Saying Goodbye To Ukraine

Alec says his final goodbyes to the people and places of Ukraine this week.

The plan is I leave on Thursday afternoon from Lutsk to head to L'viv. And then I have a train from L'viv Friday morning at 6 to Kyiv. I'll get to Kyiv around noon and then chill there for a bit. I will have a chance to go to the temple, so that'll be super cool (especially since the one in NC is down.) And then I'll have an interview with the mission president Friday evening. Saturday morning, I'll leave at 3 am to go to the airport. So it's gonna be quite the journey home--from Thursday  afternoon til Saturday afternoon, including a 7 hour time difference. 

Vika has not gotten baptized, unfortunately. The plan was to do it this Wednesday so I could baptize her before I dipped out, but she promised her mom she would think about it a little more. She still wants to get baptized and she still will, just not before I leave. 

  

Last week you asked me some questions about my thoughts as I come to the end. There are certainly lots of things I'm going to miss. There are lots of people here that it will be hard to say goodbye to, lots of friends that I've made and lots of people that I've really come to care about. That's definitely going to be a hard part for sure. However, you do eventually get to the point where you've said bye to so many different people and different things that you get kinda numb to it, so I don't think too many of the saying goodbyes will be too hard. It will be weird to leave the missionary life, knowing I'll never go back to it. At the beginning you think it'll never end, but then when the end comes it's kind of hard to believe that it's actually happening. Obviously serving a mission is hard and I'm very excited to come home, but I will always be grateful for the things I've learned and the ways I've grown out here. It's hard to list specific things, but I know for sure that I've gained a stronger testimony of our Savior Jesus Christ and his plan for our lives. I'm grateful that I made the choice to come out here and I'll always be glad that I did. 

Catch you on the flippity flip,

Alec

PS: a few pics: ask me about them on Saturday if you want.

Keeping Busy To The End

Yeah, so it was actually a pretty crazy week over here in Lutsk. I don't have a ton of time today, so we'll see how much of it I can get to. If I don't have time to write everything then just remind me in a couple weeks and I'll tell you the stories in person.

Ok, so first of all, on Wednesday we got invited by one of our investigators (Ihor, super nice, really, really loves the bible) to go out in the forest hunting for mushrooms. So we took a bus out to his village, about an hour away, met all his extended family out in their tiny little village and went out in the woods looking for mushrooms. We were out there for at least two hours, and altogether we found like 3 mushrooms. We did, however, find a ton of wild berries - mostly blueberry-ish things and raspberry-ish things. By the way, Ukrainians all know like 100 different kinds of berries and they're always surprised when you don't know what berries they're talking about, even after they translate it. We just don't have as many berries in America. The berries were pretty tasty actually. There were also some apple trees out there and after trying about 10 different super sour unripe apple trees we found one that actually had somewhat tasty fruit and so we picked a lot of those as well. It's pretty crazy how you can just walk out into a forest and find a bunch of free food just chilling out there. Anyway, on the way there this investigator told us that he met his wife during one of his many stays in a psych hospital, so I definitely made sure to keep the knife he gave me to cut mushrooms secure in my hand at all times. Just kidding. He's pretty chill - it wasn't that sketch. Afterward his grandma made some good food for us and we went back to Lutsk. He invited us to come again the very next day, but we told him we were pretty busy.

Today for P-day we went and did something we've been wanting to do for a while. In the biggest shopping mall here, there's a super sweet roller skating rink. Well, in the L'viv mission, roller skating wasn't allowed. However, we're no longer in the L'viv mission. So we went to check it out. It's been a long time since I've roller bladed, But it was still pretty fun and I was even brave enough to go up a few ramps - one of the good things about less liability and laws and stuff. We went with Larisa, a recent convert we hang out with a lot and I got a sweet video of her biffing it pretty hard, lol.

Also today we got invited over to a member's house for a little Family Home Evening. We went there with a few of the members and an investigator and she taught us how to make cheburekiy (honestly I have no idea how to transliterate that). They're basically just meat pies, so you just make dough and then put meat inside and fry it. They're pretty ok. It was fun though. and then afterward I tried leading a little spiritual thought object lesson real quick. The idea was you're supposed to take an egg and hold it in a cupped hand and try to break it, without using your thumb. The idea is that it's not possible without your thumb but with your thumb it's possible and the thumb represents Jesus, etc. Well everyone tried breaking it without their thumb and no one could do it (it really doesn't work, you should try it) until I gave it to Larisa, and she somehow immediately was able to crush it. I had a bag to catch any yolk in case something went wrong, but the egg kinda exploded and yolk got everywhere, including on our investigator, lol. Even worse though, was that when I tried to break the egg using my thumb, I absolutely could not break it. It's supposed to be easy with your thumb but I could not do it, and no one else could either (until I let Larisa try, of course). So, yeah, that object lesson was super ruined, but it was funny so it's all good. 

The coolest part of this week was probably on Sunday when we had 4 girls (including 2 recent converts and 1 investigator) come back from the countrywide YSA conference that happened last week. They go pretty hard with these YSA conferences--basically rent out an entire ski resort out in the mountains and basically try to fit in all the different parts of EFY and youth conference and trek and all those things they do in America. So everyone really loves these conferences (I would too, they look super super cool) and everyone always comes back super excited from them and everything. So, essentially our sacrament meeting was these four girls telling about their experience at the conference and it was pretty neat. The last one to go was the investigator, Vika. She had been planning on getting baptized, but she told us last week that after talking with her mom they both kinda agreed that it's a little too early, and that she needs to wait a bit longer before making a decision like that. Well after the conference she got up and told the whole branch that she's gonna get baptized "right now" so that was pretty neat. Hopefully "right now" will be in the next week and a half before I head out to Kiev. 

So yeah that's probs enough for now. In a couple weeks don't forget to ask me about the wedding story and about the "20 dollars" story and I'll tell you what happened.

I have some pics of when we did an activity on the street "sign up to receive a free Book of Mormon"  and one where we made quiche.

Alec

NOTE: Pictures did not come through this week.

18 Hours Of Bus Rides

There's a pretty cool word in Ukrainian, байдуже. It doesn't translate super well into English, but the best translation is "indifferent". It basically just gives a sense of not-caring and a lack of concern. Anyway, it describes my attitude towards writing these emails pretty well at this point. So I'll try to make this as good as I can. I still like getting emails though...

To answer a couple questions:

The new mission president is very nice. President Rizley was a successful businessman, so he was somewhat serious (not necessarily strict, but serious) and Pres. Kumferman is more of a Rob Mikkelsen kinda type, very smiley and friendly. I can't say which kind is better for a mission president, but I'm happy with the mission presidents I've had.

The new apartment is nice, but it's not too much bigger. it's definitely much newer though so I'm happy with it. 

L'viv has almost a million people. It's a very old European-style city (really the only one like that in Ukraine) so there's no big sky scrapers or anything. It's a decently big tourist destination (there was a huge Jehovah's Witness convention with about 30,000 people there last week from all over the world) and it's definitely one of the hidden gems of Europe. We didn't really have much time to do anything fun besides go to a couple restaurants and do a bit of souvenir shopping. 

We did eat some of the cherries we picked. They're not super sweet, honestly, but I guess they were ok. The more of them you eat the more tolerant you get to the sourness

Last week was pretty busy. Real quick rundown of the days:

Tuesday: took a 4-hour bus to L'viv in the morning, met two American girls who have Ukrainian parents who were visiting Ukraine. Pretty weird to hear people with perfect American accents and Ukrainian accents, but they were super nice. Got to L'viv, had interviews with the new mission president, went out to dinner at the rib place I've been to tons of times before. and then took a bus back to Lutsk and got back around 11:30.

Wednesday: one of our only days in Lutsk, so we decided to throw a fourth of July party, just like I did last year. We bought some ground beef, cooked up some burgers, and baked some cookies with brown sugar. Invited some members and people from English practice, everyone seemed to enjoy it. It was funny watching our branch president and district president try to play basketball, cause neither of them really can.

Thursday: had a couple lessons with some investigators, and then took another 4 hour bus back to L'viv to head to mission conference. Went to McDonald's, saw the new mission president there getting  a McFlurry, lol. Did a little bit of souvenir shopping.

Friday: zone conference in L'viv. This time it was for sure my last one, so I had to say bye to everyone and also bear my final testimony. pretty sad to say goodbye, but I already did it like a month ago, so not that sad. Took another 4-hour bus ride back to Lutsk, got home at 11:30 again.

Saturday: the branch had a picnic activity in the park, so we were in the park for a lot of the day eating food and playing volleyball with some random people who showed up. I forgot how fun volleyball is when you play with people who actually kinda know how to play.

Sunday: church. New senior couple that just moved to L'viv from Kiev came to visit. Good thing they did cause two of our three talks bailed out and they were able to fill up the time introducing themselves to everyone. 

Today: went to the \Tunnel of Love (again). about an hour away by bus. (That's a total of 18 hours on buses this week.)

Anyway, it was a good week full of lots of stuff. Hope y'all have a good one!

Alec

Officially Now In The Kiev Mission

We are now officially part of the Ukraine Kyiv/Moldova Mission. Not as catchy of a name but I guess it's ok. Our new mission president is president Kumferman, a Russian professor from BYU-Idaho. I haven't met him yet, but I will tomorrow when he comes to L'viv for interviews. It doesn't seem like there's gonna be a whole lot of drastic changes, at least while I'm here. We're still allowed to wear backpacks (for now, at least) which is good news. One thing that did change is that our district here in Lutsk got combined with the one in the neighboring city (rivne) which means I won't be district leader anymore. We'll do our weekly district meetings over skype from now on, which is much better than trying to do a meeting like that with only two people.

There also seems to be different focuses in general in this new mission. Before there were big pushes to share brief, concise messages with people on the street and stuff to get them interested, but now they're not pushing towards that kinda stuff as much. Also the amount of numbers that we report (lessons, investigators, etc.) went from like 20 to 4, so that's definitely a big change I'm a supporter of. 

Tomorrow I'll meet President Kumfermann in L'viv and then on Friday we'll have a zone conference in L'viv with what was the former L'viv mission. So I assume we'll find out a lot more about what is supposed to change in the coming week. Either way though I'm not too worried about, it's not gonna affect me too much.

OK enough about the future, as for the past week, there is not a ton to report. We spent literally three entire days moving from our old apartment to the apartment that the sisters used to live in (it's way nicer). Missionaries had lived in the old apartment for like 6 years, so there was just so much junk piled up (old clothes, books, etc) and it took forever to sort through it all and throw stuff away and bring stuff to the church and find out what belonged to the mission and what belonged to the apartment and basically it took forever, but we finally got it done. We're all moved in to the new apartment and we even got it mostly organized so it all looks nice. Now we're just trying to keep it that way. The pictures I attached don't really do it justice, There's a lot more stuff than you can see in those pictures. but that was most of our week. 

We also made a trip out to a member that lives decently far away in the middle of nowhere (this is the second time I've been out to him, you might remember the guy who lived absolutely in the middle of nowhere). He asked us to help him pick his cherries, so for the 3rd time in less than a week we picked cherries for a member. It's not too bad, and it's always fun doing service for people. 

Since the sisters left we picked up a few of their investigators, one of which is supposed to get baptized on Saturday. She was supposed to talk to her mom on Saturday, So we're meeting with her tonight to see how that actually went. Hopefully things went well. 

We'll be in L'viv half of this week, Tuesday, Thursday night, and Friday, so it should be interesting. Let me know asap if there's any souvenirs you want me to pick up for y'all (btw if you noticed a big charge on my card that was me buying a new suit so don't get too worried--it's a pretty nice suit). 

Good to hear that Aunt Gail is doing better. We'll keep praying about her and hope she keeps making progress.

I saw the Book of Mormon promo video when I was looking for a Mormon Message for a lesson and decided to look through it on the off chance I could see Abbie. She was in there a ton actually. Pretty neat.

I don't know what Dominion is, but I've played so much uno here on my mission that I'm ready for just about anything more advanced than uno. For some reasons Ukrainians really like uno.

There is also tons of opportunities to eat pizza here for sure. Pretty much every single restaurant sells pizza. Most of it's not very good, but a lot of it is pretty decent. At the beginning of my mission I didn't really like the thin crust European style and I really missed American pizza, but now in the last couple months I've really come to like it and I'm super worried I'm gonna go back to America and miss this kind of pizza. For a homecoming party all I can think of is some chocolate chip cookies, Chick-Fil-a lemonade maybe, root beer, and for sure some mac and cheese.

  

Hope y'all have a great week!

Alec