Not to sound whiny or anything, but the past couple of emails from our Elder have been too short for our liking. Of course, he had good excuses, but we were still very pleased to receive a "nice, big, juicy" one (as promised) this morning!
I have about two weeks of my awesome mission to catch up filling you in on, so buckle up!
Wow, the first thing I had written down to tell you about was our exchanges with Orenburg. That seems like about 32 years ago now, but I guess we'll start from the very beginning. It's a very good place to start.
We went to Orenburg! It was awesome. Let me tell you, it was the most exciting train ride I've ever had on my mission. We barely made it to the station on time and hopped on the train when the steam sounds were starting to happen. We were escorted to our coupet by a Uzebekistanian worker who checked our tickets and passports as usual, and then opened our door for us... to show that 4 drunk Uzebekistanian men were sleeping in our beds. She double checked our tickets to make sure there was no mistake and then explained to the Uzebekistanian men in Uzebekistanian something that made them all drunkenly stand up and file out of the room. I imagine the conversation went a little bit like this: "Hey guys, the people who actually paid for this coupet showed up after all. You're gonna have to get out, sorry." So they left and she kinda spruced up the room a little bit but it still reeked and did not change the fact that our beds had been occupied by smelly drunks.
So Elder Langston asked her why they were in our coupet, and she said, "There was no one else here, and we're just trying to help them out." Then we noticed that there was a suitcase in the coupet, just chilling there. We asked her whose it was and she said, "There are only two of you in this coupet; you have plenty of room. Just let the suitcase stay there." Great.
Turns out "someone" had let a rather large number of Uzebekistanian people onto the train without tickets, because they were packed about 8 to a coupet. Or they would have been, had they been in the coupets. Instead, they were all out in the hallways drinking and laughing and speaking Uzebekistanian all night long. They didn't use their inside voices or 12-inch-whispers, either. So I had some calls to make and started by calling the Bezimianski Sisters. About 2 minutes into the call, this one guy knocked on our coupet door. Well it's normal for people to knock at the beginning because they usually double check your tickets and tell you you can go buy coffee and whatever else during the train ride. But no, it was one of our four friends. We opened the door and he stumbled in and sat down on the bed accross from me and asked me if I spoke Uzebekistanian. I told him no. He stared at me, puzzled, for a minute, and then said, "Okay, well. I'll be here tonight then." So while on the phone with Sister Wilson, I got to explain to him that we had paid for the entire coupet, and that he was, in fact, leaving. After practicing my "authoritative tone" for about 2 minutes with this guy, I finally convinced him to get out. He stepped out and was like, "Okay, I'll be back in a few minutes. Don't close the door, I'll be right back!" So we slammed the door and locked it. Every 40 minutes from that point on, he came back and knocked on our coupet for a while, yelling, "Let me in, this is my spot!" It was funny until we got past 12:00 at night.
Anyway, it was a sweet train ride and we slept really well and peacefully. [Do you suppose he's being a little sarcastic here?] Add in the fact that Orenburg time is two hours earlier than Samara, and we were pretty wasted when we got up the next morning.
Exchanges were awesome though, we found 11 new investigators on the streets within two days. I also talked a lot with Elder Rekow serving down there. He came to Russia at the same time as Elder Swartz, and we have a lot in common.
While in Orenburg, I also crossed the Ural river and made it to Asia! I actually took one of those cheesy "I'm standing in Europe and Asia at the same time!" pictures as well. Hopefully I'll be able to send that next week.
New Years was awesome! We had to stay inside unfortunately for the 31st and the 1st because there are staggering numbers of drunk people on the street (that adjective can describe both the numbers AND the people!). So on the 1st, we actually just went and stayed at the Assistant's apartment to hang out with them and take care of some Zone dealios (<-- this is Spanish). [Wrongo, Andrew-o!] It was a blast. On New Years Night at 12:00, it was absolutely crazy outside. There were so many fireworks echoing accross the city that it was LITERALLY a low roar with no breaks at all for several hours. As in, I fell asleep not long after 12:00, then I woke up again to some fireworks right by our house at like 4:00, and the low roar of constant fireworks throughout the whole city was still going strong. It was absolutely insane. I didn't know there were that many fireworks in existance.
Anyway, thus started our week of staying at the Assistant's house every night. We were there Sunday because we spend New Years with them. On Tuesday we had split-down exchanges with the Office Elders and Novokuybyshevsk, so we just stayed at the Assistants to go with them the next morning. Wednesday was Zone Leader Council for January, so once again at the Assistants, and in the office all day. Then Thursday we went into our own area to work the evening and came back in to the Assistants that night because Friday and Saturday were exchanges with the Assistants. It was a blast of a week, but it felt good to sleep in my own bed last night.
We have a couple of investigators that have had awesome miracles lately! One is T*. She is awesome; she works at the branch building as a guard supplied by the guy who rents us the building. So she knows all the members and has come a bunch of times and was a really good investigator of the Bezimianski sisters for a while. Well we had an investigator give us the fig (not show up for a meeting and not answer his phone) at the branch building one day and our member help was there already, so we just decided, why not meet with T*? We sat down, had an opening prayer, and she opened up the meeting by saying, "I've been thinking, and I've decided I want to be baptized on the 25th of January." We were like... "OKAY!" So she's looking pretty strong. She studies the Book of Mormon better than I did before my mission, and has a ton of free time to kill at her job, so she's read all the Liahonas, tons of the Teachings of the Prophets books, and all sorts of stuff like that. She's way awesome.
We also have a girl we found on a bus named G*. She's about 23 or so, studying to be a psychologist. She is really... wise. I guess that's a good word. Just really sincere and awesome, too. She came to church yesterday and it was fast and testimony meeting. One of our members, A*, was bearing his testimony, and she tapped me on the arm and said, "Look! Look at him; he's glowing! Do you see?" And the more I looked at him, the more I did notice a glow. It was awesome. We're meeting with her tonight.
On Saturday, we heard this genius idea from another companionship called, "buy Pelmeni, boil it up and then fry it to make pot stickers which you can then eat with homemade sweet and sour sauce." So we went ahead and threw down some pot stickers. Oh, man it was good. We also have been making lots of peanut butter fudge lately, which is insanely delicious.
Whew! Okay. Well I feel caught up. I hope you all had a magical Christmas, New Years, and Dad, I hope you enjoyed your birthday.
Can you believe it's 2012? I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't stayed up all night listening to loud fireworks and shouting drunk people. It blows my mind how little of my mission is really left now. It absolutely blows my mind to shreds. I gotta kick it up a notch.
2012 is going to be our year. We are so pumped.
I love you all! My mission rocks!
Love,Elder Broekhuijsen
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