The Patriarch Visits

The big thing here this past week was the visit of the traveling patriarch. Since there's no stake here, there's no patriarch, so there's one patriarch called for pretty much the entire Europe East Area, and he just visits different places every couple years or so. His name is Elder Neuschwander. He was in the presidency of the seventy for a while and he was the president of the Europe East Area two different times, so he knows this area pretty well. He was also a mission president in Vienna in the late 80s and early 90s, so he was actually the one who first got missionaries into the former Soviet Union. So basically he's kinda a big deal so it was cool to get to talk to him for a little bit while he was here in Lutsk, especially since he only visited two cities, L'viv and Lutsk. 

We had to do a good bit of work getting ready for him to come though. They essentially wanted us to transform the church building into a nice, cozy home, so we had to move a bunch of furniture and paintings and carpet and buy flowers and clean super well to make sure everything looked nice and inviting. It ended up looking pretty good, and all the members that came to get their patriarchal blessings seemed to enjoy it. 

One of the people that came was actually the member from Rivne who I taught and baptized my first couple transfers in Ukraine, so that was pretty neat to talk to him and to see him again. I attached a picture of him (above) if you're interested.

Other than that, on Monday last week, we took a tour of some catacombs beneath a super old church here. They didn't allow any pictures, but I snagged a couple anyway... oops. It was actually super cool, a good amount of skeletons and just crazy to think that people were building stuff like that under ground hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Probably one of the cooler things I've done. I also went second-hand shopping last week, got some Levi's and a pair of dockers for $3, not too bad.

On Saturday, as we were walking out of the church building, we heard a screech and super loud crash noise. We ran out to the street and there was a pretty gnarly car accident, right in front of the church. We heard a little girl crying, which was pretty scary at first but no one was hurt, I think she was just scared. You can read more about it here if you want, lol.

https://www.volynnews.com/news/society/u-lutsku-ne-rozmynulysia-dvi-avtivky-na-yevrobliakhakh-foto/

We'll definitely have to be more careful walking through that intersection every single day from now on.

Yesterday was some big holiday celebrating the Pentecost, I guess. We saw tons of people this whole past week carrying around what looks like long green onions, and we had no idea why. It's a super weird feeling when the entire city seems to be in on some big secret or everyone is invited to some party but you're not invited. It's just weird to see literally everyone do something and have no idea why. Anyway we found out that it's basically a celebration of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem before the Crucifixion when people put palm leaves down on the ground. Since there's no palm trees here, they just use these green onion things instead. Real cool and all, I just don't think that Ukrainians know their bible chronology very well. I got a pic of a driveway with these things laid out on them.

That's about it from this past week, I've got some pics of a chalk drawing we did in center . . .

. . . and a few pics from a village we spent 2 hours walking through trying to find a less active member only to realize we had the wrong address. And maybe some other stuff.

Have a good week!

Rough Week (Too Much Rain, No Georgian Food)

Church on Sunday was not too bad yesterday. I taught a lesson, but luckily I didn't have to give a talk. I thought I might have to when the first two speakers left us with a half hour left, but our closing speaker came in clutch and took up the rest of the time. But all in all, it was a fairly normal Sunday, just lots of other branch business to do. We have the traveling Patriarch coming this week, so we had to get everything ready for that with interviews and printing recommends and scheduling everything. Lots of fun.

Other than that, this week was just a whole lot of rain. So that was unfortunate. And to make matters worse, I had to go a whole week without any Georgian food because my favorite Georgian restaurant is still closed. Rough week.

On Tuesday, for our activity night, we did a sweet egg drop activity. We basically just gave the people that came a bunch of trash and had them build things to protect their eggs when we dropped them off a flight of stairs. It was pretty fun and it reminded me a lot of doing science camps with Morehead, haha.

On Monday, a former missionary, Elder Von Niederhausern, stopped by with his parents. He was in Rivne when I first got to Ukraine and he's a super nice guy, so it was good to see him. We just went to dinner and talked for a bit, but it was fun.

We also did a bit of service Monday night, digging up dirt behind this one member's apartment building. Ukrainians will use any little bit of land they can find to plant potatoes. So we were basically just digging up the lawn by her building so she could plant potatoes there. It was actually pretty hard work, the dirt was rock hard. 

That's about it for last week, hopefully the weather will be better this week and more exciting stuff will happen. Also I got no pics for you, sorry, just this one with the former elder Von Niederhausern (at top).

Hope you have a great week!

Alec

Happy Mother's Day!

Well yeah we just talked so I don't really have a lot to say, haha. The biggest things from this past week were probably the zone leaders coming here for exchanges on Thursday and then President Rizley coming Saturday and the branch conference on Sunday. So we had lots of visitors this week.

For exchanges on Thursday, mostly all we did was visit that investigator I told you about with all the orthodox icons on her walls. We brought Larisa (the girl that said hi during the Skype call) as a member present, not really cause we wanted help on the lesson, but just cause this lady is pretty interesting and has a pretty interesting decorating scheme. Last time, she told us that God can't hear our prayers because there are too many radio waves going around in the atmosphere, and this time she told us that the body of Christ isn't the bread that you partake of as part of the sacrament, but it's the actual grain, like wheat and stuff like that. She's pretty interesting. Hopefully we'll get some more investigators soon.

Of course, for exchanges we also went to the best restaurant in town (except the Georgian place that is closing down) called Show Basilik. And then we'll be going there again today cause a RM is coming back to visit with his family and he wants to go there. I'm definitely gonna miss being able to afford eating out whenever I want. I've learned how to cook ok, but it's just soo much more convenient to go out to restaurants.

And then we had the branch conference on Sunday. Which went pretty badly, but all in all not quite as badly as it could have gone. There was some confusion with the schedule of the sacrament meeting and a very nervous branch president trying to give a talk that ended up going a little too long, but at the end of the day it all worked out just fine. One of the members of the district presidency just didn't show up for some reason, and he was supposed to be leading the entire second hour, so that was kinda unfortunate. Luckily President Rizley was there and he was able to step in and teach something good about ministering.

But yeah, that's about it for this week honestly, I didn't take any pictures either so here's some random pictures from my companion from the past transfer that I don't think you've seen yet, so have fun!

It was great to see y'all yesterday. Tell Evan I missed him and I hope you had a great Mother's Day!

Alec​

Return to the Tunnel of Love

This week we had a pretty down week actually, lots of stuff fell through, but we did have a sweet branch activity on Saturday. We just had a little sports day out in the park, but it was well-attended and fun. Of course everyone wanted to play soccer, but we also played a little spikeball and threw a football around, too. The weirdest thing was the fact that, when we got there, there were a ton of people out disc golfing with portable disc golf baskets. That was the first time I've ever seen disc golf in Ukraine, so we went up and talked to them and exchanged numbers to hopefully be able to play with them sometime. Today for p-day, we went to the Tunnel of Love. You might remember it from a couple winters ago when I went there once or twice. It's an old railroad with a bunch of trees that grow up and over the railroad. It looks pretty cool and you might have seen pics of it on Pinterest or Instagram. I've been twice before, but both of those times were in the winter and it's much, much cooler when there are leaves on the trees.  

We had to take a bus to get there, but we really didn't know where to go, so we kinda had to ask around. One very nice lady told us where to go, and then when she found out we were from America she invited us to come see her children's art school that she runs. She offered us tea and cookies and took a bunch of pictures of the Americans that came to visit them, haha. It's super interesting how differently we get treated out in the small towns than we do in the big cities when people find out that we're Americans. She even gave us painted Easter eggs to take home. After that we met up with the missionaries from Rivne and went to the Tunnel of Love. We got some sweet pictures, I hope you enjoy them cause each of those pictures probably cost me about a pint of blood. The mosquitoes were pretty unreal. We made some Ukrainian barbecue, called "shashlyk" over a fire we built. It was pretty tasty, but the best part was that the smoke kept away the mosquitoes. 

Glad to hear that everyone is doing well. Grandpa's got a nice beard going there. I was playing a good game of chess btw, but then I made a pretty dumb move and he's got me in a pretty tough spot now. I got some ok pictures but it was definitely one of those times I wish I had a nicer camera, haha. Have a good one and see you on Sunday.

 Alec