A great week it has been! We have a new member of our little
family in Berdsk. Ilia, an eighteen year old young man that started coming to
our apartment the first week that we arrived, got baptized on Saturday. He is a
very fine young man and we are happy to have him in our midst. The Elders have
done an amazing job teaching him. He has been to our apartment many times and
is strong in his understanding of what he has been taught. He even stood in our
meeting on Sunday and spoke with confidence in front of everyone in our group.
We travelled to Novosibirsk two times this last week, once
on Friday for a zone meeting and then again on Saturday for Ilia’s baptism.
Whether we go by Taxi, Marshrutka or Electrishka train, it seems to take close
to an hour to get there. We had an enjoyable zone meeting with the other
missionaries in Novo and also had a nice meal afterwards. Laura even made
homemade rolls for it!
They are still chipping away at the ice here. Often you see
people out with an ice chipper chopping away to either clear a sidewalk down to
the pavement or trying to make a path for the water to run away. It is starting
to get a little bit warmer and now there is a lot of water on the streets.
After the baptism on Saturday, we decided to walk to a KFC.
(They have places like that in Novosibirsk, but not in Berdsk) It was interesting,
when the minute we walked through the door of KFC, a few of the kids in a booth
heard us speaking in English and said hello. I walked over to them and started
a conversation with them. When I told them I was from America, their eyes lit
up and great big smiles came across their faces. I wonder if they had ever
spoken with anyone from America. They wanted to get pictures with us and even
had me write our names on a paper for them. The young people here in our
mission are very friendly to us. They are about the only ones that we can
communicate with.
We found out how attached we are to the outside world with
the internet. We didn’t have it for about four days and we definitely missed
it. It is so nice to stay up on the news back home, Skype, email, texting, Facebook,
etc. One thing that has been very nice is the Mormon Channel streaming audio.
That is our radio station that we play each day in our apartment. Another thing
that we really missed for the past few days was Google Translate. Boy, do we
use that a lot…
Our nice young friend in Berdsk put one of her teachers at a
university in Novosibirsk in touch with us and she asked if we would come to
the university and assist her on an English project. We met with her after our
zone meeting and we are looking forward to assisting her. Our volunteering in
local English classes has been very enjoyable thus far. Everyone has been so
kind to us.
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