"Looking Forward To Spring"

So the L'viv and Kiev missions will officially combine on the first of July, as far as I understand, which is also when my mission president goes home. We don't really know how it's all going to work out just yet, we just know they're gonna start moving some of the back-end stuff over earlier. But other than that, as far as I know nothing too big should be changing before the missions actually combine. I'm sure we'll find out more and more over the coming weeks. Since I'm not a big dog in a big leadership position I'm definitely a bit more out of the loop than I was the last few transfers. 

The weather here got pretty cold the past week or so. The coldest I saw was -16 (idk what that is in Fahrenheit, but it sounds a lot colder in Celsius.) We just barely got into booger-freezing weather. It's pretty cold, but at least we only had to deal with it for one week this year, instead of 3 months like last year. I think it's supposed to start warming up again in the next week or so, and after that we should be home free. I'm looking forward to spring, too, for sure, best time of year in Ukraine. 

Other than the cold weather this past week, not a ton happened, mostly cause my companion was sick for a lot of it, so we spent a good bit of time at home. I thought I had avoided it, but I woke up this morning with a sore throat . . . hopefully it just stops there and it doesn't get any worse for me, though. 

One thing I realized this week is that my English has gotten a lot worse than I remember. Or maybe the website I was looking at to prep for English practice was wrong. If you ask someone what they do on the weekends, and they say "I watch TV," is it correct to explain what he said by saying "He said he watches TV" or do you have to put it in the past tense "He said he watched TV." Idk honestly, I thought it was the first one but now it's got me all tripped up and I have no idea. English is pretty hard, so thanks for putting up with my weird English in these emails. 

Other things that happened: 

We visited a lonely member and brought him some pizza. He was grateful, but he asked us not to do that anymore cause we're rich Americans and so it would be better if we spent our money on ourselves. Not sure about the logic there, so we'll probably keep doing it.

I saw a security guard at a grocery store here repping some sweet Carolina blue 23 Jordans. When I went to check out he came up and talked to us and said he noticed me admiring his shoes.

One of the youth invited us to go visit another one of the youth who has been sick recently. When we got there, we couldn't remember their apartment number. To get into most apartment buildings you have to dial their apartment number to have them let you in. I forget what that's called in English - a telecom? So we just dialed a random number and then the kid said we were there to deliver water, and the random person let us in lol. He thought it was pretty funny. I felt like we were kinda ding dong ditching, but oh well, it's for a good cause.

Speaking of water delivery, one of the only bad things about our apartment is that there's no water filter. So, we have to have jugs of water delivered to our apartment. Super inconvenient when you run out or when you have to wait in the apartment for the 3-hour delivery window. But, at least we don't have to worry about changing out dirty filters.

We also met with a guy who wanted to talk to us about psychology - in really broken English. We thought it would be an easy topic to turn to a gospel discussion, but he ended up just giving us an hour-long lecture about introverts and extroverts and other different dichotomies and stuff like that. Kinda interesting, but it just made me feel bad for all the people who had to listen to my broken Ukrainian for the first several months I was here. Super hard to pay attention. 

You asked in your last email about my mission president not speaking Ukrainian. It causes some challenges every once in a while, but I think there's lots of places all around the world where the mission presidents don't know the local languages. Especially in places where the church is small. There just isn't really anyone that speaks Ukrainian who could be a mission president, there's barely enough Ukrainians to fill all the priesthood callings here in Ukraine. It's hard to take them out of their home wards/branches to serve other places. They do have Russian speaking mission presidents in the other two missions here, but that's about it. Hopefully in 30-40 years there will be Ukrainian speakers who can serve as mission presidents. They also don't encourage mission presidents to study the languages, I guess it takes a lot of time and I think people would take them a lot less seriously if they were struggling to speak Ukrainian than they would when they're speaking through a translator.

Thank you for the update on the current events, btw. I definitely feel pretty disconnected from the world, which is kinda nice sometimes (kinda) but I definitely appreciate having some idea of what's going on over there. So I always appreciate how you fill me in on those things.

  

My companion right now is from California. He's like 20 I think, almost 21. He's pretty chill, he was an amateur rapper before his mission lol, but he also was a very serious violin player. He bought a restored violin in L'viv from the 1600s a few weeks ago and so he's been looking for opportunities to play it during sacrament meeting or other things like that. Today we're trying to go do an escape room kinda thing for p-day. Basically we do whatever we can to have fun haha, there's not a ton of options really.

  

Anyway love you and hope you have a good week!  

Alec