New Area!! (March 28, 2007)

Hello again everyone, I've had a pretty interesting week again.

So, first of all, I did indeed get transferred. In fact, I was pretty much shipped all the way across the mission. I'm now in a really cool little city called Ivano Frankivsk. It's in the southwest corner of Ukraine, right near the Carpathian Mountains. It is really, really cool! Western Ukraine used to belong to Poland, so the architecture in Ivano is a lot more old western European looking instead of boxy Soviet concrete. The city is really pretty.

It's fun also because the people are crazy. There's a fairly large city square where you can walk around and go shopping, and there's a guy there who asks people for money that we call the Pany Man because he always says, "Pany, day para kopek," which means "Sir, give me a couple kopek," or he'll say "Pany, day zhurnal" ("Sir, give me a magazine"). He's fairly crazy, but for some reason he really likes us missionaries, and whenever we walk past him he tells us jokes. We also have two senior sisters serving here who are the craziest people I've met in our mission. There's Sister Borisenko, who's a native from Russia, who for no real reason really doesn't like one of the elders here (she kept asking if he really had the priesthood, and she never trusts him when he translates for her); and then there's Sister Todd. Sister Todd just turned 72, and she just finished a mission in Nauvoo. Now, she's technically a proselyting missionary, which she decided means she needs to learn to language. Now, I'm not entirely certain what duties a proselyting senior sister has, but I know for certain from President Davis that learning the language is not only not required, but it's not expected, it's never been done, and odds are, it will not be done, and in a lot of ways, worrying about it only hurts the work. Sister Todd, however, remains convinced that not only will she learn the language, but she'll learn it really, really quick, faster than we younger missionaries would. Unfortunately, that's not been the case (to say the least), which has led to her worrying waaay too much about not speaking Ukrainian. In order to discuss things about them while we're around them, we nicknamed Sister Borisenko "Flash" and Sister Todd "Laser."

The really nice thing about Ivano, though, is that everyone speaks Ukrainian! No more guessing what on earth people are saying in Russian. (Although it was kind of fun getting to learn a little Russian...by the way, Sean Connery in "The Hunt for Red October" has a terrible Russian accent, so everyone makes fun of one line he has where he says "Mizh gavarim pa Russki?" or "Can we speak in Russian?" It sounds funny with a Sean Connery accent). My companion is Elder Isaacs, who's really cool and really funny, and because the town's pretty small, we basically work all the time with the other elders in our area, Elder Tanner and Elder Aird. It's a lot of fun. The only problem is, the area's slower than the last one I was in, so the work'll be tough. It seems like I'm just going to have to get used to hearing that.

Well, I love you all, and I'll write you again next week!
Love,
--Elder Brett