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| A rundown well in Medvezhevushko |
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| Looking down the well |
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| The Temple card that the missionaries pass around |
It is starting to get colder here. It was pretty cold this week. Right now it is 0 C and is starting to snow a little bit. The river is starting to freeze back over. Which is cool cause that means we can now walk on it again. That also means that we can save some money on transportation. As far as teaching young kids.. yeah I do. We have an investigator, Nastya. She is ten years old. We found her through her Grandma, Sister Chalikh. She had a baptismal date for Feb. 11, but we had to drop it. She hasn't been coming to church, and well... you can't be baptized into a church that you never come to. She just can't get up early for church and we've been trying to get her grandma to help her, but she doesn't want to force anything on Nastya. I guess she thinks waking up Nastya is like forcing her to come to church. She always tells us "Elders it's not my desire. It is Nastya's desire to get up and come to church." And I was thinking to myself "It should be your desire too! She is your granddaughter!" But I can respect that she doesn't want to force anything, but she isn't being a huge source of encouragement for Nastya. They read the scriptures and pray together, which is good, but we just need her to come to church. So we are postponing the baptism until we can get her to come. One time Elder James and I went over to teach her and we did a little FHE with them. The plan was to teach the commandment: follow the Prophet. I brought over a Primary hymn book and we sang that hymn... "Follow the Prophet". But Sister Chalikh didn't know it and Elder James couldn't really read Ukrainian very well, because he is a Russian speaking missionary. So it was basically me serenading a ten year old girl with Primary hymns. Oh, Elder Munzer was in Kyiv when that was going on. We give her these origami things we make because Nastya loves origami. We gave her a paper origami airplane that Elder Fudge made. Sister Chalikh was playing with it the whole time during that lesson. I was like "So, Nastya, Jesus Christ commands us to follow the counsel of the prophets. Why?...." And Sister Chalikh was playing with the airplane, making engine noises and acting like she was a little kid again. And I was like "Uh... ok. Anyways..." As far as a Primary class... we used to have a Primary class, but not anymore. People don't really feel comfortable bringing their little ones. We have a couple of families, but the only full family that comes are the Madys. Katya Mady usually takes her kids outside in the hall to play. The Primary room is more like a babysitting room rather than an actual Primary.
I brought up at our District Meeting last week that I feel like we are just teaching a bunch of crazy people. This week has been pretty discouraging. Elder Munzer was in Kyiv again with Elder Fudge for most of the week. So there was only one companionship in the area, Elder James and myself. I got sick this week, so I wasn't very helpful either. We tried to give baptismal dates this week, but people just aren't taking them. I had one lesson with a Gospel English investigator, Alexander. We started off talking about the importance of God and families. I asked what he thought about families and how his family has blessed him and he went off talking about dogs and monkeys and evolution and Darwinism and how in some animal families the parents eat the children to survive and I thought... either my Ukrainian is really bad or this man is totally insane. Lena was there and her mouth was open in disbelief of what this guy was saying. She was laughing pretty hard, too. We had him read the Restoration pamphlet in English and he just responded with "hmm... interesting" every time he flipped a page. I thought that that idea was going no where, so I started asking him what he thought, if this was possible and he starting talking about how your brain can make things exist and how some people really can have super powers. We talked about faith and then he started talking about how people used to think the earth was the center of the universe and then about radio waves. I decided to give him a baptismal commitment anyway. I asked him if he would pray tonight to know if Joseph Smith really was a prophet, and if he knew it was true then would he be baptized. He was like "I have my bus in 10 min." Bummer. I double checked with Lena to make sure I heard him right about all the things he was saying. And yeah, I heard right. So he was just crazy. Makes me feel batter about my Ukrainian at least....
So yeah.. that's my week. Not very productive. Everyone was either dogging us or at work this week. And with only one companionship in the area, we didn't get a lot accomplished. Anyways, my health is doing good and Elder Munzer doesn't have Diabetes... which is good.
Love you!
Elder Zach McEntire
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