"I'm just hoping that I can do some lasting good in this area before I leave it"

Family!

Hey, so it's the week after Thanksgiving.  Yup.

I spent Thanksgiving with one other American, and a bunch of Russians/Ukrainians.  Actually it was kind of surreal.  They didn't even really know the story of why we even have Thanksgiving.  Elder Solin and Efoshkin (also Russian) both were just happy for a chance to have a ton of food.

We made our own Thanksgiving out here in Lugansk!  Nielson and I split up the essentials and created a Thanksgiving feast, complete with mashed potatoes, gravy (thanks to those gravy packets!), corn, turkey, pie, stuffing.. the works!  It was very filling.  And awesome.  It was most definitely awesome.  Oh, and I wanted to let Mom know that I only cut my hand  three times when making the food.  I'm not quite as talented as her, but I'm on my way.  I hope they scar- so I can have the most random story for a scar ever!  I was slicing potatoes... in Post Communist territory... for Thanksgiving...  Yup, it was a good time.  A member donated a turkey to our cause, which was fantastic! 

In other news, I had my first real, spur of the moment discussion with a little Russian kid this week!  After a lesson with a family in the branch, we were all sitting around looking at pictures and stuff.  A little girl, Lera, came up to me and started pulling me around, showing me all of her favorite toys and things.  Her birthday was the following day, and she was just bouncing off the walls with excitement.  By the way, she was turning six.  She reminded me a lot of Joseph.  Especially since the whole time she was dressed in a makeshift superhero costume with a cape and all.  So, yeah, that probably doesn't sound nearly as exciting as it does in my head.  But it was a huge landmark for me.

Oh, and we got a piano this week for our apartment!  Long story short, there has been this piano outside our neighbor's door for about a year now.  We asked them this week if we could use it, and they said we could have it!  Our apartment is now complete.  Besides the fact that we don't have an oven.  Or a guitar.  No home is complete without a guitar.  But, besides that, you know.

Roman has been doing awesome.  We've had two lessons with him this week, and he's brought a friend to one of them and his five year old son was there both times!  It's so nice to see his life coming together with the Gospel.  And he was absolutely beaming every time we discussed gospel principles.  It's lessons like those that make all the other random little lessons that nothing comes out of worth it. 

Russian is definitely messing with my English.  I can feel it seeping in and corrupting everything.  It's not helping my cause that I have had only Russian companions.  Don't get me wrong, that's not a terrible thing-  What is terrible is trying to say something in your native language and not finding the words you need.  So, I've been studying English grammar along with my companion.  I'm really surprised at all the things we have in English, like the billions of little nuances that make up verb tenses.  We are so blessed to be native speakers of English, I can't even begin to describe it.  That's not a blessing that I ever thought I would admit to having, but there you go.

Over all, things are doing good here.  We're halfway through this transfer, and we're in the swing of things.  I'm just hoping that I can do some lasting good in this area before I leave it (since I'm most likely getting transferred in two weeks). 

I love the Ukrainian people I'm serving.  And I love you all as well.  I'm very grateful to have a great support back home, you don't even know.  Lots of elders don't even have that.  So thank you.

Until next week,

Elder Brandon Porter


I thought this was interesting.  In my letter I asked him about his observations about why the Eastern Europeans generally have a hard time making the decision to embrace the gospel. This is what Brandon replied to me in a letter:

Our investigators are doing fine.  It's really hard for a lot of them to see why there had to be a restoration of the truth.  Most people that we talk to say something along the lines of, "God should have just one big church that has all of His authority on the earth".  We get really excited and tell them that that church DOES exist, and that's our message.  But they have a really hard time accepting the fact that it's not the ONLY church out there, saying that God should combine all churches into one.  I feel like that attitude is a bit of a left over from the Communist Era, where anything "good" was standardized.  People tell us occasionally about how that was pretty awesome for them, not having to make little decisions.  But for the most part, everyone is generally very thoughtful and careful about what they associate themselves with, which is a very good trait for someone who is a potential new convert.