1. My MTC group with President and Sister Lattin

1.) My companion Elder Naumann at the activity

2.) Activity

3.) My trainer Elder Dorius with his 4 trainees

Here some pictures of me! The Klebingats and the Lattins are also in here as well as my MTC group. 

Elder Jolstead

1. Old Babyshka by wierd art in Chervonograd

2. Me with the Klebingats

3. Branch "Meet the Missionaries" Activity (that's Elder Call, not me)

July 8, 2013

Mother,

     Love the picture! Makayla is having a blast and Kahlan is just like "what are you doing with that camera?" I can't believe that she is already walking! Did she crawl at all or just skip straight to the running? It sounds like this week was a lot of fun and that the 4th of July was really busy. 

     This week was pretty busy for us too. We went to that city again, but had to come back early because of some registration stuff so didn't get much done. We also found out the next day that President Lattin wants us to stop going out there for a while because he wants to look at it more closely and see if it is worth trying to open right now. Kind of sad, but it will also let us work more in L'viv, which is good because our area isn't doing very well with investigators right now. 

     So our 4th of July started off very interesting. I woke up and looked over at my companions bed, which was empty. That was pretty wierd, but I figured he had just had to go to the bathroom really bad or something. Then I walk out and he is sitting in our study room with his hand wrapped in gauze. Apparently he had woken up at 5:00 because he was hungry and decided to try and cut an apple in the dark. He slashed his hand accross the thumb and web pretty bad, but stopped the bleeding and decided to sit in the study room for an hour waiting for me to wake up. I don't know why he didn't just wake me up, but there it is. So we went to a slightly ify Ukrainian hospital referred to us by a member and he got his hand sowed up. Then we had to prepare for the branch activity, which went pretty well. We made a Jeopardy game with facts about American culture. The game got a little heated because almost every Ukrainian thinks they know everything and are always right (something that makes proselyting very difficult) but I think that everyone had a good time. We also made rootbeer from some extract that my companion has. There is now rootbeer here. I miss it. 

     On Saturday we had our first mission conference with President and Sister Lattin. They actually came here from Utah, but they lived in Spokane for almost 30 years and he was the president of the North Stake. I haven't talked to them too much yet to see who we know in common, but his wife did say that they know Brother Lee, which is cool. Could I get his email address. by the way? I don't have it yet. So anyway, they are really cool. Very different from the Klebingats, but they are young and european and the Lattins are old and American, so of course they are different. We talked a lot about the vision of where we want to see western Ukraine in the future and how we can get there.

     That's it from me this week. Love you all and enjoy the really hot weather!

Elder Jolstead

P.S. They just sent us an email saying that the last address I gave you wasn't completely correct, so here is the actual one. Sorry!

(First Name, Last Name)

P.O.Box #2182

L’viv 79026

Ukraine

July 1, 2013

Mother,

     Well, today I am officially writing you from the Ukraine, L'viv Mission! I haven't met President Lattin and his wife yet, but they are coming in today, so I will probably meet them tomorrow.

   That's cool that there are sisters in the ward now. I have a feeling that that will be pretty regular all over. We just heard that after next transfer when more new missionaries come in, it will be a group of 11 Sisters and no Elders. Every sister will be training again and some will be training two. Fun times. Kind of sad, because it means I won't be training, but that's okay. Kaylee Nowels is going somewhere in Brazil, right? I remember almost no one's calls that you told me. I got to see the broadcast with the branch yesterday, but it was in Russian, so I didn't understand most of it. I am actually surprised at how much Russian I understand considering I've never studied it, I just hear it pretty often. Hopefully I will see the broadcast in English sometime this week. It was kind of funny how you said "the pamphlet with Jesus holding a lamb", because I was just like that before the mission and now I'm like, yeah, that's the Restoration pamphlet. I give tons of those away on the street and use them on lessons all the time. It's cool how familiar all the missionary materials are now.

     This week was really good. We went to that other city we are working in again and played football with some little kids. We can't proselyte openly or wear tags there, so we just carry around an american football, which they don't make here in Ukraine, and kids are so fascinated by it. We hope that by playing with kids, we can attract the interest of their parents. We don't have any investigators there yet, and that is the key to opening the city. We also had a branch activity this week called, "Meet the Missionaries", where we all showed slide shows of us before the mission. The goal is to get the members to be more comfortable with us so that we can work better together and be friends.

     I have one last funny story that I forgot to tell you from last week. I was on exchanges with Elder Gmeiner and we were walking down the street contacting people when I walked up to this one man who was plastered. I had never seen a drunk man before the mission, but now, after seeing a lot of them every day, I can tell almost immediately if they are hammered. This guy was completely gone and started yelling something in Russian about how I couldn't hurt Ukraine because they have a spirit here and that kind of thing. I tried to go around him, but he grabbed my arm and Elder Gmeiner started freaking out. I just told the guy to calm down and slowly took his hand off my arm. Then I gave him one of our English cards and walked around him. And do you know what that dirtbag did? He ran up behind me and kicked me! There wasn't much power behind it, since it was the kick of a short drunk man, who wasn't flexible enough to get his foot all the way up to my 6 ft 3 butt. I could have turned around, but I decided that I would rather stay on my mission than thrash a drunk who was going to wake up tomorrow with a huge headache anyway, so I turned the other cheek. Elder Kelley has been kicked by a drunk too, so now we can start our own club. It was actually really funny in retrospect.

     Well, that's all for me this week. Enjoy the 4th of July and watch out for drunks! Love you!

Elder Jolstead