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