New Friend

Since our last blog update, we have found a new friend. It is quite an interesting story about a young girl that we have met in Berdsk. While sitting next to a very nice lady on one of our train trips, we were told about a seventeen year old girl in Berdsk that was sent to Russia from America by her mother. We understand that she thought it was to be a short vacation to visit her father that lives here. Well, it ended up being a one way ticket with no return. She has been somewhat lost for the last two years going from living with her father, to foster care, to now living with the family of a friend. It has been quite a road for her being dropped off in the middle of Siberia, not knowing any of the Russian language. She has picked up some of the language, but is still very reserved as to the things she will attempt. She came to church with us last week and is going to visit with us this week. She said that it feels good to be able to communicate with someone that speaks English. We hope that we can lift her spirits and be a good friend to her.

We had the assistants to the mission president come and speak at our sacrament meeting on Sunday. They did a great job and it was such a pleasure having them with us. Two of the three of them are returning home next week, so it was nice to have them visit Berdsk and speak before they leave. What fine missionaries there are here in our mission, every one of them are great examples to us.

It seems that every time we travel on the electric train we meet someone special. We love our trips on the train! It is fun to climb on board and walk down the aisle looking for someone to sit by and talk with. It has been very interesting to us how quickly people will become friendly to us after showing them pictures of our grandsons :-) Laura gets a kick out of it when I ask someone a question that I already know the answer to. She has finally caught on to my trick of getting people to talk to us. We love talking with the people of Russian, even if we can hardly tell what they are saying to us…

Garden spot of one of our members

Beautiful flowers

Many pretty flowers in her garden

Our walk to the Ob Sea near our apartment on our 37th Anniversary

The yellow pipe is how the natural gas is run here

Another party in Russia

Very near our apartment

The new fence service project is done