Nov 16 - Mud, Mud, and More Mud

My new comp is Elder Clarkstone from Niagra Falls, Canada, as you already know. He's cool and we've been having fun together. I'm putting him to work and I'm going to have him perform a musical number on the piano his first Sunday here. It'll be good, we're going to have a great transfer. . . mostly of tracting and finding investigators, but great nonetheless. This weekend was District Conference (Stake Conf) for all of Harkov, so that was cool to see such a big gathering of the Saints here. The talks were good, I hate translating though. It's such good practice, but it's so draining, I feel like I can't remember anything they talk about because you just are so focused on trying to spit out the right words and you only focus on a phrase at a time. But I'm sure the talks were really good. I translated for this cool kid I'm good friends with, Guillermo. He's a student here from Ecuador and Saturday night he opened his misison call. He's going to Ecuador but a different place than where he's from. The Galapagos Islands are in his mission, how sweet would it be to serve there? Anyways, training has been fun, he's a very chill, down to earth kid. Ha, and he's a fearless contacter, it's so great to watch. He like jumps out in front of people so they can't really walk around him and he yells hello with a huge smile and even a bigger American accent. It's awesome, I love it. Our first day together was crazy. Our phone is broken and the alarm didn't go off, even though it was set. So we didn't wake up on time, but it's not like we slept in late. I still woke up then let him sleep longer because President tells us to let them get their sleep to catch up on jet lag. It was funny though because no missionary wants to not wake up on time his first day in the field, so he jumped right out of bed once he woke up and saw it was past 6:30, like he had just done something really bad. It was so funny, reminded me a lot of when I first came here. Then District Conference was in center, which is far away from our apartment, and Guillermo opened his call afterwards. So we were coming home late and the girls from our branch, Veeka, Fatema, and this investigator in our branch that they are good friends with, came home with us, well, to the subway because we all had to go back to the XTZ area. So we're all talking and laughing about stuff, but of course he doesn't understand anything because these girls are the fastest Russian speakers on the planet. It was fun, but then we got off the stop and we are walking back to our apartment by ourselves now. It's already way late, and it's so muddy everywhere because it's been raining for a few days straight. And when it rains here, ukraine becomes one of the muddiest places in the world. And you probably guessed it already, as we are walking home on my comps first night in country he slips and eats it into this huge mud pile. he got duked in mud and it soaked through his suit and it was even all over his garments. ha ha, it was so funny, we were laughing so hard. I'm glad I have a comp who could laugh it off and not get upset about it. So yea, great week. We have another good week set up, meeting with lots of members and trying to find those elect.