12/13/2010 Falling on Ice - Fathers and Sons

Hello family and friends!

So it has been snowing out here which means that there is a nice layer of ice on the ground and in 2 days I have managed to fall more times than either of my Zone leaders have their entire missions! Because of the ice we didn't do sports last week but we did end up bowling. That was pretty fun.

Dexter, our American investigator, called almost every day this week asking for advice with his girl problem. The first time he did it he was very stressed so I told him to read from the Book of Mormon and he called me back after reading 3 Nephi 27, which is pretty much all about baptism, and I told him to be baptized! He quickly changed the subject! Ugh!!!!

We ran into some Budhists who started telling us that reincarnation and resurrection were the same thing.

A drunk man thought that I was Swedish and started talking to us and then he said I must be Ukrainian and spoke to us in Ukrainian. It was pretty weird.

The sun now come's up at 8 am every day and goes down at 4 pm. It's really strange. Not that we see the sun because of the fog, cloud coverage and pollution.

My companion is cool, he just doesn't speak to me in Russian at all so I'm not sure how helpful this is to my learning Russian. He convinced me to buy some Ukrainian candy, because it is 3 times cheaper than m & ms, so I did and it was really good.

We still have not found the record for our investigator but she's giving us some strange information. For example, on Sunday she said that she saw Jesus Christ at the bedside of her husband. Not that it's impossible, but it's odd.

I'm excited because we should be gettting a French speaking investigator passed to us which should be cool since he doesn't know any Russian and I know French. We are looking forward to meeting this investigator.

Here is something that we saw today on the streets. A Father is pulling his young son on a sled. He runs ahead and when they cross the street, the sidewalk drops off, so the kid jumps a little, then the sidewalk starts back up on the other side. But the Father runs him straight into it and he flies out of it and the sled lands on top of him and he's just laughing hysterically.

Well, Thank you all for your love and support.
Elder Russell

FYI from the missionary mom, I got this off the Mission's Blog:

Sis. & Pres. Fry will be visiting Kharkov this Wednesday and Thursday and they have a special Christmas celebration set up for the missionaries in that area. They are keeping everything a surprise but they are supposed to be doing a special service project, games and a special dinner. I'm looking forward to hearing about it.

Happy Holidays! DeLisa