Another week already? (April 11, 2007)

Hello again all, this Elder Hurst once again saying hello from Ivano Frankivsk!

This has been a really cool week. There's a lot that's happened, so let me try to make sure I remember to put it all in here:

Last week, we met with a really, really cool investigator that was "passed" to us from some other elders in a different city (ie, they met with him a time or two, found out he lived in our area and not theirs, and then had us start meeting with him). His name is Joseph, and he's a black man from Sudan who's studying to be a dentist at a medical school in Ivano. He's really cool, and he's probably the nicest guy I've talked to in a long time. Plus, the only language he knows that we also know is English (he also speaks Arabic and Russian), so we get to teach him in English, which is nice. A lot of missionaries in our mission really love meeting and teaching African people because almost as a rule, they're very nice, very cool, they love hearing about the gospel, and they speak English, which is always a boon. Anyways, I'm excited to meet with Joseph some more.

Last Thursday, we went shopping at a really big, Wal-Mart type store called Arsen when, to our delight, we found out that they sell peanut butter. Now, it's funny, when I was in America I liked peanut butter all right, but I could go a long time without eating it and still be just fine; but, now that I'm in Ukraine and peanut butter is about as rare as gold, it was an incredibly exciting discovery. Elder Isaacs and I went a little crazy and bought four jars of it and a big plastic bucket of jelly (literally, a bucket), and we've been eating it all week long. And, just so you can know the "inside secrets" on the Eastern European peanut butter market, the Polish peanut butter spreads great, but tastes kind of salty; the Ukrainian "klasychne" (classic) peanut butter is fantastic; the Ukrainian "solodke" (sweet) peanut butter (made with vanilla) is good, but you can't eat that much of it before you get sick of it; and the Ukrainian "desertne" (dessert) peanut butter (made with cocoa powder) is good, but would be better if they had used sweetened cocoa powder. The bucket of jelly was just plain fantastic though.

This Sunday was Easter, and Easter is a huge holiday in Ukraine. The Saturday before, everyone takes a basket with some herbs, vegetables, bread, and eggs (all covered with a white cloth with some typical Ukrainian stitching patterns on it) and they go to one of the many Pravoslavnic churches in the area, wait in line, and have a priest bless the basket. I'm not sure, but I think the food might be what they're going to cook for dinner on Sunday. Oh, and the bread they have is a special kind called "Pasko bread" (Pasko being "Easter" in Ukrainian), which is like normal bread except it's puffy and kind of circular; it's got an interesting taste that I personally don't like as much as other Ukrainian bread, but maybe I just haven't eaten it as much as I need to. Anyway, on Easter proper, everyone goes to church, and all day, instead of saying "Dobriy Den" like usual for Hello, they say "Khrystos Voskres!" ("Christ is risen!"), and then the people they're talking to say "Bo istynu voskres!" ("Of a surety he is risen!", or "He is indeed risen!"). It's cool. And while normally throughout the year people are really hesitant to talk to strangers, on Easter, everyone says "Khrystos voskres!" to everyone.

For us, we went to the family of a member in our ward for Easter. His name is Vitaliy, and he was baptized about three or four weeks ago (the week before I arrived). His wife is going to be baptized as soon as its warm enough for her to be baptized in a river. So, we went to their house out in a sello (a "sello" is a little village; there's dirt roads and actual houses, animals are everywhere, and if it was a little cleaner and if some of the homes were a little better taken care of, it could be really picturesque and cool) for dinner, which consisted of really good hard boiled eggs with tartar sauce, holobtsi (I think this is boiled buckwheat wrapped in cabbage leaves like burritos and covered in sauce; it's really, REALLY good), Pasko bread, some sauerkraut-like salad, and--last but not least--holodets, which (unlike holobtsi) was utterly disgusting. Now, as of last Sunday prior to this meal, I had never had anything to eat in Ukraine that I didn't like. The vast majority of Ukrainian food is incredibly hearty and mostly healthy and really good tasting; holodets almost made me gag. Basically, to make holodets, you boil chicken bones for a long time until a layer of goo starts forming in the water; you scoop this goo into a bowl, mix it with small pieces of cooked chicken and maybe a few vegetables, and then put in in the fridge until you eat it. It is, almost literally, chicken flavored jell-o, except with the wonderful addition of knowing that your eating whatever goop was boiled out of a bone. It didn't help that Elder Isaacs and I get along pretty well and he jokingly kept telling the family, after I'd choke down the last of the holodets on my plate, that I wanted more. I'm usually really good about having a clean plate after every meal, but this time there was a large mound of holodets that I just couldn't bring myself to touch again.

Wow, I'm writing a lot today. I'll have to write the rest a little quicker:

On Monday, we went on a picnic with the branch to some hills just outside of the city. It was a lot of fun. We had a lot of people from our English classes come along, which was great because we want to start teaching them lessons and this was a great way to get them to be comfortable with the church and get to know members. Now, in Ukraine, the day after Easter is another holiday called Water Monday. I have no idea where Water Monday came from or why, but as far as I can tell, it's a day entirely dedicated to trying to get everyone around you wet. People carry water bottles and splash each other, people in cars throw water on pedestrians, and heaven help you if you walk near any of the many fountains in town. So, during the picnic, there was a lot of random water being thrown on people. It was a lot of fun.

Yesterday, Tuesday that is, Isaacs and I went to another sello called Strupkiv to visit a really old man who's a member of the church but lives far enough away that he can't really come to church that much. He was really nice, and he looked like he could be right at home living on a British farm in a movie or something; unfortunately, he's really pretty deaf, and he doesn't understand us because of our accents anyway, so communication was limited. But, it was fun.

All right, I'm literally out of time, but have a good week, and I'll see if I can send pictures later today.

--Elder Hurst