Dobriy Den! (January 31, 2007)

Well, it's Wednesday again already! Time's starting to slip past a little faster. I remember a while ago, I was getting into bed and I thought, "Wow, it really feels like time's going by pretty quick!" I then realized it was still my first week here. Thankfully, those days are past, and as odd as it seems, not only was last Saturday my one-month-in-country mark, but a week from tomorrow, this transfer ends. I've almost been here an entire transfer. That's strange to think about...

So on Monday night, we went over to a member's house for family home evening. We taught them a little lesson and played a game, and then we went out to the trolley bus stop to go home, along with another member named Yulia. It was cold outside, and Elder Hanson and I were both not wearing hats (I was still wearing a scarf, gloves, and thermal underwear). Yulia, like every other Ukrainian person we've met, saw that we weren't wearing hats and instantly decided we were in the early stages of hypothermia. This led us into a discussion about Ukrainian beliefs concerning the cold. She kept trying to tell us that it was the cold that made people sick, not germs (she actually laughed at us when we said that germs were what made people sick). She finished the conversation by saying this: "There was another elder here who didn't believe me, so he went home and walked on cold tiles with bare feet. And he had to go home early with kidney problems!"

So, if there's one thing I can safely say I've learned during my time here, it's that having cold feet gives you kidney problems.

Well, we're still having trouble finding investigators, but it's definitely not from a lack of trying. I've already gotten three first lessons under my belt, although only one was promising at all. The first was to a guy who was so convinced he was already saved that the member we had on the lesson with us (a really cool returned missionary named Zhenya) laughed out loud at him; the second was to a man with a mouthful of gold teeth who told us that if we'd read more Tolstoy, we'd forget about all this Mormon stuff; and the third was earlier this week when we taught a lady and her husband. The husband wasn't really interested (he told us straight off that: "I'm an Atheist. I'm Pravoslavnic." Pravoslavnic is the Ukrainian name for the Orthodox church) but the wife seemed to gain some interest as we continued. Anyways, they haven't let us come back yet, which is sort of the story of my mission so far.

Let's see...I don't think I've talked about the transportation here yet, so let me describe that real quick. Here's the basic kinds of transportation here: there's trolleybuses (which are like regular big-city buses, except they're attached to cables running above the roads; they have the unfortunate tendency to come off the cables, and then you have to wait for the driver to reattach it), there's autobuses (which are like normal buses, or like trolleybuses without the cables), there's marshrutkas (which are like a cross between a very short bus or a very large van; they have routes and stops like buses, but they only stop if someone outside waves them down or if someone inside tells them to stop, so it's quicker than a bus, but it costs more), there's the metro (your typical subway, except when you get to downtown Kiev the metro stops are really deep underground, so you take these incredibly long escalators to get down to them), and there's tramvyes (which are like streetcars; they're all pretty old, and they don't work too well). Everything costs 50 kopek (about 10 cents) except for the marshrutkas, which cost about 1 gryven and 25 kopek (or twenty five cents).

Well, I'm doing well otherwise. I had a cold for a while that was really annoying, but other than that, things here are going great! I love you all, and good luck this week!

Love,

--Elder Brett Hurst

Hello Again (January 24, 2007)

Thank you everyone who sent me emails! It's always fun to get them. I enjoyed Quinn's quite a bit. Especially since I don't actually have to worry about spiders. Yet.

I experienced my first snow today. It wasn't very much, only about an inch, but it makes everything incredibly slippery. Thankfully, I have plenty of warm clothes, so that hasn't been a concern. Last week (or maybe the week before, I can't remember) we had some pretty strong winds. It was actually pretty fun...not very good for street contacting though...

Speaking of street contacting, yesterday I got two contacts within twenty minutes of each other; to put that into context, we're usually lucky to get one a day, and it's usually my companion who gets them. So, I was feeling pretty good about that, right up until it came time to teach our English class (we hold English classes every Tuesday and Thursday as a community service project), where I had to teach the beginner's class, and my companion accidentally told me to do the lesson they had had the week before, thus leaving me with an hour of spare time to fill. Which, as it turns out, is a long, long time when you're trying to teach people english.

And for some reason, there's a ton of crows everywhere! Usually, there's a few every so often, but lately, they've been coming out in droves. And these aren't your run-of-the-mill American crows; these are huge, with large gray beaks. Maybe they're actually ravens, I'm not sure, but they're everywhere! I'll try to get a good picture of them.

Things are going pretty well here. I've heard that other parts of Europe are having some energy problems, but we haven't experienced anything like that. It's actually been really warm here by Ukrainian winter standards; the worst weather we've had was when it was really windy, but even then it wasn't bad (definitely not as bad as it sounded like western Europe had...)

I went on exchanges last week with an elder whose family lived in Spain for about six years (in Seville, I think). It was fun to get to talk to him. I felt just a little out of my league when it came to speaking Spanish though...but that's okay, because there's an elder here from Switzerland who I speak German to, and almost every appliance here is made in Germany, so anything that's written on them is in German and, sometimes, English. Rarely Ukrainian or Russian, which just seems odd to me.

All right, well, I'd better get going. I love you all, and I'll write you again next week!

Love,

--Elder Brett Hurst

Pryvit! (January 17, 2007)

Hello again from Ukraine!

Well, things are going pretty well. Our area is very, very investigator-free, so we've been out finding quite a bit. The rumors circulating around say that our area is really difficult; it's just that much more of an adventure. I should probably describe what tracting is like for us. We'll go to an apartment building, choose a pidyeest, and then go to the door. Seeing as how they're products of the former Soviet Union, each pidyeest door is made of metal and has a punch code on it; since the fall of the USSR, the code is really useless, but instead of do something like change the door, they just kept them, code and all; luckily, and still owing to them being products of the Soviet Union, they're really easy to get into. It basically involves pushing in random buttons until the door unlocks itself. So, once we've cracked the code, we climb inside, where we enter a dark, shadowy, concrete landing about twelve feet by twelve feet. There's usually a few apartments here, a staircase, and an elevator. We'll take the elevator up to the top floor (an adventure in itself--most elevators here aren't very reassuring looking), and then, if we're lucky, there will be a hallway leading in both directions with about four apartments in each direction; if we're not lucky, the apartments will be behind another locked door with doorbells for all of the apartments inside. We ring the top doorbell, wait for the person to come outside and, without fail, yell, "Khto?!", which means "Who!?" We tell them, and then they either reject us, open the door, or as in one case, wait in the little hallway and warn anyone else we try to get that it's the missionaries and they shouldn't come out. Anyway, after we talk to the first person, we wait for their door to close and push the doorbell below theirs. It's kind of handy in a way; it's like Tracting Light, where you still work hard, but without all the walking. Anyway, we do this from the top floor down (it's referred to as "knocking down a building," as in knocking on the doors, not actually destroying the buildings...) and, if we have time, we move to the next pidyeest and start all over. Oh, and something else about the apartment buildings: no matter how nice the apartments are, no matter how expensive they are, the stairwells and the outside of the building are always covered in trash, grafitti, cigarettes, gum, needles, so that it always looks like your going into an abandoned, post-apocalyptic building right up until someone opens their apartment door and you see the really nice interior.

One thing that has taken no time to adjust to here is the food. It's definitely different than in the States, but in very good ways. I love it! Borscht is fantastic (red and green versions, especially with Smetana, which is like sour cream except it actually tastes good...), verenyky (sort of like ravioli in a way, but without a sauce...I think it's the Ukrainian version of pirogi, but I could be wrong) is delicious, and my favorite is pel'meny, which is like a smaller verenyky that you boil. Plus, Ukrainians love two things: juice, and sauces. Their juices are AMAZING (I'm addicted right now to "Morkva-Yabluchka," or "Carrot-Apple") and cheap (all of their food is really cheap, we can do a weeks worth of groceries for about thirty to forty gryven, and there's five gryven to a dollar). Also, I guess Ukrainians really like ketchup, because they have a half a million different varieties of it (the best: shashliky ketchup, or ketchup with onion flavor). They also have a lot of sauces we don't have, like Paprik sauce (I'm not even sure what's in it--paprika and something else, maybe smetana) which is, also, very good. I've started putting them on everything, especially scrambled eggs. Oh, and the bread here is fantastic! I buy these large round loaves for about a gryven eighty kopek (kopek are like our cents, in that it takes a hundred kopek to equal a gryven), which translates out to about thirty six cents, and there's this nice inactive lady we visited who gave us a lot of Ukrainian honey (more crystalized than our honey; REALLY good). It's really nice to come home after a long day and have a slice of bread with honey and a glass of carrot-apple juice, maybe with some pel'meny with ketchup and paprik...It's really good food. It's not fancy at all, but it tastes great.

Oh, and people here love techno. As in, they LOVE techno. Every bus, every marshrutka (like a large van, or a small bus), every store, and especially every internet club pumps out techno nonstop. Before long, you really start to miss what instruments sound like. (Unless "drumbeat machine" counts as an instrument).

Speaking of instruments, though, our ward had its Christmas party a week or two ago (it was for the Ukrainian christmas), and they had a string quartet from the ward play. They were incredible! People here really love music. It's too bad they only play techno.

Well, I've got to get going, but I love you all, and I'll write again next week!

Love,

--Elder Brett Hurst

As near as I can tell, this is a map of Brett's first area in Ukraine. The name BOCKPECEHKA in Cyrillic is "Voskresenksy" in our alphabet.

Hi! (January 10, 2007)

Hello from Ukraine!

Well, the holiday season in Ukraine is finally almost over. They have Western Christmas on Dec 25, New New Year's on Jan 1, Old Christmas is on Jan 7, and Old New Year's on Jan 14 (or somewhere around there), so for almost an entire month the entire country slows way down. There's a lot of drunk people shooting fireworks at all hours of the day and night. It's kind of fun, if you're not trying to sleep. The bad part is, though, because everyone get's drunk they don't always go to work the next day (or week), and since the vast majority of the country gets drunk, the people who don't go to work are generally the majority of the people. The country kind of goes on a month-long break ("pererva" in Ukrainian). It's frustrating, because it makes contacting people very difficult when they're either sleeping off a hangover, or still slobbering drunk. It also screwed up our P-Day schedule a little bit, so I wasn't able to write as soon as I wanted, but from here on out my P-Days should be every Wednesday.

My area that I'm in is called Voskresensky. Voskresenksy is an area either right on the edge of Kiev, or it may be a small suburb, I'm not sure; but it's made up entirely of apartment buildings. And these are the Soviet-style apartments, where they're twenty stories high, really long, and they fill the landscape. It's kind of cool looking. Any way, the buildings themselves are very depressingly built. Everyone is secluded from everyone as much as possible. In order to get to our apartment, we go through a large metal door, up a narrow flight of stairs, and into our cast iron front door. We have three other apartments clustered around ours on our floor. If we wanted to visit an apartment on the other side of the building, we'd have to go outside, walk to their big metal door and go up their stairs. The different sections of the apartment buildings (the sections are called "pidyeest") aren't interconnected at all. Everyone's isolated.

It's a pretty slow area investigator-wise. We go contacting quite a bit to find some more investigators, but so far we haven't found anyone too interested, although I got my first phone number from a guy I contacted into. I talked about the Book of Mormon until I didn't know anything else in Ukrainian to say, so I bore my testimony a lot, and he finally looked pretty interested, took a book and an invitation to church, and gave me his name and phone number. It was really exciting.

We have run into some pretty crazy people. We've taught two actual lessons so far, and one of them was to a man who kept saying he was "saved" already until the member we had on the lesson with us started laughing at him, and the other lesson we taught was to a guy with a mouth full of gold teeth who told us that if we'd stop being uncultured Americans and start reading Tolstoy, we'd forget about this whole Mormon thing. He then went on to explain that after we die, our happy thoughts drift up to forty kilometers above the earth and join together into one giant layer of the atmosphere. And he calls us crazy.

Anyways, yeah, the people are strange. The men wear these shoes that I can only describe as the dress shoe version of elf shoes. They have long pointed toes that sometimes curve up slightly at the end. The women all wear boots. All of them. Most of them wear boots with stiletto heels. And then there's the babushkas. They wander around slowly, handkerchiefs on their heads, carrying large, heavy bags full of empty bottles that they collect and sell. If you hold a door open for one of them, or help them with something, or even just say hi to them, they stop and give you a long blessing of health and happiness and prosperity (I've had one sing a little song to me once). Odd. However, when you consider how many slobbering drunks wander the streets, how many eight year old kids smoke outside our apartment building, and how many used hypodermic needles litter the entire city, you realize there's worse things at work than just weird shoes.

Well, I'm quickly running low on time, so I'd better get going, but I love you, I miss you, and wish me luck!

Love,

-Elder Brett Hurst