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