missionaries. I could do it the day before or the day after if that's better for y'all. Just let me know and I'll check my email in a few days and let you know the exact details. Idk, it's all the same to me, I'll just have to try to remember my Skype password. Google might be easier.

Hope y'all have a great week and a Merry Christmas!

Alec


P.S. The pics are all mixed up but hopefully you can sort it out. They're pretty much all from Uzhhorod, I think. There are a couple pics of the Christmas video up on the big screen at the L'viv train station, which is pretty neat. We've been going pretty hard with all that stuff so that's cool.

No comments:

Post a Comment