Exciting stuff's ahead

Hello again everyone! Things have been going well here in Kyiv. Once again we have two areas to work in, which means also that we have two churches to attend and a lot of time to spend on the metro. But, that's okay, because it's always better to be too busy than not busy enough.

Our main investigator, Volodymyr, has been really busy and unable to meet for a good amount of time, but we've been meeting with him when he can and he's still doing really well. He introduced us to one of his friends and testified to him about the importance of the gospel. We just need to have him find time when we can just talk about his baptismal date and schedule a few more lessons and he'll be on his way; unfortunately, it's a little harder than it sounds with his schedule right now. But, he has been offering us some interesting opportunities, especially two in particular--one of which is actually kind of funny, the other really exciting.

The funny one was when one day he met with us at his work during his lunch break. Unfortunately, as usual, it was way too short and he had to leave the room pretty often to do things, but after a minute or two, another doctor came in, a bottle of scotch in his hand (and remember...this is still only halfway through the working day). he comes in and starts to bother us about how we're not Orthodox and therefore not the true church, and then Volodymyr smilingly introduces him as his boss and friend. So, we quickly found ourselves in a situation where I fended off the slightly drunk doctor while Elder Higgins, my new companion, tried to talk to Volodymyr. It turned out to be kind of fun in a way, because I got to be really quite bold with the man, and Elder Higgins got some good language practice and in the end set up another meeting for us (the one where Volodymyr testified to his friend). So, opportunity #1: Argue with a drunken doctor.

The second and far more exciting opportunity was this: Volodymyr has a lot of friends in the Kyiv medical community, and one of them is a lady who runs a hospital with a large meeting hall for conferences and the like. Somehow, Volodymyr convinced her to let us use the hall sometime for a seminar in front of many of Kyiv's doctors about Joseph Smith and the Restoration. We have this planned for October 11 (which just happens to be my year mark also...how weird is that?) at 3 in the afternoon, and we will have our mission president, President Davis, speaking with us also, which shows how great of an opportunity this really is. Our bishop here is a special events organizer for Mary Kaye, and he does things like this for a living (though on a larger scale...he showed us a picture of him hosting an event in front of 7,500 people), so we've enlisted him into our planning as well. It's been a lot of fun working out the logistics and getting everything scheduled out how it should be, even though at times it's very, very stressful.

We had another meeting earlier this week where we were told we'd be speaking to a group of university students about America, with a short spiritual thought at the end. It turned out to be us speaking to a group of roudy junior high aged kids about America, with a lack of anything spiritual whatsoever. The headmaster of the school decided to tell us on the walk to the classroom that we couldn't do any sort of spiritual thought at all. That was information that may have been more helpful had he told us it earlier.

Other than that, things are going well here. It's cooling down a lot, and it's starting to rain a lot too, which is too bad. I miss summer already, and there's just a little bit of a wait until the next one.

All right, well, I love you all, and have a good week!
--Brett