Hello again! another week come and gone! crazy crazy. This week has been quite an eventful one, and i will tell you about that all a little later. So, thank you thank you for those pictures!! i loved them! I was actually thinking the other day that i wanted to see some pictures of y'all, cause i felt like i hadn't seen you in forever! crazy that even in those picutres the kids look so grown up! and ange looks so old! i guess it is cause she turned 16. wow time flies. I can't believe that y'all do fun stuff without me!! little stinkers! haha jk. You all look great and look like you are having fun and doing well. And man! aren't terence and rhen just big studs getting their pictures taken with all sorts of people! man i love those boys and wish i could be there for that fun stuff. Oh well, i am having a lot of excitement out here too!! Looks like ange had a crowd at her party. it was really weird to see that picture in the front room and see the carpet. no one here has carpet. They all just have cement floors that are painted, or that have some type of linoleum on them. Our home is probably 6 times the size of the apts here. kinda crazy.
So as of now i am with a temporary companion, and president is in the works of trying to figure out what to do. My old companions mother has been suffering from cancer for the past few years, and in the last months it has gotten pretty bad. they thought she might need to come home, and then tues. morning she got the call from her father that she needed to come home. So tues. we scrambled and got everything packed up for her, and then she was on a flight back to canada in just a few short hours. Sadly, she will probably not be coming back. She only had a few months left on her mission, and so I think they set her apart and were just going to give her an honorable release from her mission. My heart aches for her and her family and what they are going through. So now we have an odd number of sisters in the mission and i don't have a companion. So thank goodness the Lowry's just live down stairs, and i stayed with them for the rest of tues. then we grabbed a young single adult girl from the branch who is now my temporary companion for yesterday and today. Tomorrow there are sisters coming down from lipsitcks for zone conference, so they will be my companions i think for tomorrow and sat until president figures something out. I don't know what he will figure out, but we will see! We thought maybe he might stick me with a 3-some somewhere, but then that would take the sisters away from investigators here who are working towards baptism. So we will see. I'll keep you updated. I heard they might give me a mini missionary that i could help train. Which is extremely scary for me because i don't know any russian and need someone to train me!!! i don't know what i am doing! but we will see. As long as i know where i live and how to get back home then i should be good right? haha. So they turned off the hot water yesterday for 2 weeks! yahoo!!! so now we get to do it the old fashioned way and boil water and take a nice sponge bath for the next two weeks. Should be fun!! I don't know why the government just turns stuff off randomly. It's weird. but, oh well, you just deal with it.
Dad, you had asked about english lessons. We teach some private lessons throughout the week and also have an english club at the church on fridays. Honestly, english is a good way to get people to come to the church building and get them interacting with church members. It is often hard to introduce them to the gospel right off the bat, cause many times they are very against any of that kind of stuff. But if you can get them to do english with you, then sometimes you can work in gospel topics and try to get them interested in having gospel discussions. We usually just advertise by making little fliers and then we go street contacting and just talk to people and ask them if they learn english and if they would like to come to a free english club. Usually the younger kids like it the best. and yes, i had said something about teaching piano lessons. And we all thought that would be a good idea. But we haven't gotten anything started yet since all the confusion with the companions, but once stuff settles down a little bit (if it ever does haha) then with my new companion hopefully we can get that started. the hard thing with piano and english is some times you can just have eternal lesson takers who don't want to know anything about the gospel but still want to learn piano. So you just don't want to end up with a bunch of lessons that aren't going anywhere as far as teaching the gospel. So we will see. And dad, i love your OWL(obedient, work, love people). I think about it often, and try my best to do that.
So, onto our investigators. Kacenya wants to get ready to be baptized on the 12th of june!! I am excited. Her husband doesn't understand though why she needs to be baptized if she is already a good person. So We are trying to work with her and get her ready. Hopefully i get a companion soon so we can really get to workin. And we have another young investigator, Nastia, who is the sister of a young man in the ward who just got baptized in oct. their uncle is a younger man who just got married in the temple to a young girl, and they are in our ward too. So between them and their brother they have been talking to her about the gospel. We had family home evening with them monday night, and Nastia asked if she could get baptized!! it was crazy! we just met her the sunday before, and we haven't taught her any of the lessons. But she wants to be baptized on the 12th, and so we are going to do the best we can to teach her all the lessons and get her ready by then. I am very excited, and she is the sweetest girl ever. See what can happen when you get the ward members to help find people and get their family and friends interested in the gospel?!!! miracles happen. It has been tough to find referrals through the ward members, but when it happens it is wonderful. i am very excited for nastia. These people are so strong. Nastia and her brother anton both go to a university and live together here in voronezh. their mother died 5 years ago from cancer, and their father lives in some other city. Anton's face lite up when his sister asked about baptism, I am very happy for them. And their uncle was able to do the temple work for their mother in the finland temple. It is amazing the humbling circumstances that the people here live in, and how strong some of them are. It is amazing. It is exciting to see the hope that the gospel brings to people's lives when the world can be so depressing.
The other day we were contacting, and we stopped a young girl. An old man heard what we were talking about and started yelling at us and saying don't you talk to our young people about stuff like that! We get that alot. You will be talkin to someone and then someone walking by will hear and then think it is part of their business to come save the other person from what you are saying. So he was telling us that we can talk to old people about our church all we want, but please don't corrupt our young people with your american church. They are the only hope we have from russia, we don't want them to all be Americanized. Well, we lost a contact because of that, but it gave me a little look into the minds of the people here. Russian people love their country, just like we love america. And they see the church as a threat to their country, because if the young people join, they will many times move to america and leave their russian culture behind. It is true, and i can understand how that is hard. A lot of times the strong young members here move to america, or find an american spouse and eventually end up leaving russia for america also. So i can see why the older people think this american church is destroying their country, but at the same time they just don't understand that that is exactly the opposite of what we are trying to do. We are trying to build a strong base of the church here in russia, so that when people join the church they have support here, and they can find a spouse here, and grow up and build the church here in russia. But now that is kind of difficult. there just aren't many good members here to marry, so many times people will go out to america and find a spouse there. I continue to pray that the young people here will be able to find themselves a good spouse here and be able to build the gospel in their own homeland.
Well family, i love you and have rambled on too long. thank you for all of your emails and pictures!! oh, happy late b-day gma!!!!!!!!! i thought about you on tues. and i hope you know that i love you! oh and mom, i need to get you the correct address for the mission office. Yes, you should be able to send stuff there and it should be ok. Usually people are in and out of the office every couple weeks or so and pick up the mail for their cities. So it may take a while to get here, but it would get here. I have heard that sometimes people will put a picture of Christ on there too, and it makes them a little more nervous about taking something. But as long and you don't ever send anything really valuable you should be ok. Well love you all!! have a great week! dallin, where is my email?!!! haha. love you!
RUSSIA MOSCOW WEST MISSION
Muravskaya Street, Bldg. 1 Floor 3
Moscow 125310
Russia
Until next week! Loves!
Sister Brown
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