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