Dobroho dnya! (February 28, 2007)

Hello again everyone! We've had a fantastic week this time around. As I may have hinted about earlier, our area has been really, really slow; we've been excited to get more than three or four phone numbers from people on the street or from tracting a week. However, this past week things are turning around quite nicely. On Saturday, our Zone Leaders told us that one of their investigators actually lives in our area, so we've taken over teaching him, and he has a baptism set for March 17; there's this really cool guy named Serhiy who lives across the street from us that we committed to think and pray about preparing for baptism on March 24 (we should find out for certain tomorrow, because he invited us to go roast shishkabobs with him and his family in the forest outside of Kiev--our apartments are right on the very edge of town, and literally across the street is a forest); and last Monday I contacted a man named Danyil who took a Book of Mormon and said, kind of dismissively, "Yeah, I'll come to church," before walking off, seeming very uninterested. But, lo and behold, he and his wife were there at church, and when we talked to them he said, "I started reading in the Book of Mormon and really liked it. So I read a lot of it out loud to my wife, and we both agree that it's a very special book."

So, things are starting to heat up in our area, which is ironic because things have really started getting cold weather-wise. It snows probably every two or three days, and the sidewalks are fairly treacherous with black ice. There's a little game in the mission where the missionaries count how many times they slip and fall ("fall" as in you end up entirely on the ground--the scores are counted more like golf...). I've only fallen twice so far--the first time being the worst because there was a great deal of packed down snow on the ground one evening when it started to rain, and the rain froze into ice that coated everything--not ideal for staying upright. However, I've been doing better than most; one elder in my district had a week where he fell every single day. But, the fun thing is, when you slip and fall it doesn't hurt at all, and it makes for a funny story afterwards. (I've been fortunate also in that I've only slipped to the side--the worst is falling flat on your back). But, before you start worrying, I've only felt cold once here, and that was one night when it was about 20 below Celsius, the wind was blowing, and this tiny, sharp snow was falling. Other than that, I've actually been really comfortable outside.

I'm excited for my birthday, but more for the fact that I'll be turning 20 than for anything that'll be happening on that day (as it looks now, it probably will indeed involve a good deal of tracting). Thanks to everyone who sent me emails and e-cards! As it turns out apparently, I can indeed get cards through the pouch mail (wish I'd found that out earlier), as long as there's no money in them--they're cracking down heavily on that; every letter we get is opened and resealed because they check them for money. As for packages, here's the information:

There's two ways to send packages to our mision that are recommended. These are through two companies, Roxolana and Meest-America. There info is as follows:

ROXOLANA

19 w. 21st St.

Linden, New Jersey, 07036

Telephone: (973) 763-8778

888 725-8665

Fax: (973) 763-5425

roxolanaltd@roxolana.com

www.roxolana.com

MEEST-AMERICA

609 Commerce Road

Linden, New Jersey 07036

Telephone: 800 288-9949

1 800 361-7345

I'm not sure how the process works--the website probably says far better than I could speculate--but the address here in Kiev is this:

Elder Brett Hurst

Puhkinska 2-4/7 Apt 43

Kiev, Ukraine 01034

It's really important to NOT put "Ukraine Kiev Mission" on the package, because I guess the government would consider it a business package and would slap a rather hefty tariff on it.

All right, I hope that's helpful. There's absolutely no need or anything to send packages whatsoever, I just wanted to include the information.

Well, other than that things are going pretty well. My companion has 18 days before he goes home, so that's been a bit of an extra challenge in our work, but not much of one. Well...yet. We suspect that once he reaches 10 days he'll be more of a burden than anything...

Well, that's how things have been going! Thanks again to everyone who's sent me emails or letters. I hope you all have a good week, and Renee, tell Alli and Mary that I miss wrestling with them too.

Love,

--Elder Brett

P Day Again

Hello again! Things in Ukraine have been going well this week. We have our Zone Conference tomorrow, so that should be fun. I always like seeing people from my MTC group. My companion, Elder Hanson, goes home at the end of this transfer (March 19, to be exact), so he's unfortunately getting pretty homesick (or "trunky," in missionary language). Our area's starting to produce more new investigators, but unfortunately our progressing investigators are still nonexistent. But, we're going to be working even harder now because President Davis challenged Elder Hanson to have a baptism before he goes home. (He also hinted that I'm going to be in the Voskresensky area for a while...looks like I'll get to know my way around this part of Kiev pretty well).

A funny thing happened this week while I was on a bus. This lady saw my nametag and asked me, in accented English, "Do you speak English?" I said, "Yes, I do. I'm from America." She nodded, then said, "Do you speak it well?"

One of the things we've been doing here a lot has been helping this family near our area build a house. The dad is an American, and the family speaks english pretty well, so it's kind of nice to get to talk to people and understand them completely every now and then. So, we've been doing a lot of construction work, and at first I thought, "I think I know a few family members who'd enjoy this." However, as it turns out, I should have thought "I think I know a few family members who know waaaay more about construction than this guy." I've never heard the phrase "That looks good enough" used so freely.

Well, as usual, I'm entirely out of time too quickly. I love you all, and have a good week!

--Elder Brett

S'ohodni u mene yeh poslannya pro misiyu moyu! (2/14/07)

Hello again everyone!

This past week was a good one for us. We met with this woman we found tracting a week and a half ago and had a lesson with her that went very well, even though it seemed like it shouldn't have. We arrived, and she invited us in and had us sit down. The room we were in just happened to be the one with the TV in it, so she had to shoo her husband away and turn it off so we could have our lesson. We began and taught her about our heavenly father, families, prophets and dispensations, Christ's earthly ministry, the great apostasy, and the Restoration, when her thirty-something daughter came in, drunk, and started yelling about how she wanted to watch TV but we were hogging the room. The woman we were teaching--Anna--told her to be patient and wait, and the daughter left. We started going again, and were right about to finish when Anna's son came in and decided that he'd sit in on the lesson as sort of a "counterpoint" against us. We retaught some of the lesson so he could hear, but he--also a little tipsy--kept telling us that his pastor told him not to trust Mormons. We were having Anna read out of our copy of the Bible, so he stopped us and grabbed his copy, not trusting ours (we found out when he got back that we had the same Bibles; he wasn't happy). Finally, he stood up to leave, then turned to Anna and said, "Babushka, you can't let these men confuse you." She looked at him and said, "These men have explained the Bible much clearer than you or our pastor have! Maybe they've come to help my sinful soul!" It was amazing; you could feel the difference between when we taught with the spirit, and when her son taught from his own understanding, and I know Anna could feel the difference too.

Anyways, that's my spiritual thought for the week, now here's my culture lesson. In Ukraine, or at least in Kiev, McDonalds restaurants are everywhere. And the food they serve tastes far better than its American counterpart. The hamburgers are far bigger and better tasting, and the french fries are really good. The food is slightly cheaper than America too, although they recently changed their dollar menu (well...the "five gryven menu") to be slightly more expensive. The restaurants themselves are nice too, with these big plasma TVs hanging from the ceiling playing music videos. The funny thing is, because they're so nice, they've become the example of a good restaurant. If someone here goes to a restaurant they don't like, they say "Well, it wasn't McDonalds."

All right, I've run out of time unfortunately, but I love you all, and I hope you have a good week!

--Elder Brett Hurst

Hello Again! (February 7, 2007)

Happy P-Day everyone! It's sounds like things are going well with you all (y'all, for Adam). I've had a pretty interesting week this week.

Well, we've started tracting a lot more, which means that we've been meeting a lot more strange people in their homes, where they seem more willing to be even stranger. On Sunday we went to an apartment building near ours and started knocking it down when we reached this one little hallway where the light was broken. This isn't anything new in Ukrainian buildings; about half of the apartment buildings are missing lights right as you enter, and since for some reason they don't find windows necessary in their buildings, they're pitch black. So, in this particular hallway, there was a light down on the other side of the hallway, but a door was kind of blocking it, so we had to keep pushing it open every now and then. We knocked on the apartment door nearest this other door and a short, squat Russian man answered. It was my turn to start us off, so I started talking and got about halfway into my second sentence when he cut me off and started cursing at us in Russian so much that his wife started yelling at him from another room to close the door and leave us alone. Thankfully, I don't know any Russian swearwords, so it didn't really affect me, but my companion was really mad and about ready to head home when we decided to do one more door. This lady answered and invited us in, and long story short, we have a lesson set up with her tonight; so, you never know what'll come next when you're a missionary. Like when we were riding on a trolleybus a few days ago and the radio started playing "It's Raining Men."

Something else that happened this week was when on Saturday we got on a bus to head to the church building when we saw an older man get on with...something...I don't know what, but something on his face. It was like a mask that only covered one part of his face, around one of his eyes, only the mask was part of his face, and it was black and thick and hairy. It was like a giant, black mole that stuck out of his face. It was incredibly gross.

And I'm getting really fed up with drunk people. They're everywhere, and all they do is stumble around, swearing and smoking and, in general, just getting in everyone's way before passing out on the sidewalk. And I'm getting really fed up with seeing kids younger than 10 smoking and drinking. I think that if people wanted to make effective anti-smoking or anti-drinking ads, they'd just need to videotape the people at your average Ukrainian metro stop for about two hours. I know I never want to do those now.

So, that's the highlights of my week. As usual, my time's running short, so I love you all, and I'll write you again next week!

--Elder Brett Hurst

Dobriy Den! (January 31, 2007)

Well, it's Wednesday again already! Time's starting to slip past a little faster. I remember a while ago, I was getting into bed and I thought, "Wow, it really feels like time's going by pretty quick!" I then realized it was still my first week here. Thankfully, those days are past, and as odd as it seems, not only was last Saturday my one-month-in-country mark, but a week from tomorrow, this transfer ends. I've almost been here an entire transfer. That's strange to think about...

So on Monday night, we went over to a member's house for family home evening. We taught them a little lesson and played a game, and then we went out to the trolley bus stop to go home, along with another member named Yulia. It was cold outside, and Elder Hanson and I were both not wearing hats (I was still wearing a scarf, gloves, and thermal underwear). Yulia, like every other Ukrainian person we've met, saw that we weren't wearing hats and instantly decided we were in the early stages of hypothermia. This led us into a discussion about Ukrainian beliefs concerning the cold. She kept trying to tell us that it was the cold that made people sick, not germs (she actually laughed at us when we said that germs were what made people sick). She finished the conversation by saying this: "There was another elder here who didn't believe me, so he went home and walked on cold tiles with bare feet. And he had to go home early with kidney problems!"

So, if there's one thing I can safely say I've learned during my time here, it's that having cold feet gives you kidney problems.

Well, we're still having trouble finding investigators, but it's definitely not from a lack of trying. I've already gotten three first lessons under my belt, although only one was promising at all. The first was to a guy who was so convinced he was already saved that the member we had on the lesson with us (a really cool returned missionary named Zhenya) laughed out loud at him; the second was to a man with a mouthful of gold teeth who told us that if we'd read more Tolstoy, we'd forget about all this Mormon stuff; and the third was earlier this week when we taught a lady and her husband. The husband wasn't really interested (he told us straight off that: "I'm an Atheist. I'm Pravoslavnic." Pravoslavnic is the Ukrainian name for the Orthodox church) but the wife seemed to gain some interest as we continued. Anyways, they haven't let us come back yet, which is sort of the story of my mission so far.

Let's see...I don't think I've talked about the transportation here yet, so let me describe that real quick. Here's the basic kinds of transportation here: there's trolleybuses (which are like regular big-city buses, except they're attached to cables running above the roads; they have the unfortunate tendency to come off the cables, and then you have to wait for the driver to reattach it), there's autobuses (which are like normal buses, or like trolleybuses without the cables), there's marshrutkas (which are like a cross between a very short bus or a very large van; they have routes and stops like buses, but they only stop if someone outside waves them down or if someone inside tells them to stop, so it's quicker than a bus, but it costs more), there's the metro (your typical subway, except when you get to downtown Kiev the metro stops are really deep underground, so you take these incredibly long escalators to get down to them), and there's tramvyes (which are like streetcars; they're all pretty old, and they don't work too well). Everything costs 50 kopek (about 10 cents) except for the marshrutkas, which cost about 1 gryven and 25 kopek (or twenty five cents).

Well, I'm doing well otherwise. I had a cold for a while that was really annoying, but other than that, things here are going great! I love you all, and good luck this week!

Love,

--Elder Brett Hurst

Hello Again (January 24, 2007)

Thank you everyone who sent me emails! It's always fun to get them. I enjoyed Quinn's quite a bit. Especially since I don't actually have to worry about spiders. Yet.

I experienced my first snow today. It wasn't very much, only about an inch, but it makes everything incredibly slippery. Thankfully, I have plenty of warm clothes, so that hasn't been a concern. Last week (or maybe the week before, I can't remember) we had some pretty strong winds. It was actually pretty fun...not very good for street contacting though...

Speaking of street contacting, yesterday I got two contacts within twenty minutes of each other; to put that into context, we're usually lucky to get one a day, and it's usually my companion who gets them. So, I was feeling pretty good about that, right up until it came time to teach our English class (we hold English classes every Tuesday and Thursday as a community service project), where I had to teach the beginner's class, and my companion accidentally told me to do the lesson they had had the week before, thus leaving me with an hour of spare time to fill. Which, as it turns out, is a long, long time when you're trying to teach people english.

And for some reason, there's a ton of crows everywhere! Usually, there's a few every so often, but lately, they've been coming out in droves. And these aren't your run-of-the-mill American crows; these are huge, with large gray beaks. Maybe they're actually ravens, I'm not sure, but they're everywhere! I'll try to get a good picture of them.

Things are going pretty well here. I've heard that other parts of Europe are having some energy problems, but we haven't experienced anything like that. It's actually been really warm here by Ukrainian winter standards; the worst weather we've had was when it was really windy, but even then it wasn't bad (definitely not as bad as it sounded like western Europe had...)

I went on exchanges last week with an elder whose family lived in Spain for about six years (in Seville, I think). It was fun to get to talk to him. I felt just a little out of my league when it came to speaking Spanish though...but that's okay, because there's an elder here from Switzerland who I speak German to, and almost every appliance here is made in Germany, so anything that's written on them is in German and, sometimes, English. Rarely Ukrainian or Russian, which just seems odd to me.

All right, well, I'd better get going. I love you all, and I'll write you again next week!

Love,

--Elder Brett Hurst

Pryvit! (January 17, 2007)

Hello again from Ukraine!

Well, things are going pretty well. Our area is very, very investigator-free, so we've been out finding quite a bit. The rumors circulating around say that our area is really difficult; it's just that much more of an adventure. I should probably describe what tracting is like for us. We'll go to an apartment building, choose a pidyeest, and then go to the door. Seeing as how they're products of the former Soviet Union, each pidyeest door is made of metal and has a punch code on it; since the fall of the USSR, the code is really useless, but instead of do something like change the door, they just kept them, code and all; luckily, and still owing to them being products of the Soviet Union, they're really easy to get into. It basically involves pushing in random buttons until the door unlocks itself. So, once we've cracked the code, we climb inside, where we enter a dark, shadowy, concrete landing about twelve feet by twelve feet. There's usually a few apartments here, a staircase, and an elevator. We'll take the elevator up to the top floor (an adventure in itself--most elevators here aren't very reassuring looking), and then, if we're lucky, there will be a hallway leading in both directions with about four apartments in each direction; if we're not lucky, the apartments will be behind another locked door with doorbells for all of the apartments inside. We ring the top doorbell, wait for the person to come outside and, without fail, yell, "Khto?!", which means "Who!?" We tell them, and then they either reject us, open the door, or as in one case, wait in the little hallway and warn anyone else we try to get that it's the missionaries and they shouldn't come out. Anyway, after we talk to the first person, we wait for their door to close and push the doorbell below theirs. It's kind of handy in a way; it's like Tracting Light, where you still work hard, but without all the walking. Anyway, we do this from the top floor down (it's referred to as "knocking down a building," as in knocking on the doors, not actually destroying the buildings...) and, if we have time, we move to the next pidyeest and start all over. Oh, and something else about the apartment buildings: no matter how nice the apartments are, no matter how expensive they are, the stairwells and the outside of the building are always covered in trash, grafitti, cigarettes, gum, needles, so that it always looks like your going into an abandoned, post-apocalyptic building right up until someone opens their apartment door and you see the really nice interior.

One thing that has taken no time to adjust to here is the food. It's definitely different than in the States, but in very good ways. I love it! Borscht is fantastic (red and green versions, especially with Smetana, which is like sour cream except it actually tastes good...), verenyky (sort of like ravioli in a way, but without a sauce...I think it's the Ukrainian version of pirogi, but I could be wrong) is delicious, and my favorite is pel'meny, which is like a smaller verenyky that you boil. Plus, Ukrainians love two things: juice, and sauces. Their juices are AMAZING (I'm addicted right now to "Morkva-Yabluchka," or "Carrot-Apple") and cheap (all of their food is really cheap, we can do a weeks worth of groceries for about thirty to forty gryven, and there's five gryven to a dollar). Also, I guess Ukrainians really like ketchup, because they have a half a million different varieties of it (the best: shashliky ketchup, or ketchup with onion flavor). They also have a lot of sauces we don't have, like Paprik sauce (I'm not even sure what's in it--paprika and something else, maybe smetana) which is, also, very good. I've started putting them on everything, especially scrambled eggs. Oh, and the bread here is fantastic! I buy these large round loaves for about a gryven eighty kopek (kopek are like our cents, in that it takes a hundred kopek to equal a gryven), which translates out to about thirty six cents, and there's this nice inactive lady we visited who gave us a lot of Ukrainian honey (more crystalized than our honey; REALLY good). It's really nice to come home after a long day and have a slice of bread with honey and a glass of carrot-apple juice, maybe with some pel'meny with ketchup and paprik...It's really good food. It's not fancy at all, but it tastes great.

Oh, and people here love techno. As in, they LOVE techno. Every bus, every marshrutka (like a large van, or a small bus), every store, and especially every internet club pumps out techno nonstop. Before long, you really start to miss what instruments sound like. (Unless "drumbeat machine" counts as an instrument).

Speaking of instruments, though, our ward had its Christmas party a week or two ago (it was for the Ukrainian christmas), and they had a string quartet from the ward play. They were incredible! People here really love music. It's too bad they only play techno.

Well, I've got to get going, but I love you all, and I'll write again next week!

Love,

--Elder Brett Hurst