Friday Surprise!

We had basically given up on getting an email from Andrew this week and were consigned to our fate of waiting until next week to hear from him, when lo and behold —an email showed up this morning!  Yeah!

We got lucky - on Monday, there were no post offices open, because apparently working is optional the day after a holiday here. 

SO we got permission to spend a few minutes today writing an email to you. 

There's actually been a ton of awesome news from the last week and a half, so I'll see how much I can fit in the time I have to type. 

In no particular order: 

N* and M* are doing AWESOME. We've taught them almost everything and they are receiving testimonies. But they need to come to church, and that's a major concern. So that's kind of our focus with them right now. 

Zone Leader Council was awesome. We really came away with some good decisions.
Halloween was pretty ordinary, until night, that is. Around 10:25, things started getting spooOOOooky! We have a rule in our mission called, "get off the phone by 10:20pm, then spend the last 10 minutes winding down and going to sleep by 10:30." So at about 10:30 or so, we had the lights out and everything, with a few missionaries on trains inbound for a visa trip, etc. etc. Suddenly, the phone goes off, and I recognized the ringtone as Elder Langston (the senior assistant). Well that's weird. I picked it up, and he hurriedly tells me something along the lines of, "Just so you know, tomorrow is a lockdown day, we just heard there have been some threats against church buildings in Samara. So call everyone from your zone who is going to be in Samara tomorrow and tell them to travel low profile, no tags, etc. etc. and we'll call everyone who's not in your zone." About 1 second after I hung up from that call, I got another call, this time from Elder Woolley, my district leader. "Hey, our carbon monoxide alarm just started going off. What should we do?" We had them turn off the alarm and take it with them out into the stairwell, then turn it back on to see if it would go off again. Then we got to calling everyone and warning them about the emergency lockdown day (oh yeah... "lockdown day" means everyone stays inside all day, period. We have them on New Years; and Victory Day because of all the drunks). So we got the stuff with the carbon monoxide figured out (false alarm, it never detected any again in the apartment), and the next morning we had to ride with no tags and no ties to Zone Leader Council on a taxi, and do our best to look like Russian businessmen. I felt so much like a spy speaking with my most perfect accent and not saying anything in English. Elder Nielson was debating installing a laser into his watch, but I figured that wouldn't be the best way to travel low-key, so we settled for a silenced PP-7 in our pockets. 

So the details are basically that the government spoke out against "foreign cults" and the danger they posed to society, and there were a bunch of protests planned against all sorts of churches that weren't Russian Orthodox. I guess in Moscow they got a handful of people to go picket the stake center for a couple of hours, but everywhere in Russia where there were protests scheduled, they just evacuated, so the picketers and news crews got bored pretty quick protesting at an empty building, so they went home. There was supposed to be a demonstration in Samara on Molodogvardyeyskaya street (say that five times fast), but nobody showed up. So nothing really happened here. 

Pretty crazy though. Fun stuff. 

Anyway, that's about it. It's been some fun times. The work is going forwards. I'm about out of time to type, so I'll probably just get off. 

If you're wondering what to put in my package: Root Beer Extract, and also Maple Extract. But that one brand isn't concentrated the same as the regular McCormick or Crescent, and I can't figure out how much to put in. Also, photos. I love getting photos. So thanks. 

Thanks for everything! Love you all! Glad Melissa survived the hurricane! 

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen

Me studying the finer points of Russian grammar.  Yesterday I learned about genetive flexions.

The result of studying too much about genetive flexions - mania ending with squeezing mayonnaise out of a bag directly into my mouth.  Don't worry, I didn't really do it; that would be gross.