First off, Happy Mothers Day! Woot! I hope
you're all treating Mom very well for me this week. Not that you
shouldn't be nice the rest of the year... but right now especially!
I'm going to be talking to you all this next Thursday, so
this email will be slightly shorter than usual. I just wanted to
relate a little bit of an experience from yesterday.
We had a District Conference this last Sunday. There's a new Eastern
European President, and he's touring around a bit to get to know the
missions he's over, and this Conference was all of the branches under
the Donetsk District coming together. This was such an amazing experience. If you didn't already know, all of the branches that I've
served in fall under this district, so I got to see literally every
member of the church that I've ever been around in the Ukraine. It's so nice to go and
talk to people I met while in the Office and find that they have some
sort of good memories from my serving with them, which shows me that I
succeeded in balancing my time between Office work and missionary work
well. It was awesome to see Lugansk there too. Just in the four months since I left, there's
some visible growth in the members. Z, one of the youth, seems
like she's grown up a bit in maturity, and the new branch president is
doing well.
The person I was most excited to see was H,
the Nigerian member in Lugansk. He found me and gave me a big hug. He
told me that when I left he had gotten all prepared to just be forgotten
by me since I was no longer serving around him, but that when I sent
him that English hymnbook he felt like he had a real friendship with
me. I talked with him a bit and found out that his plan is to start up a
medical practice over in Germany when he graduates, which will be just
after I leave next year. He's studying German now. In Ukraine. Go
figure. I definitely am going to be life friends with Gabriel. And I
got really excited to find out he'll be in Germany. We discussed plans
of visiting him when he's settled there. I'm excited!
So yeah, good weekend there. I got very pumped up seeing everyone. Made me feel like I'm actually making a difference! Yay!
Well, that's my big thing this week. We'll talk more this Thursday. Can't wait!
Love,
Elder Brandon Scott Porter, the first
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