Almost Christmas... (12/19/2007)

Hello everyone! I'd say "Merry Christmas," but the mission will have Christmas next week be a P-Day for us, so I can just email then and be timelier. How's Christmas in America so far? Here in Ukraine, as usual, it's only being celebrated by members of the Church (well...celebrated Western-wise; everyone else celebrates by drinking). The big holiday here, thanks to eighty years of Communism, is New Years, so everyone's buying their New Year's trees and presents nowadays. New Year's here is basically an exact copy of Christmas in America, except a few days later, without any reference to religion, and literally entirely commercial. And it involves a lot more vodka and beer. In fact, the entire holiday season--which, thanks to Ukraine's turbulent history involving calendar changes, involves Western Christmas (Dec 25), New New Years (Dec 31/Jan 1), Old Christmas (Jan 7), and Old New Years (Jan 13/14)--is basically one large holiday. Most businesses literally shut down because no one would come to work anyway. On New Year's Day, the streets are almost entirely empty aside from a few people passed out drunk along the side of the sidewalk. The entire country goes on vacation/hangover for a month.

In other news, we have an investigator with a baptismal date! Her name is Anya. She's a little...strange, but she loves the Book of Mormon and Liahona magazines, and she's really good friends with a slightly less active member. She lives in a little village outside of Kyiv called Irpin. Her date is for January 5, although it may be changed to January 6 because the stake wants all baptisms done on Sunday for some reason.

On December 27, I will have been in Ukraine for one year. That's the official "old man in the mission" mark. The next big step is when the sister in our MTC group, Sister Russin, goes home, because that means we only have six months left. Yikes. I seem to remember that two years used to be a long time.

This week two native sister missionaries joined our district. As district leader, it means that every night I get to try and talk them through some problem in their new apartment, listen to them talk about how little they know the area (then remind them that I know it about as well as they do), and, above all, do it all in Ukrainian. It's fun. One of them is from Armenia, and the other is from Ukraine, from a city called Dnipropetrovsk (they just opened a mission centered in that city earlier this year). Thankfully, they both know English pretty well, so I can fall back on that when necessary (although I've realized a bit lately how much I'm able to speak in Ukrainian and understand in Russian; it's a really cool feeling).

All right, well, that's it for me this week. I'll write again on Christmas!

--Elder Hurst