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.