July 29, 2013

Mother,

      Well, I hope you fixed the problem with the hacking. I didn't get anything wierd from you, but that could have been awkward to something weird in my missionary email account. That's really awesome that the band got back together to play for at least one more time. Was Merrill there too? That's really awesome that we have grown so much that we need a new building. Which neighbor lady was this again? The crazy one with all the dogs? "Goliath!" Ha, ha. That's cool that you are all getting missionary opportunities. Looking back, we really get a lot more than we think. We just need to look for them more. I also have something for Kelleene to help gain weight. My companion has this recipe for something he called Fatty-Fat-Fat that we made. It's a bunch of sliced up potatoes with a layer of chicken breasts on top and then a whole bunch of cheese and Mayonaise on top of that in a pan. Then you cook it until the mayonaise has melted into the rest of it. That should put the pounds on. I would also say to eat Kontik's which are a really awesome type of cookie, but I think those only exist in Ukraine.

      So, a few exciting things happened this week. We started a new program for teaching english this week which is a lot better and more fun than the old one. I think we will be able to attract a lot of potential investigators. Elder Naumann and I teach th beginning group, which is really fun, because they know practially no English. You say something and they are like "write that down!" I am also learning a lot of basic Ukrainian words from them that I didn't know before.

     On Wednesday we took a trip to the city of Ivano Frankivsk, because my companion had to do some registration stuff, so that was pretty cool. Before this week, the only city that I had seen in the new mission was L'viv. I don't get out of L'viv very often. Funny story. When we were heading back on a train, the train had stopped twice for some reason so we thought that we were going to get to L'viv a little late. Now, just so you know, the trains in Ukraine are very accurate when it comes to arrival time. Within like two minutes of the time they say they will be there. So when the train stopped again twenty minutes before the estimated arrival time, we were like, "what the heck. Why did it stop again?" Well we sat and talked for about ten minutes in our compartment, but the train still hadn't moved, and we were very confused. Then my companion lookds out the window and says, "We're in L'viv!" So we had to hurry super fast to get all of our stuff together to get off before the train started moving again. So we get off and I'm like carrying all of my stuff and my tie is just hanging on my neck untied running out before it started moving. It was really funny. If we hadn't gotten off, we would have ended up in Kiev.

     We also had a really fun branch picnic on Saturday. It was very hot and I got pretty fried, cause I was in shorts and my legs haven't seen the light of day since before I got out here. We played a lot of soccer, talked about the pioneers and ate really really good sausages. Everyone had a lot of fun, I think. The members are all getting really excited about helping us since they found out that most of us can't proselyte right now. Oh, I don't remember if I told you but, the government here didn't like that we made a new mission here and are making it very hard to get missionaries proselyting rights here in L'viv. My companion and I and the APs are the only ones who can wear name tags right now. Even President and Sister Lattin can't. It's very sad. So pray for a miracle there. Well that's about it this week. Love you!

Elder Jolstead