Week 37

So, as light hearted as it was, i hope you read last week's email so you can appreciate what i am going to tell you today....

to fill in some minor details about our experience with vera nickolaevna, after we helped her find her way home to dome shyseva10a, and after her son came home and i had the most awkward moment of my mission looking up at him while cleaning his bathroom floor when he came home from work, he said he would show us where dome shyseva 8A was, the dome we had been looking for from the beginning. Seriously, this dome is impossible to find by oneself, hidden way far back and sideways, so anyway, we were glad for the help, stopped by the less active who was not to excited to hear from us, and went home.

A few days later we received a referral that had been passed through a few people to finally get to us- to go see a lubov and maria who live in no other dome than shyseva 8A. Wow. that sounds familiar and we now exactly where it is...cool, of all the domes in center Kiev they live in that one. If you don't have time to read the rest of this email, long story short....we finally met with these two woman have become our new investigators and where a referral from their sister who lives in a city outside of Kiev and was baptized a year ago and just went through the temple for the first time (she gave the name and address of her family living her to someone at the temple and it finally got to us)...so to pull it all back around, we had to have that crazy experience with vera in her bathroom so we could be shown where this dome shyseva 8A is so that we could easily find it to contact this referral. yay.

this week was the third week of the transfer which means sisters exchanges...i was supposed to go to another area but my companion needed a break from the area so i let her go and i stayed in center. i was with a sister who just got here three weeks ago from Russia. She was originally called to the Chezk Republic but couldn't get a visa there nor to America to go to the mtc so she was reassigned to our mission and just showed up and started working. She is really awesome. But while i was with her i realized i am the most boring companion, but that's okay, we got a lot of work done. and one thing we did was stop by sheseva 8a, and they were miraculously home and miraculously let us in...just to give you an idea of 'how' we did that, ill tell you. Each dome has anywhere from 60-500 apts in it, so you stand outside the building, and can call up to the apt you want and they talk to you through the intercom and then they can buzz you in. So we just rang her apt, "Hi! is this lubov? Hi, we are missionaries from the church of Jesus Christ, your friend, larissa, (we didn't know it was her sister at the time) wanted us to stop by and share with you what we believe. can we come up and meet with you?" She said, 'uh, okay' buzzzzz....i just looked at my companion and said, wow. that never happens. (for example on another occasion on our exchange we walked around this neighborhood to find the dome of a less active to stop by and when we found it the man yelled through the intercom..."don't bother us! go home!"...) so we went us, met this wonderful family, the mother and bobyshka sat in our lesson, and we gave a first lesson. it was awesome because she actually had questions for us about what her sister had told her. We kinda just said the greatest blessing of this gospel is the knowledge and peace you can find. and your sister wants to share with you that what she has found. She said it was a miracle that she was even home that night and was so grateful she was.

General conference-yes, awesome. watched everything on sat and sun in Russian. here they had one room showing it in Ukrainian, another in Russian. on Saturday we had the option to go watch it in English, but we had a potential lesson set up and i flat out told my companion (who prefers watching it in English) that if i watched it in English i would probably cry the whole time because it would make me homesick. I still cried listening in Russian when the choir would sing because they don't translate over the hymns.

So, i have to think about this...its october...10ish. wow. everyone, have a wonderful week...i hope you all know that prayers are answered and heavenly father does bless us for that which we have done in His name.

i love you all!

sister little