Mission Update

Pictures from President Fry's Blog - Zone Conference March 2009
Words are Excerpts from Elder Bronson Shipp's Letters (Our oldest son is serving a full-time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the Ukraine, Donetsk Mission)

Week 1 in Kharkiv, Ukraine -

my new companon is named Elder Tyler McCarther (i think that is it in english. i have only seen it in russian. )my days have been full and exciting...figure now that you are curious as to the nature of my trainer, well he is a couple inches shorter than i and is from south jordan, utah. i like him, he is a good obedient missionary and i am learning a lot from him. we are white washing our area in kharkiv which is decently enjoyable so far, there was only one investigator in the mess of an area book we found. we have an appointment set up for wednesday which i hope goes well...

k, tracting stories... i have none really, nothing uber awesome. but we pretty much taught this random guy the first lesson yesterday,... k i guess this was awesome. his name was игор which is pronounced eager not igor like we say it. but he was hanging out at a bus stop and i contacted him and jumped right into teaching, he was decently receptive and we threw down the first lesson right there on the street standing in the mud with no feeling in our fingers and snot running down our faces bearing our testimonies and making that little dirty piece of Ukraine sacred. it was awesome. we gave him a book of mormon and invited him to come to the open house that we are going to be having for the beautiful church building that we have.

oh food! haha, nothing absolutley ridiculous to tell thus far. i had a шарьма (sharma) my first day out which wasn't terrible, but not my very first choice. it is a cabbage and chicken rap. yup... tasty... crunchy to say the least hahaha, but i ate the thing and i could say that it wasn't too bad. i never wanted to vomit hahaha. (Hotmama notes: He doesn't like vegetables. heehee) but that is so far the extent of my uniquely ukrainian dish experience. i must add though that so far i have discovered two things that ukrainians do better than us. juice and ketchup. the juices are incredible and the ketchups come in SOO many different flavours i like the orange one, it has a slight salsa taste with a bit of spice though the blue one (the ketchup isnt blue the package is thats the same for the orange) is pretty good.

Elder Tillotson & Elder Shipp

Week 2:

my companion left me! sort of, he is on his way to bulgaria to renew his Visa, so i have been hangin out with one of the A.P.s Elder Hulet and today i will be joining elders hunt and tillotson (the other elders in novia doma) for the rest of the week! but it is going to be a jam packed week with all sorts of activities, we have zone conference and the open house and stuff it will be cool to be with elder hunt. he either was a zone leader or an A.P. for a year of his mission, this is his last transfer before heading home. he knows russian as well as any professor stateside, the guys grammar is unearthly amazing, its really cool. but that will be really cool.

Another tracting story: " hahaha, it makes me laugh just to think about it. we got run out of a подездь (stairwell) quite forcefully. we were tracting this floor and about three door later this guy comes out and starts yelling at us about how we woke him up and blah blah blah. and told us to leave after using a lot of words i didn't understand (i later found them out to be some eloquent swear words) then as we were leaving he seemed to get the idea that i wanted to fight him, so he grabs me by the jacket pushes me up against the wall and starts shaking his fist in my face saying something along the lines of "you see this fist i have two of them and i will pound your face in with both of them if you don't leave!" needless to say, if i didn't have the Lords name on my chest and hadn't been set apart above the world... well, i would have been a little un-Christlike." lets just say that.

Week 3 - Kharkiv

our open house went pretty well, we had around 100 people come which was far more successful than the one that they had in saltofka, but it went really well. a success. Ukraine seems to have a pretty serious surplus of crazy people though. oh! funny story, i was out on the street during the open house inviting people to come in and i just about got bum rushed by a gang of бабушки (babushkas) there was about seven of them walking down the street and they came up and all of them started talking at once, and you have to understand, babushka russian is a very unique accent. if i had a spoonful of thick oatmeal in my mouth and then started speaking russian it would come close. but these ladies were yelling at me about how i didn't have a hat on. (to babushkas no hat means you will get sick and die, kinda odd.)

(Open House Images from Sis. Kinghorn's Blog)

then they asked why i had a tie on and if i was going to church and so i am thinking "hahaha! why yes!" so thats what i say! " why yes! today our church is having an open house! and you are all invited!" the exclamations were there when i spoke too, they couldn't really herre me, bad hearing combined with thick scarves. then they started asking me above doctrine and stuff so i just kind of dropped a simple universal " we are Christians and we believe that Christ is our Savior and in this beautiful church there are ukrainian members who are willing to answer all of your questions!" so they said ok and went in. i thought it was hilarious, because not a single one was taller than 5'5" so i was stooped over yelling at them and such, pretty entertaining i thought.

k so on the mission blog that sister frye does you see the pictures of the zone conference where we are eating pizza, that is as close as we can get to american pizza, meaning that it didn't have mayonnaise on it or anything oddly ukraine either. they put mayonaise on EVERYTHING and it isn't really american mayonnaise either, lets just say it wouldn't be the first thing that i put on my pizza...