Transferring to Lutsk

So the big news from this past week is that I'm getting transferred out of Ivano-Frankivsk into Lutsk, a city north of L'viv, kinda towards Belarus. I've never been there before, but I've heard there's lots of great members, so it should be fun. Kinda weird to think that it will most likely be the last city that I serve in. 

Other than that, we had a few big stories from last week.

First of all, we had the cool opportunity to go down to Uzhhorod this past week. When Elder Martino came a couple weeks ago, he asked us to change the way we do our district meetings, so all of the members of the MLC had to go around and visit all the cities of the mission to show them how we want to do it. Somehow we got to go to the farthest away city (which is actually really cool, and I was super happy to go back one last time) and since we were only there for one meeting, we ended up spending more time traveling than we spent in Uzhhorod. It's about 11 hours one way. We got in late Tuesday afternoon, did the meeting Wednesday morning, and left  early Wednesday afternoon. In total, we were in Uzhhorod for 21 hours, but we were on trains for something like 23. Can't complain about laying down and looking out the window for all that time though. I also got to see some members from when I served down there, including the lady I baptized the last time I went there for one day exchanges. She was super glad to see us, so that was cool.

The branch also put on a big valentines' day activity on Saturday. We were kinda worried, cause nothing was planned out at all ahead of time, so we were kinda worried it would be a huge disaster. Luckily the branch president and his wife came in clutch and planned out a bunch of games and competitions and decorations and stuff and it was actually very successful. We started about 45 minutes late cause it was all so last minute...but that's ok, it gave everyone a chance to help set up.

On Friday for our missionary activity night, we decided to try to make spikeball. We basically put some screws in a hula hoop, bought a hammock (cause that's the only netting we could find) and stuck it on some water bottles. For how janky it looked, it actually worked pretty ok. The holes in the hammock were too big, so sometimes it would bounce in weird directions, but it definitely could have been a lot worse. I'll try to get some pics at some point. 

And then on Sunday I basically said bye to all of the members, so there's a few pictures of me with some of the members. There's one with a lady with a head covering who really really loved me cause of my Ukrainian last name. She's very pro-Ukraine and likes to tell me all about it. One thing that's pretty cool though is that she found some short biography in a book of an artist with the last name Marchenko. It's a pretty common name, but this guy was actually born in 1932 very close to where grandpa was born, in a city called Zaporizhia. I wonder if there's a connection there.

The last fun thing was Friday afternoon we set up to go visit a member at his workplace. He lives out in a quiet village and works as music teacher there. The little known fact about this guy is that he used to be the lead-guitarist for a pretty dang popular post-soviet rock band called Листопад. I've seen some YouTube videos and they're actually pretty legit. He doesn't do that anymore, but he still had the drum set and his instruments. My companion played the drums before his mission, so we went out to him to have a little jam session. I was pretty impressed with how good both of them actually were. The guy said that my companion is the best drummer he's ever seen in this entire city lol. It was probably the loudest noise I've heard in the past 18 months, but it was all pretty fun.

Ok, I'll attach a bunch of pictures, have fun going through all of them. There's a couple of the huge icicles that were on our house one night last week. Those things are super dangerous. There's also a pic of the cake some people gave us for helping out at their English school. It was pretty tasty.

Also speaking of the Olympics, I think I might have seen a Ukrainian Olympic athlete at the train station last week. I don't know what she was doing in Ukraine during the Olympics . . . but she certainly had all the gear and a whole entourage following her. Surprised to hear Shaun White is back winning medals. If I remember right he was gonna retire after not even medaling at the last Olympics.

To answer your question, there is Seminary here in most of the branches, as long as there are actually any seminary students. they try really hard to get all the different programs of the church running as best as they can, no matter how small the branch or how small the classes will be. Of course they don't meet at 6 in the morning and it's at most once a week, but they do the best they can. lots of times they just combine seminary and institute.

Ok have a good week,

Alec​