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!