Lithuania!

Good morning!  It's always fun to wake up to email from  Elder Andrew.  We got some audio files too, so it feels almost like we just got through talking to him!  I love technology (but not as much as [him] you see…)  :-) Sorry - couldn't resist the Napoleon Dynamite reference…  Also, Andrew mentioned that he may or may not have time to email next week (because of transfers.)  So, fair warning…

Hey family!

It's been a pretty nuts week. First off, we had visa trips. I went on the 18th, and we got to go to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania! So we hopped on a plane to Moscow, and I got some interesting, if not particularly photographically stunning shots through the window of Moscow from the air. It is such a huge dang city. We went to our next gate in Vnukova airport, hopped on a very small propellor plane that took us to Vilnius, and got out. Vilnius kind of pretty much looks like Russia, except no big tall buildings. At least from what we saw. Mostly private houses as far as I could see. We went through passport control no problem. But being in that aiport was pretty weird. There's still plenty of Russian going on because it's an airport, but all the signs are in Lithuanian, and then English. No written Russian anywhere to be seen. After quickly exchanging some rubles for Lithuanian money to add to my collection (cool!), we went back through passport control, but in the other direction. The exact same lady was checking my documents. Heh. After some narrowed eyes and awkward questions, she let us through. (Yeah... we came here to renew our Russian visas... and we're already done and ready to go back. Quick, wasn't it?) We boarded the exact same airplane that we took to Vilnius, and went back to Moscow. Ha. After landing in Moscow, we all said a quiet prayer in our hearts that nobody would notice the mistake that the people in Prague made on Elder Elwood's visa (AGAIN! Grrr...). They didn't. We flew back into Samara and the group went home on a minibus. Elder Langston (he did his trip on the 21st) was, as it happened, at the airport already, with the Connells, waiting for the new senior couple, the Childers, to fly in. So I just stuck with them. The new couple flew in, R* took us home, and everything was great. I was ready to hit the hay for my guaranteed 8 hours.

So on the 20th, we had a sweet cultural day (we get one a cycle). We went to this place called Philharmonia, which was basically a really swanky concert hall. All the missionaries in the district, and a whole bunch of members and investigators came. We saw this cool quartet of guys play tango music for a couple of hours. It was a guy on a big old accordian, his son, who was a really good pianist, some other guy with crazy long silver hair on the violin who was amazing, and a guy playing the cello that was old enough to have invented the cello. It was so dang cool. So that was fun.

We also had a meeting with R* and O*. And we FINALLY got to the bottom of what's going on. [Details omitted for privacy reasons - suffice it to say, R* got some bad news and is kind of focused on that situation right now.]

On Saturday, we had a double baptism in Samara - S* from the Avrora Elders' area, and A* from the Bezimianski Zone Leaders' area. I worked with A* almost a year ago back when I was in Bezimianski with Elder Wood. Cool beans! Both of them are so dang cool. Actually, there were 5 baptisms in the mission this weekend, so that was really awesome.

Perhaps the most interesting news from this week is what happened yesterday. Sunday morning, at about 2:00, Elder Langston woke me up with some terrible stomach pains. I gave him a blessing, and then we talked to Sister Sartori on the phone for a while before going back to sleep. The next morning he was feeling a little better, so we went to Sacrament Meeting at least. He was out the rest of the day, so I tried to make myself useful, organized the whole area book and cleaned up a little and stuff. Today we headed to the clinic to get some tests done and try to figure out what's going on. We suspected maybe an ulcer. The doctors did a blood test and an ultrasound (yes, there were many pregnancy jokes made; no, none of them were inappropriate). While observing the ultrasound, I came to the conclusion that Elder Langston has a lot of weird black and white bubbles in his insides. The doctor, no doubt, came to some more educated conclusions. They basically said that they see nothing wrong with him, and he's feeling a lot better today, so hopefully that's the end of that epic saga.

And now here I am. Hopefully everything on your end is going great.

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen

Visas & Varyenyeki

In addition to this nice email, we also received some sound files from Andrew today.  Maybe I'll see if I can get Joshua to help me post something…Meanwhile, enjoy the written word!

Hey everyone!

It's a cloudy day here in Samara, and I'm loving the weather. Cloudy weather is the best thing ever. That rhymed. Well... slant rhyme.

I guess one of the most exciting things that's happened this week happened this morning. We had Elders Ceimers and Berrett from Dachney (an area and branch in Saratov) up in town yesterday, because they are headed out to Latvia for a week for Elder Ceimers, who is from Latvia, to renew his Russian visa. Elder Berrett just got lucky enough to be his companion at the time. Anyway, they left the apartment this morning to go to the airport at about 1:30. Then the fun started. At about 4:00, we got a call. Elder Ceimers has two tickets. Elder Berrett has none. Awesome. We woke up President Blinkov. He said, "No, we definitely ordered Elder Berrett tickets. I saw them with my own eyes." We were on and off the phone with virtually everyone for the next two and a half hours, including almost sending Roman back to the airport to pick up the Elders, because they were going to miss their flight. Somehow, by some miracle, they got on the plane. God obviously softened somebody's heart, because the way they told it, there was one guy who was REALLY pushing for letting Elder Berrett on the plane to Moscow. So they got on, we breathed a huge sigh of relief, and then we arranged with President Blinkov to make sure their tickets from Moscow to Riga were good. He said they were.

Fast forward about the amount of time it takes to fly from Samara to Moscow. We got another call from the Dachney Elders. "The same thing is happening." Awesome. Face palm. We got President Blinkov on the phone again. "I'm sitting here behind my computer double checking this order on the internet, and I am staring at the ticket that has Elder Berrett's name on it. It has the correct passport number and everything!" We flexbusted out of the house and started going down to the office to get to the bottom of this. Meanwhile, the travel agent that President Blinkov orders all of our tickets through is on the phone and the internet with Moscow airport, trying to get everything straightenend out. For whatever reason, Elder Berrett's tickets, which were 100% correct and valid, were not in either system. But we gave them the order number, and they miraculously turned up. So they're on a plane to Riga now. President Blinkov is on his way down right now and we'll be taking a nice long look at what exactly happened, so that it never happens again. Meanwhile, the travel agent is cancelling and re-ordering all of their tickets back from Riga to Moscow to Samara. So that was a fun adventure.

Next up on the docket. Good news on the R* and O* front! We kind of figured they had looked at some anti-mormon trash online, and decided they didn't want anymore, beacuse R* was super rude at the door that one time. Well this week we just bumped into them on the street, and said hi, and they said hi back. And the next day, we decided to call them to test the waters, and it was as if nothing had ever happened. They were like, "Yeah, come over!" So we haven't had a meeting yet because of scheduling difficulties, but they almost came to watch the Avrora Sisters' investigator get baptized on Saturday, and we'll be meeting with them this week. In any case, they're back on the radar. Woot!

Our area is actually doing really good. We have six progressing investigators, and three baptismal dates (R* and O* are not progressing until we have another meeting with them). F* is doing great - I don't remember if I told you about her, but we set a date with her for the 27th. She is wonderful. Super solid Christian background, really delightful to teach, because she listens and contributes on lessons and doesn't get all off-topic, and just the nicest lady ever. So she's doing wonderfully. We also got a referral from a member named G*. He's 19, and getting ready for a mission, and he has a girlfriend named K*. She's also a boss. I'll send you a picture of me with G* sometime. He has the spiciest mullet/goatee combination I've ever seen. So K* is doing wonderful as well - going to be praying and trying to find out more about whether or not Jesus Christ was the Son of God. We also have a cool guy named M* who is accepting the message really well. We had a meeting with him and taught the Restoration, and he was like, "So it seems like there needs to be a church founded on the Book of Mormon then." Well. Yes. Sorta. We ran out of time to set a date with him on that lesson, because it was like 9:20, and we were a 20 minute walk from home (or a 9-minute run, as it turns out). But we'll set a baptismal date with him next time we meet. He works as a security guard, and he came straight to church yesterday after working a 24-hour shift (those are really common here). So he's a huge boss as well.

T* is doing great. She understands more and more about baptism and how it's necessary. She is what I call an eternal-progressing investigator. She will get baptized, but she's not the fastest at getting ready for it. That's okay though - it has lots of advantages actually. She's really well tied-in with the branch, when she makes a decision, like following the Word of Wisdom, she sticks with it despite social pressure from her friends, and she LOVES the missionaries. We had a lesson with her about how getting baptized to make the missionaries happy isn't a cool idea, and how it's way more serious, and there's a million inactive members that just went inactive as soon as their favorite missionaries left. She really gets that, so when she gets baptized, she'll be active.

We finalized transfers this week with President Sartori. I'd tell you now, but this kind of information has a way of leaking everywhere. So I'll just tell you at the end of the transfer. Sufficeth it to say that I'm really pumped.

What else do we have going on? Oh! Cool recipe. It's called Varyenyeki. It's pretty much ravioli, except instead of meat and red sauce, there is no meat or red sauce, and instead, you fill them up with mashed potatoes. It goes like this:

Make some mashed potatoes, and you can put stuff in them if you want. Like basil, or hamburger, or whatevs. Then take 1 cup of milk, 1 egg, and 3-4 cups of flour (I find it's usually closer to 3), and make super simple dough out of it. Then roll out the dough nice and thin, maybe 2 or 3 millimeters, cut out circles with a cup or biscuit cutter. The circles I use are about 3 inches in diameter, probably. Then you put some mashed potatoes in the middle, fold it in half, and pinch the edges really well so that they'll never come apart. If you want, you can kinda bend the two corners back around and join them together the same way. That will make it look more like a ravioli instead of a weird ugly lumpy half circle.

So then you can fry them in a pan with oil, (my personal favorite) or you can boil them. And if you made more than you want to eat right then, you can throw them in the freezer (cover them in flour so they don't stick to each other) and cook them all the same later. They're super good. Also they're super cheap, because, let's examine the ingredients: Milk (cheap), Flour (cheap), Eggs (cheap in Russia - 10 eggs for $1), potatoes (insane cheap). That's all. So a good combo for missionaries. And they make you feel like a professional chef once you have assembled them. And if you eat them in garlic sauce, or mayonaisse, or anything else that sounds decent, they are delicious.

So there's a cool recipe for you that we've been making this week.

Well. That's about it for my week. Hope everything with you all is going great! I'm looking foward to reading your emails that I just printed off.

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen

36 Hours Later…

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much of an email from Andrew today, since we just got a nice big long juicy one on Saturday!  Happily, I was wrong, and we got not only a nice written email, but some audio files and photos as well.  So, it's been a great multi-media Monday morning!

A picture of Elder Langston and I enjoying some peanut butter oreo shakes. So delicious.

It's been a whopping 36 hours since I last wrote you, so as you can imagine, there are tons of crazy updates. 

I'll share one funny story from last night's contacting. We headed out with three hours left to find 6 new investigators and hit our weekly goal. We were hoping for a repeat performance of last week, but we were completely out of copies of the Book of Mormon. Instead, we loaded up on Gospel of Jesus Christ brochures and hit the streets. While walking down the street, we quickly found one new investigator, a lady named Lidia who speaks some English and had a lot of questions of the soul. We got a ways futher down the street, and saw a guy who was pounding on the metal door to an apartment building with a sledgehammer. We decided to contact him. Turns out he was drunk, and he rudely told us he didn't want anything, so we went on our way, and stopped a nice lady about 15 yards down the sidewalk from this guy who was busily having absolutely no effect on a big old Russian metal apartment building door with his sledgehammer. So turns out this lady was really nice, and we had a pretty long talk with her; maybe 15 minutes or so. Meanwhile, the drama was unfolding with this dude down the street. There was some lady in a window on the second floor sticking her head out and yelling at him. He was yelling back, and it was generally a funny situation (to witness from a safe distance). So she shuts the window and the lady we're talking to explains that that's the drunk guy's wife, and she has once again locked him out of the apartment because he was drunk, and that this happens quite regularly. Meanwhile, he starts throwing his sledgehammer at the house, aiming for I'm not exactly sure what on the second floor. Finally, after a bunch of misses, he nails the window she was yelling through and completely shatters it. Elder Langston asks this lady we were talking to (who stayed totally calm as if this was no big deal at all the entire time) if someone was going to call the cops. She said something to the effect of, "No, she doesn't call them anymore, because they just come, talk to the guy for 15 minutes, and then leave." Then the lady comes down the stairs and out onto the street and starts cussing the guy out. Turns out she's bigger than him. And she basically yells at him and then says, "That's it. I've had enough of this. You're going back to your mom's place." So she kicked him out right then and there.

Moral of the story: Don't drink alcohol. And if you know someone who does, make sure they don't get a hold of a sledgehammer.

So anyway, we had a good night. I'm just now finally getting over the tail end of a cold. Our investigator, T* (the one who kind of decided she was my mom while I'm here, and comes to church every week) skipped 2nd hour to go down a buy me all sorts of Russian remedies to a cold (some weird pills and powders, 4 lemons, a bag of walnuts, and some medicinal herbal tea that tastes like weeds from the backyard steeped in water), ironically missing a lesson about keeping the sabbath day holy in the process. So that was nice of her, but I wish she would... just... not do that kind of stuff all the time.

We had a new family (kinda) come to church as well yesterday; they are a couple in their late 20s, D* and N*, getting married sometime in October, and she'll be having his baby in a few months as well. They both drink and smoke. She has a LOT of sincere desire to quit smoking and drinking for her baby's sake. He's kinda just a chill dude along for the ride. We met them at the bus stop yesterday to bring them to church, and in the five minute walk to the church, he had finished a beer (at 10 in the morning) and two cigarettes. So they have some path ahead of them, but we're confident things will go well. It will be so cool when they're over those addictions. They both loved church by the way, and N* especially really loved the family atmosphere and all the kids running around. We're pumped about them.

I guess that's about it. Thanks for all your emails!

Thanks for all being awesome.

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen

A few shots of Saratov at 5:00 in the morning, just as the sun was barely starting to come up. I hack-job edited one of them with some built in program on this computer because it turned out darker than I intended.

A shot of A*, a young kid in a family of members we visited while in Saratov. He is holding a kitten named Morris.

Some spiders chilling by the office. They are large and come out as soon as the sun goes down. There are many of them.

Real Email!

Andrew mentioned in his short email on Monday that he might be able to send a "real" email on Saturday - and that's what happened.  Yay!  Sounds like he had a great week.

Hey there. I'm back. 

I got special permission (thanks, President Sartori!) to write you today, because I didn't get any time this week, and now I have a short breath before visa trips begin. 

There is actually a ton of awesome to write about. I'll see if I can give it to you chronologically - 

Oooh. Probably not. I can't remember which day to start on. 

I'll just start on Sunday. 

Once upon a time, this entire last week, we were too insanely busy on exchanges in Tol'yatti and stuff, and getting ready for mission tour to do any missionary work. So we were stuck on Sunday evening with 3 hours and 0 new investigators for the entire week. But we had set a goal of seven the previous week during weekly planning. So we decided to flexbust out of there with a ton of faith that the Lord would give us seven new investigators. And He did. It was like every time we turned the corner, there was another elect person waiting for us. Even right in the areas around our apartment that get contacted to death when we don't have time to get further out, and when other missionaries are in town and don't know where to contact. So we came back in at about 9:00, (it didn't seem like 3 hours, it felt like about 20 minutes) having met and taught and gotten appointments and prayed with seven awesome new investigators. Woot woot! The Lord will help you reach your goals regardless of the limits you think you have. 

Already not chronological, because I have a story from earlier on Sunday. It was Samara District Conference (think stake conference, only... a district, rather than a stake). We did it, as usual, in the hotel Renaissance. T* brought her mom, which was way awesome.  S* also came, and he liked it. Well anyway, in the middle of the conference, I started getting a bunch of calls from this unknown number, but I recognized the area code as Moscow. I thought that was kind of weird, and they were calling really persistently. After that, I started getting a bunch of calls from a +1801 number. That kind of freaked me out; although I didn't recognize the number. Then I put 2 and 2 together in my head, and figured it out. Sister Sartori is the medical... person... in our mission. The one anyone calls when they have medical stuff to talk about. And her phone is set to divert calls to mine if she doesn't pick up. So all these calls were getting bounced from her phone. Her mother has been really in bad condition health-wise for the last few days, and so I figured this was probably "the call." It was. A few seconds later, she walked out. At the end of the meeting, after President Malm had finished speaking, he invited Sister Sartori to stand up and bear her testimony of the Plan of Salvation. She did a wonderful job. She flew back to America the next morning at about 1:00, and will probably be staying there until everything is done - ideally hooking back up with President Sartori in Tallinn, Estonia, during the Mission Presidents' Seminar in a couple of weeks (her visa only allows for two entrances, and she needs one for a visa trip). So she's been gone all week, and it's weird to see President Sartori pulling it alone. 

The next day.

We got up, and trooped on down to the office with the Zone Leaders. I guess I should explain what the heck Mission Tour is before I go any further. Mission tour is when a member of the Area Presidency (and sometimes another member of one of the quorums of the 70, like last year, when we had President Schwitzer and Elder Zwick) comes down and chills with President Sartori for like a week. They sit on Zone Leader Council, teach at Zone Conferences, etc. etc. President Per G. Malm and his wife, Agneta Malm came down. He is the new 2nd counselor in the Area Presidency, and he is a huge boss. He's from Sweden, as is his wife (whom he met on a temple trip to Switzerland at the age of 14 - cool, huh?). He doesn't look right away like he's Scandinavian, but she looks like she could be in Abba. They're both so cool. She speaks Swedish as her native language, knows German fluently, and knows English also pretty fluently, although she has a really cool accent. He knows Swedish, German, English (super good English with a humongous and very professor-like vocabulary, and only a tiny accent), and Norwegian because he was a mission president there (and apparently it's pretty similar to Swedish), and a little bit of like 30 different languages like Danish, Finnish, Russian, etc. 

So anyway, he blew our minds on Zone Leader Council. It was like the most inspired (and inspiring) thing I've ever heard. Every time he opened his mouth, fountains of pure gold came out. I came out of that so pumped to just absolutely slam my last 5 months. I'll ask permission to send you the minutes from the council on Monday, if President Sartori will let me. We had interviews after that, and I got lucky and got to be interviewed by President Malm. It was so awesome. He gave me super good advice personally that he could not have known to give other than through the Spirit. 

The next day. 

We got up, headed to the Avrora branch building, and got set up for Samara/Tol'yatti Zone Conference. Everything went smoothly except for a couple of fiascos with train tickets which we mostly dealt with all night on Monday (everything worked out, don't worry - Orenburg just missed a morning train to Samara and had to walk instead. Just kidding. About the walking). Then President and Sister Malm and President Sartori came in and conference started, and it was like an encore performance of Zone Leader Council. Once again; mind blown. 

That very night, we got to the train station with President, and the Malms, and helped them get all set up with their tickets and stuff. Then we got on two different trains (another fun side effect of ticket fiascos) and overnighted it to Saratov. The timing was sweet, because we decided to combine our exchanges with the Saratov ZLs with the Mission Tour Zone Conference. Well as it happens, President Malm and President Sartori wanted to go with the missionaries all evening on the 5th, and Zone Conference was the 6th. I hit the jackpot again, and headed out with Elder Christensen and... you guessed it - President Malm. Woot! We had three awesome meetings, and I got to see a family of friends from Saratov that we used to meet with when I served there. They have a kitten named after Elder Morris... haha. I hope Elder Morris finds out about this post because I'll be attaching a photo on Monday of A* (their younger son) holding Morris, the orange furball kitten. U* is also doing well, in case he was wondering. Also, as a fun fact, there is another black kitten named M* (another missionary the family really loved). But that kitten is a girl. Ha. Another fun fact - A* told me that Morris "писает очень много!" I laughed so hard! So anyway, that was a sweet day.

The next day. 

I woke up with a minor sore throat that felt more or less like post-nasal drip. We had to get up at 5:00 to make it down to the Zavodskoy branch building down in the southwest section of Saratov on time so we could get all set up for Zone Conference. We got set up and everyone started trickling in, and we once again had a GREAT [okay, Andrew actually said SICK, but that doesn't translate quite right for everyone] zone conference, thanks to President Malm. I was receiving so much revelation about missionary work that had nothing to do with what he was talking about the whole time; it was awesome. Man. This mission tour is going to burn something into this mission, and I think it's going to solve a lot of the problems we've been struggling to solve for months now on Zone Leader Council. President Sartori and R* took the Malms off to the Saratov Airport to fly back to Moscow, and I felt a giant load of all mission-tour related stress lift from my shoulders. 

The next morning we still had exchanges with the Zone Leaders, so I woke up at 6:30. I was feeling like poop at that point, but I figured it would be a huge waste of exchanges if I called up for permission to rest up. So I nuked down as much herbal tea and other hot liquid and anything else I could think of (like this super nasty inhaler thing that is supposed to make your throat feel better) as I could, and we got to work. We had a great day; I finally got to work an exchange with the legendary Elder G*. He's older than regular missionary age, and had to get special permission from the First Presidency to come on a mission. He is also a huge boss (he's from Ukraine). We had a wonderful day, and found a young couple of recently married people who are looking for a church to baptize the husband in. Woot! They are way awesome, and live right across the street from the branch building. 

So last night, we got on a train back to Samara, and got in this morning to a trashed apartment (we didn't get a p-day, and the apartment always ends up trashed when you have a bunch of missionaries over). So we got permission to do some clean up, I got permission to write you today if I found time (I did, in case you were wondering), and we had a meeting with a new investigator we found last week named F*. She is the younger sister of a guy who started a Protestant church here in Samara. His church has like 10 members, she said, if they are all anything like F*, they are SUPER SUPER good Christians who really understand the teachings of Christ well. We taught a wonderful Restoration discussion and committed her to read and pray about the Book of Mormon. It was a great meeting, and we're hoping to meet her brother soon, and ideally from there, some more members of that congregation. 

After that, Elder Langston and I brought it in down to the office, and started working on the visa trip schedule. It's mostly done now, so that's cool. We caught some problems with train tickets in advance this time... so hopefully we have enough time to fix them before they become fiascos. 

Anyway, I did an audio recording of replies to your last emails, so I'll attach that on Monday when I write you again. I also should be able to send you some sweet pictures. 

It's pretty weird to reflect that I may never see Saratov or Tol'yatti again (I'll probably see at least one of those cities again, but I don't know where I'm going). This week we'll meet with President, and he'll decide my fate. Dang. When did I get old?

Melissa, you are looking pretty sharp. Every boy's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed woman. I mean, sister. Man, that was stretch. Probably because I shave every day. I always suspected ZZ Top's power was contained in their beards. Way to go on the cupcake front. 

I'm loving the mission. The clock is ticking way too fast, and I'm really feeling the pressure and the desire to make these last 5 months the best ones I have. Until Monday then. 

Love,Elder Broekhuijsen

One Liner

Jerome and I were gone all morning, but returned to find a short email from Andrew.  Not as good as a long one, but WAY better than nothing at all!

Sorry, I know you hate when this happens. This week is nuts, and I don't have time for writing right now. We just got off of Zone Leader Council with President Per. G. Malm in attendance. Tomorrow I'll be at Zone Conference in Samara all day, then getting on a train to Saratov for exchanges and Saratov Zone Conference. I get back I think Saturday morning, so I may be able to write you then. But can't make any promises just yet. If it makes you feel better, my entire life is being faithfully recorded in my vocal journaler every night :) 

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen

What?! No Email?

Hmmm…we were prepared to receive no email from Melissa, since they'll be celebrating Labor Day in Boston, but we thought we'd still hear from our "Russionary."  But we were skunked this morning.  We'll keep our fingers crossed that something will come in later - maybe the computers in the mission office were down…