Dylan:“How’s Russia doing in the Olympics?”

Hello family and friends, 

So we dropped of our Russian companion at the mission home on Monday. So now it's just me and my other companion, who has been here for maybe 9 months. So we are both young and we are stoked to kill it this transfer! We had a super busy week that pretty much just consists of missionary work in Russia. We met our record of lessons this week, which was really exciting and had a lot of different successes. 

We have 2 new investigators! Which is crazy because the amount of times I taught the first lesson since I got here was 1 time. One of our investigator is one of our long time investigator,who won't commit, mother from Ukraine, and she pretty much only speaks Ukrainian. She will only be here for about a month are so we are really trying to work with her. The other investigator is this 30 year old man who the missionaries stopped talking too for some reason when the law changed. He is a really loud fun guy, and we started over with him and he is ready for round 2. 

We got someone to commit to baptism!  He is this older Russian man who is super Russian! He got in a car accident or hit by a train or something and has one blind eye, a bunch of cool looking scars all over his face and body and he has a really bad leg. Every time after our lesson we catch him standing out the balcony of the apartment hallway smoking, so we yell at him to throw it down and he just kind of growls at us. It's so funny. This time when he opened up the door to his apartment hall he was smoking already. We had a quick lesson and asked him to be baptized on this date. We pretty much tried convincing him for 20 minutes and he finally broke, it was so funny. He knows the church is true and knows he should get baptized but he won't quit smoking even though he says he wants to, he won’t actually stop. Apparently he's come close to baptism a few times, so we will see if this is the one.

The mission President and his wife checked our apartment this week and we passed with flying colors, so shout out to you, mom ;) 

We have a ton of in-actives and luckily we have an awesome tiny branch, so we are going to really push on everyone to do home teaching this transfer because we need help finding these people. And the members always ask the mission President when will they build a temple in Russia and he always reply's with when you do your home teaching, it's so savage and funny, but true.

We are ready for another busy week ahead of us. Love you all!

Elder VanBuskirk

“We enjoyed being in the Severny Branch with Elders Sweeney and VanBuskirk!! These elders have a clean, tidy apartment.” – Sis. Miner

Sweeney will hit his year point in like 2 transfers. He is from Pennsylvania, went to a year of BYU, and is in the theater program there. He wants to be an actor; super fun and cool guy.

 I am serving in a small branch called Severny, I think. we are in the Nothern part of Rostov, and it's awesome!