Week 41

Hey, i don't have much time this week, but i wanted to make sure i write to tell you all thank you for the cards, warm wishes, and beautiful thoughts!!! Having a birthday on a mission is really tough, but you helped make it so much better :) i hope you all have a wonderful thanksgiving with friends and family...and really count your blessings. here and im sure there, a lot of lessons have been on "preparing for the second coming" "the second coming" "preparing for the millennium" and the "millennium" and talk about how repetition really makes you think about all of this, the whole purpose of life and the gospel. i am so grateful i have the knowledge that i have about my heavenly father, about my role and purpose on this earth and the importance of families and service. I know Heavenly Father lives. I know He loves us. And i know He will always be there for me.

i love you all ! miss you like crazy!!!

sister little

Dear family and friends...

yep, its the time of year where it is just plain cold and dark, haven't seen the sun for awhile. but, the Lord's work still moves forward!!

last Monday night i got a phone call from the elders in the next district over-"hey, sister little! do you remember a 'valery' you met at the temple awhile ago, you and sister zanger sat him down and had a lesson with him and gave him a book of Mormon right there in the waiting room at the temple?" yes. "well, he is getting baptized! tomorrow! and he still remembers that meeting and what it meant for him and he want you to be at the baptism and say the closing prayer!" Okay! no problem. wow. that's so cool to see the result of such a small coincidence. I think i wrote a little bit about it, but about three months ago when i was with sister zanger we were having weekly planning on a Friday and realized the temple would be closed for two weeks, so we called president to get permission to go the next day, Saturday morning (missionaries aren't really allowed in the temple on Saturdays because its a big day for people of other countries to come in)...anyway, he said, "sure, go. if you think it will help you get more baptisms" ha. i could sense a slight bit of sarcasm in his voice when he said that, but we went anyway...and look. Ha! a baptism!! We met valery as we were about to leave the temple, had a lesson with him right there with a temple worker with us, all in white. it was way cool. normally i wouldn't give a copy of the book of Mormon to someone right when i first meet a person, but in that moment i felt inspired to give him one, but with my small doubt i told him, "im not going to give you this book if you're not going to read it. Are you going to read it? Promise?"...and we passed his name and phone number to the elders in his area and went on our way. Surprise! baptism! very cool.

And the wedding...

so its really cool ive been noticing how the work and needs of the wards change just slightly with transfers, different missionaries etc. The work has been slow in these wards, but we were blessed to have a girl move into the ward boundaries who i really saw as someone who needed our attention. The story starts with paul who got baptized in Odessa almost a year ago. he met yulia on line, moved to donetsk to help her find the church, she also got baptized, and the next day moved here to Kiev. When i heard this a couple weeks ago and met here, i really had a feeling of duty to make sure she gets situated in the ward, has the lessons again, and most importantly has friends at church. Agree? how precious she is not to get lost at this moment. Well we finally had a meeting with her on last Sunday to just answer any questions in general she had about the church. Her biggest question: When and where can i get a temple recommend? Yes!!! she gets it too!! her boyfriend, Paul, has done a great job in helping her understand the gospel. She also slightly mentioned that they are officially getting married. on Thursday. this Thursday? yes. its not going to be a big deal she said, because they don't have any money and no family or friends really here. UUUMMM. that's no excuse. Can someone say cultural event? time to use my party girl talents and help our little yulia have the best day ever. So here in Ukraine, in order to be officially married you have to sign "zaks" which everyone has to do even if they are having a marriage ceremony. So we called yulia the night before, got ourselves invited to zaks, rounded up some elders from district who knew paul from Odessa and went to zaks on Thursday. we decoupage a picture frame for her, made her brownies, and bought her flowers. And i am so grateful we did. besides missionaries, only her brother and his wife came to support her on this beautiful day, oh and one of pauls friends from Odessa. She was so happy, so beautiful, so grateful that we were there to help her celebrate. I promise we didn't take up too much proselyting time by doing this. but i think it was definitely a good use of time-to support this recent convert and show her that missionaries and members of the church can be a big support. Its was a neat experience, funny though. there is the huge hall, they walk down the aisle, and sign the paper, kiss and then they are married. interesting. Yulia already knows the exact date next year when they can be sealed, so we are going to work with her to keep her strong and motivated and enveloped in the ward and in the gospel. We can be a blessing to her and she is a blessing to us-someone to serve and pray for. this yesterday me and my companion fasted to help the sisters in our ward be more open with us so that we can know how we can serve them better.

another miracle in these cold times is that a young girl-late twenties found her way back to church after being inactive for about 5 years. i never would have known if i didn't open my mouth and talk with her. its neat because we have been working a lot to follow up with a list of less actives to try to meet with them to no avail...but look. a blessing. She is also someone we can work with and pray for while we are serving in this area. She said she just felt like it was time to come back to church. probably marry someone in the church. good idea. We have talked with our priesthood leaders a little more lately about our work, especially information we have found on the less actives, and while they are ever appreciative of our contribution, one bishop told us nothing big will change until the members of these wards shows this much interest and do this work themselves. fair enough. so he asked that we also helped the members get excited about visiting their less actives and doing visiting teaching.

I am trying to realized each day the blessings and little miracles in our work-that a bus came right away while we were waiting, or that we were at the right place at the right time in order to talk to someone who needed help. I need to stop seeing everything as a coincidence and realize and recognize the lords hand in everything.

yes! my birthday is in two days!! the office sister was in our ward yesterday and said, "sister little, you have a birthday coming up!" how do you know? i asked, "because your mailbox is overflowing with mail!!" she said she is going to try to see if she can get my mail to me by Wednesday, but if not, ill just get it a little late. we'll see..Thank you in advance for the love and support....its a necessary pick me up as I work through these middle months of my mission and just the beginning to get to know the definition of cold :)

love you,

sister little

ps...pictures...oh yeah so we show up to the baptism..and who is going to baptize him? oh president klebingat. hah. so cool, he's been working with him a lot-has been on a lot of lessons with him, so cool.

next-the 'wedding'-more like the big whooped di doo about signing the official paper.

next-we did the armor of god lesson with a less active family and dressed up their little boy-so cute!!

Week 40

wow, a lot to report this week. We had our two ward activities, and it was stake conference-the broadcasted kind, so i guess 'regional conference' for all of eastern Europe. i'll talk about our activities first:

first, our cultural night for shevchenkivsky ward. a pretty good show-15 people-actually pretty bad, but like ive said, we're working on reminding the members that coming to church for three hours on Sunday and forgetting about everything else is not living the gospel....anyway. it was great-utah, vegas, latvia and georgia. So cool. i talked about Vegas and still, everyone even this far away from America thinks "casino' when they hear Vegas and most people have seen or heard of the movie oceans eleven. so i figured a lot of people had a good idea of what Vegas is about. so as i talked about Vegas i casually talked about some of the temptations there-like"advertisements for girls and every kind of gambling game to steal your money" but that members still live and thrive there because we focus our sights on the temple- i showed a picture of the temple all lit up in the foreground with the strip in the background. my spiritual thought attached to it was about how living in Vegas is a very real type of Lehi's dream. i showed the picture from the liahona and compared it to the picture of Vegas i showed. Really good thought i thought....but as i was talking i saw on everyone's faces how casually i talked about "advertisements for girls and gambling away money"...they were shocked. all the sudden it wasn't cool to be from Vegas. i sat and thought about it afterwards...maybe i over exaggerated. maybe Vegas isn't that bad, let me think about it....No, yep, its definitely that bad. maybe even worse. wow, i thought. Vegas is a disgusting place. what a reality check of what the world is coming to. but anyway, the rest of the activity was great...sister pliha showed off Latvia and the Georgian missionary did some knife dancing for us-if i learned anything its that everyone in Georgia does everything with a knife. (Georgia the country)

okay, Thursday night, our fireside with the president. we were all a little nervous, but excited. we announced it big time on Sunday, made flyers, everything.....it was supposed to start at o'clock and at 10 minutes before 7 there were...ehem. 3 people there. and then president walks in. yep three people from our entire ward to listen to the mission president. I was listening to him greet the people there. one Ukrainian women said, "oh, we're just Ukrainian! no big deal! more people will come later...you know its just our culture! when we say we start at 7 it means we really start at 7:30" president didn't think that was very funny and replied, "well, that may be Ukrainian culture, but im from Germany and when we say we start at 7, we start at 7"....oh my. not looking good. sister pliha and i ran upstairs to grab some people from institute to ditch class and come to our fireside so it wouldn't look as bad-we got another 4 people (there were only 5 up there)...but oh well, time to start. 10 people in the audience. (ill just quickly say by the end there were a total of about 20 that came.) each of us missionaries gave a short talk and testimony about different aspects of missionary work-i closed with my miracle story of irina when we thought she wouldn't call up back after her trip to Greece, but did AND wanted to get baptized-we later found out because she had been in Greece with a member of the church...blah blah blah, you remember, so that members are the best missionaries, best influence on people. then us four missionaries had to the musical number because our girl who we wanted to do it fell through. we had practiced a few times-we'll bring the world his truth-acapella in ukrainian. not to bad. We get up to sing it and at the start of the second line one as we're singing of the elders just loses it and cannot stop laughing. we sounded that bad. then the other elder loses it. then i lose it. and luckily my companion, who actually has some singing talent, keeps the song going and at most of the times in the song is the only one singing because the three of us can't keep it together....we can't stop laughing. so embarrassing. I look back once to see what president klibingat is doing...He has his iphone out and video recording us, laughing too. Oh my gosh. awful. then president was the concluding speaking after that. luckily he had a sense of humor about it all...said he was going to send this out in a video to everyone after the meeting and that it is written in the scriptures that where there is two or three people that is enough for the spirit to be there, so we have enough people in our meeting to feel the spirit. He talked about the joy we should have in the gospel and the success we are having in the mission. the stake president was even there the last little bit (i count that as success if you can get the stk pres there...) anyway. good meeting. after the meeting the stk president asked our mission president for special permission to have us at the adult session of stk conference to meet some of his 'friends'-referrals. he said we could. Awesome! i didn't realize what this would really mean for me....

Saturday night was the adult session for the whole stake. since the Sunday session was going to be a broadcast, all the wards were meeting at their own buildings so i wouldn't be able (like i thought) to see everyone from my old wards....but the Saturday night session....yep that was for all the adults in the stake. in one place. OH MY GOSH! it was like being in the receiving line of a wedding reception watching all these people from my old wards come in! i even had to resist a few hugs from people. BUT the best....IN walks in my Aliona!!! who got baptized a few weeks ago and i didn't go to the baptism because i didn't know...."Leeetel!!!!! my sunshine!!!!" oh my gosh!! i couldn't believe i got to see her again!!! i asked her how things were going.."SO wonderful!! i went to the temple for the first time today to do baptism for vladim's grandparents" (vladim is the dentist/boyfriend)....she said she's working on her own family history to get it their work done...OH my Gosh! She gets it!! she gets it! she went to the temple!! oh may gosh, it was an amazing experience...amazing feelings of reunion. Wow. i just sat in that meeting overwhelmed with happiness and love for these people. its come. love for the Ukrainian people. and a glimpse of what the kingdom of heaven is supposed to feel like. so much more of the eternal perspective is being opened to me. This is the kind of joy we are to have with our families. i can't wait.

Sunday's broadcast was great. in Ukrainian, but it was okay for me. heard from elder Clayton (area 70 for this area), elder Oaks, sister Barbara Thompson, and Pres Uchtdorf. all mentioned tithing. a lot about getting the youth out on missions. getting married. living the gospel. activating and still loving the less actives. its was great.

So. joy is service. im sure more to come. i love you all and miss you so much!!!

sister little

here are pictures-my Halloween costume and then us four missionaries who put together the fireside and can't sing for the life of us. we made this collage to put with referral cards to put in our church foyer.

Week 39

Dear family and friends,

this week was full of just plain work and then some good times at the end of it. We helped out with a ward party on Saturday night, about 30 people came (sad, but its a good start...they want to have another one in two weeks because the ones that were there had so much fun)...we helped organized a couple games. the best was where you have a partner and one person is the arms for the other person. our theme was kinda 'unity' in a companionship, so you had to the morning tasks of a missionary-eat breakfast, brush teeth, hair/tie/put on a nametag, and then go around the room and contact (the arms just flip open the book of Mormon to a random page and the person has to make up a spiritual thought about something there) it was really fun. then Sunday we made a good mark in the wards-just getting the members to notice and appreciate us. we did a lesson in relief society in one ward and the next ward us four missionaries talked in sacrament meeting. i had no idea what to say, let alone in Russian, but i just let the spirit guide and even i was blown away but what i said...i'll just share a few things that i said that really are true and dear to me.

so i was talking with a recent convert, and she asked me what i thought "salvation" was...well, living with god again, he's perfect, we're not, so there is no way we can live with him, so somehow the atonement can make up the difference so that we can. okay, she said, but for me, she asked, what is the first step to salvation. hmm. For me it is and it was really realizing who God is, who i am, and where i fit in this plan. I am His daughter. he loves me. That's the first thing to realize. I can tell you that when you really feel that love, you know. and everything else just follows. The desire to study more comes. the desire to actually keep the commandments comes. the energy to endure to the 'end' comes....but there really is no end. we find the eternal happiness here and now and enjoy it for eternity. That's what happened to me, and i am so grateful for my knowledge and testimony of that.

secondly, this passed week my companion and i were contacting people on the street to find some new people. One woman i approached, asked her if she ever heard of the book of Mormon...she responded, in English. Usually when this happens, i get pretty frustrated, especially because after i approach someone in Russian and they respond "no, thank you" in English and walk away, kinda insulting. but this time when this woman responded in English, i didn't feel frustrated, i saw it as a great opportunity to testify in English. wow testify in English!! i can say whatever i want!!! finally! but as i talked with her about the gospel, i found myself taking the words i would have said in Russian and translating them back into English. so my testimony was very simple, i even struggled a little bit to find the words. interesting. I told the members i share this experience with them so they know that as missionaries here, we our testimonies and opportunities to feel the spirit are happening in their language-Russian and Ukrainian. so my growing testimony here is in Russian. We are here growing with them. its very interesting. but so neat. i told them i am so grateful that i do understand some of their language so that their testimonies can help build mine. really neat.

side note...i can barely pray now in English. i almost laugh with embarrassment during the prayer because i have no idea how to pray in English. its easier at this point to talk spiritual in Russian. but, i guess that's a good sign :)

i love you all, continue with faith, patience, love and joy!

Sister little

pics from our activity....

:)

Week 38

Wow, i just opened the newsletter from president this week and each week he includes the pictures of the baptisms that occurred this week....just one this week. i scroll down to see the picture and wait...I KNOW HER!!! another one of my lovelies from my old area was baptized yesterday....how wonderful!!! Alyona, who was invited to church maybe two months ago by her dentist, she came to church, we had no idea who she was so i mustered up the courage to talk to her (she had her Ukrainian/Russian shell on for sure that day--Ukrainians and Russians are super stern and closed on the outside, but if you can get and get their trust they are the sweetest people ever...well i can say that for Ukrainians. i don't know about Russians...) anyway. i started to talk to her and immediately she opened up to me. we talked about how she already had a book of Mormon, i challenged her to read it, pray about it and she WOULD feel the happiness and love of God through the holy ghost. She lives in an area pretty far away, so there was no real opportunity to meet with her, but i grabbed her phone number anyway and then she left. About a week or two later she hadn't come to church so i decided i should call her. There was probably a space of thirty minutes between the time i decided i should call her and check in with her and when i actually mustered up the courage to do it....speaking in Russian, on the phone, just to check in, talk casual, not try to set up an apt. just scared me. but i could feel i needed to do it. She seemed like the type of person who needs a phone call or some kind of support and love. So i mustered up the courage, dialed the numbered and prayed while it rang....she answered, 'hello' 'hi, this is sister little, the blonde missionary' (i promise it sounds more professional translated into Russian...) "sister little!!! my sunshine!!!" and she started giggling because she was so happy to hear from me. the phone call was maybe 45 seconds, but her mood jumped from a 2 to a 10 instantly, you could tell. I just told her i wanted to see how she was doing, how reading was going, etc. nothing big, invited her to church....then when i moved areas i called her again one night because i was thinking about her....she said it was perfect timing, she needed to hear from me, her 'sunshine', she had just finished praying about the book of Mormon, and was feeling a little lost. i gave her some more support and a few loving words, and that was it. hm.. and i guess she decided to get baptized!!! wonderful!!! i haven't called her in a couple weeks but i guess that's what happens....so beautiful and awesome. actually, if you remember from when i was at irina's baptism she's the one that held my hand as irina was baptized....one more guest at the party in the celestial kingdom that i know :) She is about 40, has a son, and if you ask me, her and this dentist could have something :) i'll have to call and congratulate her tonight. yay.

Don't get the wrong idea, this area is great too, and i love it...the members here and so awesome too. If you do any research, you'll see that Kiev is one of the busiest temples and something i found out a while ago is that members here love doing' indexing' on line. and a member showed me once what she does, then i realized, wow, you think reading old English cursive is hard in order to type the names, try reading Russian cursive. agh. but the members are so enthusiastic about it. one of my first nights in this area we were at a member's apt- parents and two daughters, we got there and they fed us, but they just left us alone in the kitchen with the two daughters, so we were just kinda chatting with them. i was starting to think, "wow, how rude, the parents don't even care that we are here, we're just here chatting it up" but after we finished eating we finally went to the living room to have the lesson, and i realized what the mom and dad had been doing this whole time....they were both very engaged looking at the computer screen helping each other read the Russian and Ukrainian cursive on the church indexing web site. how cute. sorry i judged them. they were busy doing family indexing together. we had a lesson, and learned very quickly that this family is so awesome, so good at sharing and talking about the gospel.

life is pretty good. sister pliha and i are just keeping our heads down and plowing through the rough and tough of missionary work-trying to talk with everyone on the streets, tracting, etc....

Michael Mc lean is coming to Kiev this week for a fireside, we probably won't go, but that's pretty cool.

it is getting colder, but i remembered back when it started warming up i as glad, and the only reason i wanted winter to come was because i figured by that time i would actually understand this crazy language. i guess its kinda true. im doing pretty good, a good indicator is that i feel like i could talk myself out any situation i might find myself in, which is a good, safe feeling :)

have a wonderful week!!!

sister little, the blonde missionary

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

Week 36

Another week in the big city. time moves fast here. we have exchanges this upcoming week and i told my companion that they cant do exchanges the first week of the transfer....and she said sister little, we are going into week three. oh. wow.

So I'm not ashamed to say that humor has helped me survive a lot of difficult times so far on the mission and there's a lot to laugh at here in center Kiev to, so i though i'd share with you one of my experiences this week that helped put a smile on my face.

on Thursday evening....we had a list of less actives we were going to stop by that kinda live in the same area. it was a new area to me around a metro stop. my companion hasn't been to very often so we were having a hard time finding the right 'dome' (this is like a super tall apt building that this area is full of). we could find all its neighboring domes but not the right address - dome 8A. as we are wondering around the neighborhood we come across an old babushka who asks us to help her find dome 12A. we kinda look around and point her in the right direction and continue our journey to find our own dome. After wondering around in a few more circles we run into this babushka again, still looking for this dome 12a. this babushka was pretty well dressed, pretty classy and she was wearing a name tag, so after the first time we briefly met her we thought that maybe she was a 'missionary' too trying to find an inactive from her congregation too or something. the second time we see her she is asking a different woman to help her find this dome 12a. the women calls to us and says, 'hey, if you are missionaries you should be serving god. we all know when you serve other people you serve god' and she left us to help this babushka as she ran on her merry way. So we decided to give up our hunt for a little bit to help this babushka.

She tells us that she doesn't need dome 12a but 10. okay. why? we ask her. after a little more thorough investigation and after reading her name badge more clearly, her name tag is actually has her name and her address written on it-dome 10, apt 15. OOOHHHhhhh. it clicked. this woman has Alzheimer or something and she can't find her own dome. alright. got it. so we helped her find her dome and we took her up to her apt to make sure she got there okay. She was kinda giggly and embarrassed but didn't really understand that we were helping her, but it was fine. As she opened the door (her key worked that she was surprised to find in her jacket pocket) she invited us in for tea. We wanted to get back to our own hunt, but as you could probably guess, she wouldn't let us turn her down, so we went into her little apartment. nothing scary, pretty normal with lots of old pictures, small, it was fine. She offered her toilet to us, which to anyone who has served a mission knows is a blessing. i didn't have to go, but my companion went. So this babushka, Vera Nickolivena, is in the kitchen making a whole lot of noise, I'm in the other room looking at all the pictures when my companion comes out of the bathroom saying "i think there is something wrong with your toilet" i go to look....its is flooding this little bathroom like crazy and within 30 seconds there is 4 inches of water in the bathroom.

now, remember i told you about the old sewers her in Kiev, this is just another experience with it. So Vera Nickoliven comes to see what is going on, laughs a little and says, 'don't worry about it, ill take care of it.' i don't think she realizes how much water is the bathroom and just trots right into the bathroom with a towel and bends down and starts wiping the floor. my companion and i just watch her for a minute to see how she handles the situation. Fully dressed, high heels and all, she is soaking the towel with the water that is on the floor then wringing it out over the bathtub then bends down to do it again. She is standing in 5 inches of water and has no idea that water just keeps coming out of the toilet.
Well, we couldn't convince her that what she was doing was ineffective and really....i couldn't stop laughing at this situation we were in. in a strange bobyshky's apt with a flooded bathroom, she's sloshing around in there with all this water there and none of have any idea how to make it stop.

i finally find the water valve behind the toilet by laying on the ground outside the bathroom (so i don't get wet), i miraculously reach it to turn off the water. we end up spending half an hour using a bowl and a dust pan to get all the still water off the bathroom floor. this whole time our bobyshky thinks she is helping by wiping the towel on the floor and ringing it out over the bathtub. We just about clean up all the water when we hear a key in the door turn. Oh my gosh. someone's here. this bobyshky talked about a son, so i knew it was probably him. but...what on earth do i say when he opens the door and sees his mother with these two young girls in the bathroom (\we had cleaned up all the water by this time, so no evidence that we had helped her in this mini disaster....) So he swings the door open and i am the only one visible. 'hi'. "we found this lovely woman on the street and helped her find her way home." "and then something happened. and we helped her" His face of blank shock and 'who the heck are you"...just priceless. He half believed our story but was overall really nice. He said he had just made that name tag for his mom the day before in case she gets the idea to go out again. He said if we hadn't helped her he would have spent the night running around the streets looking for her. which had happened before. we left him a Liahona and our contact information and said we'd stop by sometimes to make sure she's okay. He was pretty nice given the situation.

this is just one of the moments on my mission that i can't wait to re watch with you all in heaven...so funny. My companion said that that morning she prayed that something fun would happen.....i am keeping a close eye on her and what she prays for now.

fun times. look....well you can't see it, but i'm smiling. i am finding joy in the work. i'm excited for general conference next week. still don't know if ill watch it in english or Russian.

i love you all,
sister little