I'm a nine-month missionary... (July 11, 2007)

Hello again all! I hope everyone had a good week. Ours was pretty good, although, as usual, it could be better. Our area is pretty cold when it comes to investigators (we have one promising potential investigator we're meeting with on Friday, and one "eternal investigator" family...and that's it). We spend most of our days on the street contacting or in the buildings tracting while we wait to meet with the members in our ward and do work with them (which, as I'm sure Adam will tell you, is the best way to do missionary work--when a member gives a friend as a referral, then the member is able to 1. Help bear testimony during lessons, 2. Use their home as a great place to meet and have lessons, 3. Answer questions or address concerns when the missionaries aren't around, and 4. Be friends and fellowshippers during the crucial first year or so after baptism). Unfortunately, this transfer, a lot of the members weren't available to meet for a long, long time (I...kind of suspect they don't like my new companion...not to be mean, but...I don't really blame them...); however, good news is, this week we've basically got every evening taken with either lessons to pump members up about missionary work, our English class, or our investigator (Vasil is his name). So, things may just be looking up.

In other news, we had exchanges last Friday and Saturday, so I was paired up with Elder Kauffman, who was in my MTC group and with whom I've gotten to be pretty good friends. We decided, as usual, to go contacting, and so we decided to explore the area a little bit (there's a few far-reaching parts that I'd never been to). We had just traveled to the farthest boundary from our apartment when we realized that the sun had just gone dark. Now, I've probably written about this before, but in Ukraine rain works differently than in in the Western US. There are some days where the clouds move so fast that they overtake you in automobiles, and when they're full of rain, that leads to sudden torrential downpours that get you soaked, then disappear in an instant. So, just as Elder Kauffman and I realized how far from home we were, we also realized that we were about to get drenched. And then we realized that the black clouds went all the way back to the horizon--it wasn't going to blow over quickly. We decided to start heading home.

We made it about a hundred feet when the clouds basically turned on the faucet on top of us. We ran to a sidewalk next to a partially-constructed apartment building that had been covered with wood by the construction crew, only to find that the rain was coming so hard, and there were so many cracks in the roof, that we might as well be standing in the rain anyway. We saw a covered bus stop about two hundred feet away, and after psyching ourselves up a bit, we sprinted to it. Now, we've been on our missions a while now (as of today, 9 months since I went in the MTC), so our shoes are starting to get really pretty worn down, and when they do that, they get really slippery, especially on wet surfaces; and for some reason, the white paint lines on crosswalks (they have the horizontal "zebra stripe" crosswalks here) turn incredibly slick, so as we ran, we had to dodge puddles, cars, and white painted lines, all the while getting soaked thoroughly. We made it to the bus stop, then realized that we had a sport day activity that evening, and we'd have to get all the way back to our apartment before that. We quickly found out as well that there were no buses or anything that came to that stop that would take us anywhere we wanted to go. We had to go it alone.

We ran from cover to cover, trying to wait for times when the rain would die down, but in general just having to sprint through the worst of it. Finally, we reached a large parking lot with several covered spaces. We went into an empty covered space and waited, trying to plan our next move, when we noticed a little old man slowly walking towards us through the rain. He came in and walked up to us and, obviously drunk, asked, "Is there life after this one?" We said, "Yes," to which he cackled maniacally, held out his hand, and said, "Where's my dollar?" We told him we didn't have any money, so he asked again, "Is there life after this one?" Elder Kauffman and I looked at each other, then at him (to which he cackled again), bid him "Dopobachinya" ("See ya") and ran out to the street. We stood there for a minute, waiting for traffic to die down, when we glanced back and saw the crazy drunk man slowly walking after us. Thankfully, there was a convenient break in the traffic, so we darted across and ran a brief evasion maneuver, eventually stopping at an overhang on an apartment building. We waited there for a minute before deciding that we were already wet enough, we might as well just go the rest of the way home, even though it was still a good fifteen minute walk.

The worst part? As soon as we stepped into the apartment, the sun was shining through the windows, and the storm had passed.

I've included a picture of myself in the middle of this excursion, just to help show how wet I was. This, mind you, was after the rain had died down quite a bit. All in all, it was a really fun adventure, and now that I've dried off, it makes a good story.

Well, that's my long-winded email for this week. Talk to you again later!
--Elder Brett