So this is Christmas...

Good Morning Everyone! This is one interesting Christmas! This letter may be just a little shorter than previous letters ive written, but we'll see. Writing this is fun for me.

So to start off, just wanted to wish everyone a real Merry Christmas!! It's the greatest time to spend with your family (Apologies to mine and every other family with a missionary in the field... we are currently indisposed😅), and friends and to just go about in good feelings. If someone is sad or has bad feelings on christmas... fix it with them.

Alright so I've got two stories from this week. One comes from a festival in the town im serving in and the other comes from our ride back from Zone Conference ( Our big missionary meeting).

So... this festival... To start, we had no idea it was happening. We were walking by one of the streets leading to a big open square in the Center of the city and as we were walking by this street we hear the sounds of a concert. We had no idea what was going on, so we decided to check it out. What we stumbled into was a tree lighting ceremony of EPIC proportions. There was a legit concert stage set up, with Orthodox Priests walking around on it,Orthodox Santa Claus, child Dancers and of course Olaf. Because why not? It was quite the scene. We stayed long enough to watch the lighting of the tree and the Fire Dancers who had a performance quickly thereafter. Yes... Fire Dancers😐. It was quite something for sure. I've got video of some of the ceremony... not sure how to get it to y'all, but i've got it😅.

(This is Shelby, I've added the video)

The second thing, our ride back from Zone Conference. Basically what happened was that USUALLY when we hop on  a bus for the ride back it is jam packed with people. This was not the case for this ride. It was literally just me, my companion and one other guy. So naturally I talked to him. and LUCKY ME  he knew english😁👌! Not a lot but enough that we could communicate fully when we used both languages as required. Pretty fun stuff! I talked with him in RushLish for 3 and a half hours. Pretty crazy, but it gets crazier! 

A few days later we were street contacting and I saw him! We were in a completely different part of the city, so I got a little excited and ran over to say hi🖐. Unfortunately he was busy and was on his way to practice with his band, but just before he left to do that one of his friends came up and said hi and all of us started talking. Anyways, bus friend ran off and new guy and I were left to talk. Come to find out this guy is a less active that has been living in Poland! We invited him back to church and got his Facebook to keep in contact! We are getting pizza soon👍.

So yeah. that was wild. Blessings, blessings, christmas blessings! 

Other notable mentions for the week; 

I had liver for the first time in my life. That is a whole other story right there. Personally I give it a 5/10. not good, not bad. 

Got called Mafia on the street. Stood a little taller after that.

Participated in the most intense White Elephant gift exchange I may ever have the privilege of participating in. Pictures of what I received included.

Had a random guy walked into the church and ask "Is this the mormons? I didn't know there were Mormons in Cherkassy." Yeah we taught him the first lesson right there and he came to church the next Sunday and he wants to meet again. Minor miracle👌. Best part is he came because he heard a Protestant Minister slam us and wanted to know if what the dude said was true... It wasn't🙄. We had to explain and clear up some stuff, but he is really intrigued now so hopefully he keeps coming. He even used the english word convert lol "If this is good i want to be... convert..." (Italicised in Russian)

So yeah, that's about it, Have a Happy Christmas everyone, and remember John 3:16; 

16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.   

Love y'all, be safe, stay smart and dont do bad things!

1. White Elephant Gift

2. Kiev Temple as seen from a bus stop

3. A Christmas Carol (In Ukranian)

4. The tree lighting ceremony

5. Bunch of lads we see almost everyday

6. Christmas in Ukraine on a budget

7. My english class did sentence by sentence storytelling and I decided to draw it out. I CANNOT BEGIN to describe the amount of wild stories they came up with

From Shelby

Well, we survived Thanksgiving.  It was a little rough, simply because it felt weird without him here.  Times are changing, I can't expect them to be with me forever, so I suck it up and keep moving forward.

Jake did great for Thanksgiving.  He was excited to mix it up with additional Missionaries at the Thanksgiving conference they had...I think they kept the kids too busy to feel like they were missing anything.

As I've said before, when I read Jacobs emails, I don't think I see them the way other people do.  Take this last week for instance...

First-Why is he drinking something that "tastes like a CAMPFIRE"?  What is that thing?  Whats in it?  Did he even check before drinking it?  Did the other Missionaries drink it, or was he the guinea pig (because he LOVES being the guinea pig :/ )

Second- Air raid sirens? AIR RAID SIRENS!!??  And to this day they still have no idea why that happened.  What? THEY ARE ON THE BORDER OF RUSSIA!  He said the sirens went off for several minutes.  Their main protocol in this situation is to shelter in place and call to get further instructions...but NoBoDy AnSwErEd the phone.  Wait, what??  *sigh*

That's just a few examples of the things that go through my head.  Nonetheless, he is safe and doing pretty well.  He's a little sad to loose several companions.  There were five Missionaries including him serving in Cherkasy area (a 3-4 hour trip to get to the next closest group of Missionaries) and they lost three of them last week, leaving just Jacob and Elder Maximo from Brazil.  He and Elder Maximo are plugging along just fine, but it's a little lonelier with just the two of them.  Jacob was excited to tell me that they were promised some new sister Missionaries during the next transfer period.

So I attempted sending a Christmas package to him, but the whole situation is sketchy at best.  I may have to dish about it in another post later, but suffice it to say that I got the dang thing out, for the rock bottom price of $70 to ship roughly $40 worth of stuff.  Now the real test is to see if it actually gets there in time!  There are conflicting reports from other parents about how long their packages take to arrive, so I think I'm playing a bit of roulette (Russian Roulette!)  here in hoping it makes it by Christmas, and all I can do is cross my fingers and wait.

Say a prayer for Elder Coleman...He REALLY wants to make more progress in their missionary work, so if y'all could pray for him do be successful in his endeavors, he'd really appreciate it. 

Week 20- What do you do?

There were a few things that have happened recently that made me ask this question. For Instance: 

What do you do when you have no clue what's going on?

What do you do when you need to prepare English for a bunch of Ukrainians?

What do you do when you prepared a lesson for the wrong Vladimir?

What do you do when the air raid siren goes off in the city you reside in?

In this email I will be telling you what it is exactly that you do when faced with circumstances as wide in variety as these. Let's look at the notes

I have figured out that sometimes i really have no clue what is going on. This happened last Sunday at church. I was just sitting there minding my own business and doing minor translations for a New Zealander who doesn't speak russian that currently resides in our Branch. It came to a point were I realized it had been a few minutes and i had no clue what they were saying. The words sounded familiar, but i was just about as lost as my first day of the MTC. I then realized they were speaking Ukranian... I don't know ukrainian😓. So basically what you do is first make sure they are speaking a language you "know". After that step has been taken you sit back and wait for the language you "know" so that you can again continue the struggle to understand and learn😅👌. 

I figured out this week that i was going to be teaching the advanced class for our Free English courses. This means that i had to prepare games essentially. but i thought to myself "I don't want to play the games we always do... what's something new they can try..." and then this evil thought dawned on me. "I bet the don't know the Alphabet Aerobics" *Laughter emits from somewhere behind me* and I proceeded to print out and teach my class the alphabet aerobics as an exercise for their pronunciation... they wouldn't let me record them trying😂😂😂. Lesson to be learned here is if all else fails just do something that you think would be fun to see them try and go with it... I think this week we are gonna do and idioms comparison. We will see what the большая шишка has to say about it though. Go ahead translate it. I dare you.😐

So something funny about the names here is that basically everyone has like... the same 15 names. That's being generous. But anyways when we started to get a lot of lessons with Vladimirs it got a little mixed up and we prepared a lesson for someone that wasn't the person that showed up😓. So what do you do? Say a really good prayer and take what the Lord says into consideration. "Take no thought beforehand..." Turned out to be a pretty good lesson anyways, so something went right. Must've been a good prayer. 😅

To end off this list, what DO you do as a missionary when an air raid siren goes off unexpectedly and all you were doing at that particular moment was studying🤔🤔? You sit there (obviously) and wait for the second sound of the siren to really make sure it was, in fact, not a fluke. After this you simply yell across the apartment to the companion who has been here since march to see whats up. It went about like this. Me: "How long have you been here" Him: "7 months" Me: *Walking towards the window to see what i can see outside* "This ever happened before?" Him: *coming out of the bathroom (and going to wash his hands)* Nope... we should probably call somebody... Me: ... I mean... no ones running... 

We did end up calling some of our leaders and when none of them answered and we received no phone calls in return we figured all was good and that we could just go on with our day. We did have lessons we needed to teach anyways, so we didn't want to be late. What kind of missionary would that make us😅? 

So yeah, life lessons from Ukraine i guess. This week as actually successful despite trying to figure out "what to do". We've still got plenty of lessons to teach, people to bring closer to God, and english to teach to some eager(ish) Ukrananians👍😀👍!!

For my spiritual thought i will use the scriptures to back up some of the decisions that we made in these circumstances. It comes from Nephi 3:7 (Also, this is the youth theme for this year and if you haven't watched the Youth Theme video, now's the time) anyways here it is

7 And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them. 

Kind of a cop out, but it is still useful knowledge to have. When we go forth in righteousness intending to do the will of the lord, we will be able to see that through all things he will help us. Remember that the Lord wants us to succeed, he IS our Loving Heavenly Father. 

I hope everyone has an enjoyable week and don't forget to stay smart and remember who you are!

1. Buncha goofs, and then some youth from the branch

2. This drink, I kid you not, tasted life i was straight drinking the smell of a campfire... I hope you're confused because i sure was

3. When you are spear fishing all day and you don't even like fish

4. Another picture of that snow from last week. I didn't get sick of it, luckily, but the ice is getting to be quite the nuisance

Week19-Its That Time of Year!!

This last week was Thanksgiving which means that Christmas Music is ofiicially LEGAL!!!! I really like christmas music, so im pretty excited. For those of you that arent fans or can only take it in small doses... i still love you too... just dont push it. Jk jk. But really though. Its Christmas time so step up with the Christmas Spirit!!

Anywyas, this week we had a crazy full week of things to do and only some of that was in Cherkassy. My companionship had to go to Kiev and teade companions with the Zone Leaders (The companionship that serves in a leadership position over our area). It was super fun doing work in another area of the mission. We even had a really promising contact that lives in Zapporozhia, so hopefully she finds the missionaries there! 

I also got to help run english practice at their english practice, which was super awesome. We had ia round table discussion of what books should be made into movies. Super fun to hear all the ideas they had😅😂.

On thanksgiving we meet as a big ol Missionary group and chowed down on some food together. There was a also a couple who had just gotten married that came in and decided to celebrate with us. They gave us some of their wedding cake to, so big plus! 

As the Christmas season rolls around i would seriously hope everyone remebers the "Reason for the Season" so to speak. There is a really great new video put out by the Church called The Christ Child and it is really worth the watch. 

Love yall, sorry about the short letter, i had to go and kill my first companion today, so as one would expect i had to do a lot of traveling. See yall around!

1. Snow Oh yeah!!! ...ill prolly be sick of it by next email, but it was cool to have it land where i didnt have to travel to see it

2. Found a cool tank painted to match the Ukranian flag at a museum here

3. Shrek says 'sup

4. A wall in Cherkassy that has legit bullet holes from when WWII rolled through.

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Week 18-You may be confused. im in a rush

Hello hello hi hi. Hope everyone is doing well, this may be slightly shorter, for I have not much time today. I'll just share some updates... and maybe a story😁.

So to start, we have got some pretty cool friends we are teaching right now. Vitale, Igor and Ira. Ira has still got a baptisimal date, so keep rootin for her!!!👍👍 Igor has been coming to church consistently for 3 weeks now, and we have only known him for three weeks, ain't that just something! Vitale has been taking lessons for like 7-8 weeks now, he's just pluggin along. He is honestly just super cool, so we are just working hard on getting the ward to fellowship him now. 

That's about it for news on friends, now i suppose its simt for a story then yeah? Alright alright if you insist. Let's see then.... 

*Scene fads out to black and, with the effects of a mirage, slowly start to come back in and solidify into the shape of an apartment with seven missionaries preparing to participate in the evening ritual known as... SLAMMING*

(Now i feel that i should Preface this by saying slamming is a FOOD related ritual) to set this seen up, the only reason there were SEVEN😐 elders in an apartment this late at night was because we had interviews with the Mission President that day and we needed a place to sleep for the night before we set off for our city the next day. To continue...

I will leave you all in the dark on the specific details of SLAMMING, but basically we just consume unhealthy matter directly into our digestive system. Absolutely delicious👌👌. Unhealthy if done regularly, which was what the topic of conversation was about at the time. Whilst in the midst of this discussion on the physical repercussions of SLAMMING, one from them who are more seasoned than I remembers an Epistle.

Now when I say Epistle I mean something that matches in style and vocab to Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. This beautiful beast was written BY a missionary in our mission to another missionary in the mission, but wisdom can be taken from it and applied to all. It literally reads like the Bible, with verses, chapters, and links to other scripture for reference and cross reading for comprehension.😅😅

I don't know how best to describe that evening other than it devolved into reading these Epistles and examining them for knowledge, whilst doing the very thing that it sets forth guidelines to protect against. What a great night. On request I may provide more specific details on SLAMMIMG 😁

I've got just a scripture this week for us all this week. James 1:27

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

This scripture is neat because in my mind it does not apply just to believers. The main message here is basically saying, "What greater act is there than to serve those afflicted worse than you are. Its difficult but it's possible. As this christmas season rolls around I would encourage everyone (if you haven't already) to visit the Light the World page on ComeUntoChrist.org and just take a casual peruse around. I'm sure you'll find something that spikes your interest. 

1. We found a tank

2.I made fried rice and had bell peppers with it. I only made it fancy because it was easier to organize i promise

3.Mike Tython is everywhere. And Connor McGregor.  

4. This depicts an over exaggerated deadlifting statue