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
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