Another week in Ivano

Hello again! Well, this week wasn't quite as exciting as some of my other ones have been. I did find out that it's probably a pretty sure thing that I'm finishing on October 28th, although I found that out in a pretty roundabout way (someone else was told that there will be no transfers, either in the mission or to home, in September). This Wednesday will be our president's interviews, so I'll ask him then more in depth. It's still pretty strange to me to hear that most other missions don't have the same go-home-date thing that we have; I thought it was universal that you either go home a couple weeks before your two-year mark, or a couple weeks after. Odd.

Because our zone is pretty big, they have, in addition to two zone leaders in L'viv, a third zone leader in Chernivtsi, and that just happens to be Elder Kauffman from my MTC group. He came up to Ivano last week with my secondborn son, Elder Horne, on exchanges, and it was a lot of fun. We all went to Nadvirna to interview our baptismal date, Oleg, and he took us on another little nature hike. They have ski jumps there also, so we hiked to the top and looked out over the entire valley. It was really beautiful.

People here are starting to call me the "super translator" because I have to translate a LOT for the senior couple here. Maybe that's what I need to look into as a career, except I can't stand translating from a native speaker into English, and that's how you're supposed to translate professionally. My mind gets stuck sometimes into Ukrainian mode, so I understand them perfectly, but I have no idea how to express it in English except by translating certain things word by word into bizarre little phrases. The good news is, because of all the translating, I'm getting a great amount of language study.

Well, I should probably get going. I love you all, and I hope you all have a good week!

--Elder Hurst

PS - Happy Birthday Carter!!!!!