Monday, December 11, 2017

Making the Most of Christmas in Ukraine

We've had a couple decent snow storms so far. Each time we get a few inches and then within a couple days its all melted. It seems like it's not actually all that cold, but just when it snows it snows so much that it ends up just sticking anyway.
   
The Skype call thing on Christmas Day will be tricky a little bit. It would be super cool if grandpa was there, do you know when he'll be there? We got invited somewhere for dinner Christmas night, so the latest I could do it is like 4 o'clock my time. So that would be like 9 o'clock over there. Idk, I could also do it the next day or the day before, but the timing might be weird and I don't know when grandpa will be there. Right now we'll plan on 4 o'clock my time Christmas day for now, but we can still change it.

As for housing for school next fall, I honestly have no idea. I don't really know how the whole process works. Definitely not on-campus. If the tap water is drinkable and the hot water is reliable, then it'll be a step up from what I've had here, so I'm not super picky. As for roommates, I really don't know. Ill ask a few of my friends who might still be around Chapel Hill next year and see what I can find. 

The branch here is good. It's by far the biggest one I've served in with about 45 people at church each week. There's some really cool members and 2 or 3 really great families, which are pretty hard to come by in the church in Ukraine. It's definitely not quite a fully-staffed branch, but there are presidents for most of the auxiliary organizations and stuff, so we do have a pretty good branch council (which basically consists of all the really active members.)

The whole mission is still on the 2-hour block. That'll probably be a permanent change cause if you ask my mission president, the whole church will be moving over to 2-hour blocks soon. 

As for my last week, the biggest thing was going to L'viv for Mission Leadership Council on Wednesday. There, we found out that we as zone leaders are going to be going down to Uzhhorod for exchanges this week (that's why I was buying train tickets). There's only one companionship in that city, with one Ukrainian who barely knows English and one new missionary who barely knows Ukrainian. So we're headed down there to make sure that everything is going well with them. I'm super excited to head back to Uzhhorod and see all the people down there, and if everything goes according to plan we should be there for a baptism on Saturday of a woman that I taught while I was there. so that should be pretty neat. It's about a 10-hour trip to get there, so that'll be half of our week. Should be a lot of fun.

Other than that, this past week we had another Christmas activity. We got permission to show It's a Wonderful Life. It ended up being the biggest hassle in the entire world, literally nothing worked. It took us forever just to find a way that we could legally buy it. And then forever to figure out a way to get subtitles to work with Amazon. And then all the technology to actually show it wouldn't work. First the computer didn't have an HDMI port, then it didn't even have a wi-fi adapter, and then the Amazon app on the TV didn't work, and then the projector couldn't connect with the computer. It was the biggest disaster ever, but we finally just played it on the computer. So, yeah, it was kind of a disaster, But it's a super good movie and people seemed to enjoy it so that's good.

Also, we had a little lesson with a recent convert. He works as a security guard at a museum, so he invited us to just stop by at his work. He showed us around the museum and made us take pictures of every little thing, so I attached a couple of those. I did get a cool pic with a classic Ukrainian instrument though, called a bandura. 


That's about it for the week. We finally got Ukrainian #lighttheworld calendars from Kev, only 9 days too late. so now we can start doing a bit more with that. This next week should be a lot of fun with exchanges in Uzhhorod. So hopefully I'll have some cool pics next week.

Alec

No comments:

Post a Comment