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