Week 18 - Sanders...I Like the Sound of That

This week flew by for real.

Monday:

Normal P-Day. We had family home evening with the Fushtei family. They fired up their new barbecue and made some super good pork and chicken. It's the most that I've eaten on my mission I think. We went through some straight-up wilderness to get to their house from the bus stop. You can kinda see the bridge in the dark in the picture. Bridges here are just a bunch of wood stapled and nailed together and just set across any body of water. It feels like you're walking on a diving board and you never know if it's gonna snap on you. We ate at Decyatka and it was super tasty as always. I've spent more money there than anywhere else in Ukraine for sure. The ice cream is SO GOOD. 

Tuesday:

We had all our meetings and skype calls on as usual. English practice was especially awesome. We split up into our three groups, and Elder Lukach and I teach the beginners. This young family of 4 came in late to our class. After the lesson we were just talking with them. The dad was super funny and thought that our English jeopardy was awesome for some reason. They asked us why we have so many pictures of Jesus in our church building. Elder Lukach and I were so excited to teach them. We started talking about the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and it was awesome. Then a couple of the other kids from our class gathered around too and started to listen. By the end of the lesson we had 7 people listening to us teach them. It was so cool to watch and listen and to teach them too. They even prayed with us, took a Book of Mormon, and said they would for sure come back next week and talk more about what they were going to read. We're super excited to be working with them. The Lord really does prepare you to cross paths with people who are ready and willing to learn about Him and his teachings.

Wednesday:

Exchanges! Today we finally got a scheduled LESSON with our Grandma Anna. She works handing out newspapers and loves us a lot. she always wants to hear a spiritual thought from us and calls us her sons. She's awesome. She is usually kind of passive with learning and accepting invitations though - always excited to see and talk with us but never really GOING anywhere with what we teach her. But today we set up a lesson for Sunday and we were super excited to finally teach her in a more normal and spiritual setting. (We usually talk with her in the middle of the streets downtown while she's working.) Elder Frehner came to Ivano with us. He's such a beast! We ate at Decyatka together. No surprise there. We are very similar so talking and catching up is always super fun. We did an English activity on the streets and handed out our cards like crazy. We probably went through 1000 cards at least. Then, we put in work and had a race to see who could hand them out the fastest. Honestly started sweating cause we were going around so fast and nonstop. Hoping for a big turnout next week.

Thursday:

We ate at Decyatkas again! They gave us free drinks as a thank you from the chef. Missionaries have been eating there for 10 years now. they really like us! It's really the DOPEST restaurant. 

Friday:

Our sports night got cancelled due to massive rains so we had a game night instead. It was a huge turnout. not. haha. It was all the missionaries and one very drunk girl. We played music, and some games too, like Ukrainian monopoly. Let's just say American monopoly is a lot better...especially when all of the players are sober. FUNNY STORY: so this girl was DIGGIN  Elder Sanders. Everyone was low key super uncomfortable. Everyone just kinda ignored everything and played it off really well. Then, as we were wrapping up and cleaning  she walks up and says "Elder Sanders, look!" and she was wearing his name tag that she took off of his suit coat that was hanging in the other room. He was like "uhhhh that's my name tag why are you wearing it?" and she said "I dunno.. I like it! It's fun. I want a nametag too." and she kinda just walked along playing with it. Then she was like "hmm. Sanders.. I really like the sound of that". I LOST IT.  The other elders and I made eye contact and just DIED. I said to Elder Sanders "Man.. 'Sanders'.. it really does sound good!" He was so embarrassed and it was just so funny. Now every time that we say his name or hear it, Elder Lukach and I say, "Sanders.. I like the sound of that!" - with a super big eyebrow raise. Also, it's his birthday!!! happy birthday to Elder Sanders. 

Saturday:

Filled with a lot of lessons which is so good!!

Sunday:

Church was really good. We had Sasha come to church with us. He's going back into the army really soon so we'll try and help him progress as much as possible! A ton of rain today. Anna, our Grandma, wasn't feeling good so she couldn't meet with us. We see her just about every day on the street so it's okay! President Rizley will be here with us next week on Sunday, which will also be General Conference too. So excited!

It was a really good week! Yesterday I finished reading the Doctrine and Covenants. It was a super awesome experience. Reading the scriptures is one of the best testimony builders about prophets and especially Joseph Smith. We see the power of revelation, and the relationship God has with not only the prophets and apostles, but all of His children around the world. He truly speaks to us and we have everything we need to lead us through this life. I hope everyone has the chance to hear from the Lord's prophets and apostles this next week during General Confrence. TAKE NOTES. Read. Study. And then reread and restudy. This is our Heavenly Father giving us guidance for our day. Pray for an answer to something. He will provide YOU specifically with something that you need to hear. And after you pray for it, that's just the beginning. LOOK for it. Watch and listen to Conference. Go back and read it online too! Take what you read and apply it in every way that you can. Your answer will be received. Then, give thanks through prayer. Keep applying what you learned. You'll realize that you can do this every day for the rest of your life! Having a knowledge and testimony of current prophets is such a huge blessing and comfort to me, and everyone.

Godspeed.

Elder Stott

Picture of our church chapel

Week 17 - A Hard Week

What's Up Everybody!

Okay so this week was just hard. For sure one of the toughest here in Ukraine. So far. haha.

Monday 11th:

P-Day was a good one. Pretty normal. We had FHE at the Bontsov family's house and I ate probably the best food I've had on my mission. She is such a good cook! We had chicken and potatoes and then this SUPER good homemade cake with bananas and peaches inside. Dang it was so good. They showed me pictures and videos of the hurricanes in the US. I had no idea about them. I hope everyone is keeping those who are affected in their prayers.

Tuesday 12th:

Tuesdays always go buy super fast. We have meetings, Skype calls, and English practice all in one day so it always flies bye. English practice is going super well though, we hand out English cards like crazy. It's always so funny to try to give people a card and they're just so automatic about saying no but then they walk past and they're like "Wait what? Free English practice?"...and inside you're just like "yuppp that's right. Not what you thought. You walk back here and take this card." hahah so good. We're getting a lot of people showing up. I teach the beginner class which is always super fun. There are just simply some sounds Ukrainians can't make. Just like me in Ukrainian...makes sense.

Wednesday 13th:

We had surprise cleaning checks. We were NOT ready. We hopped on a bus and booked it very slowly to Epicenter (Ukrainian Ikea) and bought a bunch of cleaning stuff and things that were missing from our apartment. We looked kinda funny holding a mop and broom coming back from the store. We got more funny looks than usual! And just so everyone knows, we did pass our cleaning check. I had to teach elder Lukach the importance of sweeping before mopping...yeah that was a mess. We made it though. I know my mom is super proud. We slammed that night too...it's hard to explain, but I'll take pic this week. It's so tasty. Always respect the slam.

Thursday 14th:

Exchanges! I was with elder Galafent on Thursday. We hit the ground running that day and put in work!! Mormonchik (touchy guy at the park) got pushed over and we were pretty sure he broke his hip. He grabbed the wrong lady and got his fair share. It drew a ton of attention and was actually kinda sad. We were happy to see him right back to work the next day though. Mormonchik is just a beast - Literally an Ivano Frankivsk LEGEND.

Friday 15th:

Friday was pretty normal. Yeah this is starting to get weird. We've got to find a way to spice up the Fridays. Sports night was good as always and I'm starting to get used to the streetball life. I'll have to show you all how terrible this court is next week.

Saturday 16th:

THE hardest day of my mission. Literally every single thing on our schedule fell through completely. We walked around contacting EVERYONE for about 8 hours that day. It was the first time I can truly say that NO ONE wanted to talk to us. It was our second exchange and I was with Elder Sanders. That Elder is a beast. Never stops and we used every second that day. We both kept saying how everything was just a trial of our faith, and boy did I feel that. But we just kept going no matter what. We met a really neat guy at the VERY end of the day. Andri. He was super interested and was the first person that I've contacted 100% by myself. We were walking past him and then we stopped at a crosswalk. It's always kind of awkward trying to talk to people but I'm getting over it. I handed him a free English card, and thought that was it. He read the card and then came up and asked me about it. We kept walking and talking and then waited at his bus stop with him. We ended up teaching him about the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He even missed his bus so he could keep talking with us. We're excited to start teaching him. The Lord truly provides after we do as much as possible.

Sunday:

Sunday was also a toughie. We planned on having a baptism, but since Wednesday we haven't heard anything from Roman. We interviewed him on Tuesday and he was so ready and excited and happy to be baptized. Since Wednesday we called several times but his phone is off, and he wasn't home when we tried to visit Sunday morning. So, we had no baptism that day, and we're really worried about him. Please keep him in your prayers. 

Tough weeks are good for the soul! Everything is truly just a trial of our faith.

Sorry for no pics this week. I'll make up for it this week.

Godspeed!!

Elder Stott

Week 16 - Gotta Have Faith

First transfer is finished! Luckily I get the chance to stay here in Ivano Frankivsk. We got 3 new missionaries in our district so I'll have to get a picture with them! Sister Morris, Sister Mitchell, and Elder Galafant. It's a good group of missionaries!

I liked the setup of last week's email so I think I'm gonna keep doing that! 

Monday 4th:

I finally became legal in Ukraine! I got my Pocilka or Ukrainian passport so I won't get kicked out of the country! It's a good feeling. Random: There are more and more American cars here every day and Elder Lukach and I have decided that Ford Fusions (sport version of course) are our new dream car. It's nice to have a regular car be your dream car. We went bowling right under a night club (thank goodness it was day time). I swear this was the GREASIEST place! hahah They literally oiled the ball after every roll. I figured out how to spin a bowling ball. I might have bowled a 52, but anyways.

Tuesday 5th:

Update on the Special Service of Ukraine. We got a call from our branch president to go to the church and set up for an interview with a representitive from the SSU. We didn't talk to him but our branch president did. Everything is OKAY. We got roasted a little bit because some guy made a news article online about Mormons in Ivano Frankivsk and it got sent to SSU, but everything got figured out. 

Quick story time: So there is this CRAZY dude who stands on the street every day - with his cane, and says "give me your coins" over and over. We found out very soon that if you walk too close to him, he's a grabber. We call him Mormonchik. He likes to pinch butts. We walk pretty far from him, but he always calls out to us. He's pretty crazy. This week he said the funniest thing, but you'd have to HEAR him and his funny voice. Basically "Mormons, mormons, let me touch you". We both just LOST it. It was literally the funniest thing this week. What a guy.

Wednesday 6th

I finished the Book of Mormon from cover to cover since the beginning of my mission! It was such a great experience. It's just all so simple and true. Was a huge testimony builder for me. I know that any time we put into reading can bless our lives more than anything else. I'll share more at the end. I also almost got hit by a car. Street lights are kinda sketch here in Ukraine. One of the crosswalk lights turns green before the car's light turns red. hahah. 

  

Thursday 7th:

Pretty normal day. I had my first scary mission food experience. The personal prayer I was saying in my heart was the most sincere prayer over food I've ever had. Forget about "nourishing and strengthening my body"-- I'm just trying not to DIE here! We taught a wonderful sister in our branch and after the lesson she said that she prepared a dish for us! So awesome! She asked us if we like mushrooms. Oh no. "Love them!", I responded. (Mushrooms are hands down THE worst food on the face of this planet. I can't even think about them). Next thing we knew, we were scooping a mixture of 25% mushrooms, 25% onions, and 50% slime into a crepe. I was praying non-stop. I couldn't even look at it. SOMEHOW I finished one of them. These things would literally slip out of your mouth. They were so slimy that when I tried to bite it, it wouldn't work. Kind of like squeezing a bar of soap. They were literally impossible to eat. Even as i'm typing this I just got goosebumps thinking about it. Okay, so anyways I downed one of them. She left the room to get berries. THANK YOU. Then, she dished up more on my plate. "THANK YOU"  I thought I could sneak some berries in my mouth to help overcome the mushrooms, but that idea backfired and made it even WORSE, and it just ruined the berries. Anyways...she left the room again, I looked at Elder Lukach and just said "I can't do this". I picked up my plate, scooped all that goo back into the pot, leaving some on my plate, scattered it around to make it look like I ate it all. I still had the remnants of my second crepe in my mouth after 10 minutes of chewing and gagging. I am, however, alive. I survived and I really am so thankful that she was willing to feed us. Afterwards, we went straight to the store and just bought the first thing we could find to replace the aftertaste. The Lord provides a way. Always. hahaha

Friday 8th

This seems to be a common occurrence, but nothing really that big happened on Friday. We played basketball at sports night. Good times!

Saturday 9th

We went fishing with Andri! We went to a cool spot and it was super fun! We got to teach him afterwards too. Hopefully my mom posts the video of the fish I snagged. It's literally crazy. 

Another story: So we planned to go and help out at an orphanage and it was pretty far so we ordered a taxi. The driver shows up in this Soviet car called a Volga. This car literally put-putted to the orphanage. He just got his license and this was his first drive. He got lost 4 times, and the car died twice. We had to push it to restart it - which was super fun. it ended up being slower and 10 times as expensive as the bus would've been. And after that, the orphanage turned us away. Because we were Mormon. The nuns said they didn't want the children asking about who we were to spark "dangerous interests". They were so open and happy for our help until we got there and they found out we were missionaries. It was sad because these kids deserved so much more than they had. Hopefully we'll get the chance to help out some way or another.

Sunday 10th

Church was good. I played the musical number I was supposed to last week. Then they asked me to be the piano player for the primary too. One of the sister missionaries used to play, but she's gone now so I filled the spot! Fun to help out any way I can here.

So about Book of Mormon!!

At the end of the Book of Mormon the prophet Moroni talks about praying about the Book of Mormon and receiving a witness of its truthfulness through the power of the Holy Ghost. Although I had read it a ton before and already felt that it was true, I wanted to pray and simply find out for myself if every single word on every page is the truth. I said a super sincere prayer and simply asked. But I didn't receive any answers, and I wrote this in my journal: "I didn't get any big or grand answer. I simply just felt peace." I was almost a little bit disappointed. I had worked super hard to read as much as I could every day. The next day I decided to start reading the Doctrine and Covenants just the same - cover to cover. I read 5 sections and called it good, but saw that I still had some time left, so I read the next section too. And boy am I glad that I did. In this section, Oliver Cowdery had prayed to Heavenly Father to receive a witness of the Book of Mormon for himself. I'll just write Heavenly Father's response to him:

D&C 6:22-23: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, if you desire a further witness, cast your mind upon the night that you cried unto me in your heart, that you might know concerning the truth of these things. Did I not speak PEACE unto your mind concerning the matter? What greater witness can you have than from God." 

Wow. Sometimes we are going to want big grand manifestations in our lives. Answers to questions, and sometimes all we want is physical PROOF. A lot of times people want to be proven something or convinced of the truth of our message. They want missionaries to "prove" it to them. That is the last thing that we want to (or can) do as missionaries. Where is the faith in that? If we had a perfect knowledge of it, we wouldn't need faith because we would just know. That's not what Heavenly Father wants. Faith is the first principle of the Gospel. Without faith, we simply cannot progress. The PROOF that people want comes through acting. DOING something. Not having someone else prove it to you. I know that when we have that faith, taking any step forward in that faith will bring us blessings 10x bigger than the step we took. The proof is right there. Simply reading and praying, that can take no longer than 5 minutes, can bring us incomparable peace and comfort. What greater witness could we possibly receive? Faith leads to action. Action leads to repentance. Repentance leads to change. Change leads to becoming better. Becoming better and growing is the purpose of our life here on the earth. Achieving our purpose allows us to live with Heavenly Father again. If you are lost, in a mess, or just struggling, why would you not start at step one? First, we need faith. Hold onto any amount of faith that we can have, and let it take us through this life, and THROUGH each of our trials. Simply have faith.

Have a great week.

Elder Stott

Biggest catch of the day

Week 15 - Roaches and Potatoes

Yeah so this week was a roller coaster as always. I found out what hard physical labor truly is. Weeding in the backyard is nothing to me anymore after this week. I'll just do a day by day sorta deal for this week. 

Monday: Elder Newton, a RM who served here 2 years ago came to visit! He took us to lunch at the famous Десятка and it was way good. We all got so much food! He had a ton of cool and crazy stories and it got me way pumped! On the way home that night, there was a guy who was out playing his guitar and singing (there's a ton of people doing stuff on the streets all day). As we were walking past he started singing in English! Some song from Nirvana and it was SO sick. I had to stop and give him an English practice card after his song. It was so dope to talk to him. He's from Kiev and was fluent in English. Made my day.

Tuesday: So like 3 weeks ago we found this "beetle" in our kitchen. Elder Lukach was TRIPPIN. He asked me if it was a cockroach. I said "No way Elder Lukach that's a beetle right there" - and then I killed it. (That thing was definitely a cockroach, but Elder Lukach didn't need to know!)  Important fact: cockroaches are Elder Lukach's BIGGEST fear...like HUGE fear. So we don't see anymore for a week, but the next week there was ANOTHER one in the same place. It was bigger though. A couple of days after that, we walked in the kitchen and there were like 4 baby ones walking around on the counter by the sink. Elder Lukach was losing his marbles. He goes to pick up a rag to squish them and ON the rag is the FATTEST cockroach I have ever seen. Elder Lukach was off his rocker at this point.  "Ohhhhhh no Elder Stott!" Long story short, today we spent a large sum of money on Raid. Elder Lukach used a whole can within 15 minutes. My lungs stung. We also bought more traps and haven't seen them since. All of this is funny because the apartment we were supposed to be living in got cancelled because of all the cockroaches, so we moved here instead. Now every day we leave our lights on in the kitchen because they don't really come out in the light. I honestly don't really care about them anymore but Elder Lukach won't use the kitchen now. Happy Birthday to my amazing momma too. U rock.

Wednesday: We went out to the village to do service. I was STOKED because this was my first service project. We showed up to a field that I thought was empty. I didn't really know what we were going to be doing. Their language is WHACK out in the celo and it's super hard to understand. They said we were going to farm potatoes for a couple of hours. I was stoked because I could only see maybe 500 potatoes within eyesight. And THEN these grandmas starting hoeing the ground...there were infinity. These grandmas go HARD working non-stop and I couldn't keep up with them. We hoed these potatoes for 5 hours and I was cooked. It was super hot, super dirty, super sweaty. They were so nice and called us their sons. I am now a firm believer that age is simply a number. These бабусяs were straight BEASTS!! We filled like 50 pillowcases.

Thursday: We had an activity where we draw a huge plan of salvation on the ground in the street with chalk and just talk to people about it - or attempt to talk to people about it. This grandpa came outta nowhere and told us to go back to America. A lot of old people actually do that. He called us Mormon paratroopers. Well, he ended up calling the Special Service of Ukraine (the FBI of Ukraine) on us and saying all this stuff about us. Our Branch President has a meeting with a SS member next week! All will be good - we're not worried at all. Also we walked past another guy on the way home and he says, "Mormons right?" I was STOKED. Turns out that he's here from Detroit to study medicine. He's also on the city league basketball team. He asked for our number and we might go play some ball with him at the gym!! Such a cool guy. 

Friday: I'm sorry but literally nothing great happened on Friday. I did spend 2 dollars on food that day which is an all-time record for me. haha

Saturday: We had a senior missionary couple from Lviv come visit us and give a fireside. It was super good but there were a lot of technical problems. PLANNING IS IMPORTANT PEOPLE. They gave awesome talks about family history. Family History work is so amazing and SO important!

Sunday: Our plans crashed, but church was awesome and we had a good day. There was a HUGE thunderstorm that night. My backpack is drying on the fan right now. The weather is starting to change. I was supposed to play a musical number for church but people bore their testimonies non-stop until the end! Win-win. But I'm playing next week.

Pretty boring week. Not much happened. Hopefully more things happen next week! 

That was a joke.

Have a good one!

Elder Stott the Cockroach Exterminator