March 9, 2009

The first few days here we were in Donetsk, we stayed at the Office elders apartment. During the day we would be at the President's apartment with the A.P.'s. We had a lot of orientation stuff and talked about the mission. Pres and Sis Fry are awesome. It was alot of fun getting to know them. And the Assistants were way cool. Anyways, now we are in the beautiful, majestic city of Gorlovka. It's a really dirty city, but I heard that's how most the cities in our mission are, and there's nothing really here except people, so it's perfect for missionary work. Church was a really cool, new experience. There were about 30 people there, including the 4 missionaries. There are 2 branches in Gorlovka, 4 missionaries serve in ours, and 2 serve in the other, so 3 companionships cover the city. But in our branch, and I think the other branch has similar numbers, there are around 25 active members of about 175! Yea, I know, I couldn't believe it when I heard that either. We're really going to have to work hard to change that. The old missionaries left us 1 investigator, but they didn't put any info in the area book, so we're still waiting to get all their information. My comp is really cool, and everyone says he's a really good missionary so it will be good to work with him. We spent the first 6 hours of our first day spring cleaning our ENTIRE apartment, and I mean ALL of it. We were cleaning out like 10 years worth of missionaries junk, but it looks way better now. Our first night here, we had a Branch party because it was Women's Day here. It consisted of the Branch president and his active counselor giving spiritual thoughts and reciting poems about women, the missionaries singing hymns in English and Russian, and this one kid playing songs on the guitar.
This one guy, Andre, came who heard about it. We talked to him for a while, meaning my comp and I just nodded a lot. No, I’m kidding, I talked to him for a little bit, I can get by if they use hand gestures. . . usually. He came back the nest day for church and stayed for all 3 hours, but he went to the other branch, but we were still so happy. I guess his family left him and he lost his job so he decided he needed to turn to God. Hey, at least this economy is humbling somebody. And we're also working with this guy Sasha. This was also my trainers first area in the mission when he was a greeny, and they baptized Sasha. He's still really active, he spoke on Sunday, but he's started smoking again. So we're working with him on that and we taught him a lesson after church. He doesn't have legs so we take him back to his house after church, and he's cool. I'm doing good though. I’m adjusting surprisingly well to the time change and food. And its way less dangerous here than what I heard and thought. Hardly any of the missionaries here have even been robbed. My area hasn't seen a baptism in a long time. My trainer said he doesn't think it's been since he was a greeny here, but we're going to work as hard as possible to change that