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