First, Happy Birthday Luke! Love you
buddy I can't believe you are 12!!!
Second, if you are going to email me
it has to be on my dylan.van.buskirk@latter-daysaints.ru account I am
not allowed to go on my lds.net one. Thank you, and I don't mean to leave you
hanging.
Well just when I think a week can't
get any crazier in Russia, I get proved wrong once again! This week was insane!
They are also enforcing all the laws and restrictions on us a lot more and
taking away all the smart phones from the zone leaders, so things are getting
tight and I have no idea how the relationships are between the US and Russia,
but I can assume they aren't getting better. Out of all the missionaries coming
in this year that we are aware of, none are from the US, so that can only let
you imagine that they are trying to prepare for the worst.
Russians do it right: So Monday night we had a beloved inactive call us to help them
move, so we called like the only member in our branch who has a car to help us.
He bought his car for about $500 and he definitely got what he paid for. So we
shoved all their stuff from their one-room apartment in to this tiny sketch car
with all of us in it, the trunk was wide open and their bags we so high hanging
all out just staying in because it was so stuffed. So the car was not doing
well with the ice and was just drifting all over the place and the transmission
was horrible and we would just start falling back, and the car would turn off
randomly while we were driving many times. I accepted my fate and was ready to
die, it was AWESOME!
Broke into a Russian School: So those friends we met last week and that I "rapped"
for. They invited us to play volleyball with them and they said it was in their
school, so we just assumed we would play just with them in ther gym... So they
met with us outside the school and they walked us into their school (which
looked crazy, it was so old and so Russian, it was like we were in the 40's!)
But they had us walk past the security guard and was able to get us in, which
probably has been never been done by volunteers before. And we went into their
gym which was so sketch and there was a bunch of students with a typical scary
looking Russian woman volleyball coach, and she let us play with them! We tried
hard to talk to all the 40 teenagers in there and they thought we were so cool
and they said they were down to have game night at our branch so we could tell
them more. It was the craziest thing though we were straight up in a Russian
school volleyball practice with a real Russian coach yelling at us in school
number 107. How can you get more culture than that!
More destroying: We also spent some nice time destroying and ripping apart
church documents, so that's just part of the work here in Russia...
Changing moment: So while opening the church doors we noticed to our left a man
who we thought was peeing on our church building (which was not something we
would be surprised about here in Russia) and me and Elder Altahov (we were on
splits) were about to tell the old man to go away, and I was just not thinking
the greatest of this guy but Elder Altahov got closer than asked the man if he
needed help. The man pointed at his grocery bags, so we carried all of his bags
and gave him an arm to hold as we walked him through the ice all the way to his
home. This man had had a stroke a few years back and could barely talk and move
a side of his body. On the way there I felt so much love for him and felt so
horrible about how I first looked and judged this man. We walked him all the
way to his apartment and he just thought we were angels and went right away to
his alter and prayed because we helped him. We showed and said a prayer with
him our way and he wanted us to come meet him and his place on Friday. That
moment really changed me I realized that we need to do what Christ would do and
search out to help others, and judge not. I noticed a big difference in the
rest of my week as I tried to look at everyone how Christ sees them and to
always search for service.
So we went back later that week and
he fed us and we were just talking about ourselves, and a big scary Russian man
walks in, and just stares at us. He gets his gf or wife (who is the old man's
daughter who we had no idea was there) and they were not happy to see us they
started yelling and things were getting pretty heated. They were kicking us out
but the old man didn't want us to leave and was doing anything he could to have
us stay, but we were not about to challenge the Russian dude. We finally got
out and the Russian man walked us out of the building and told us off on the
way out. So that was fun - a little sketch.
Threatened by a man high out of his
mind: So at a sharma stand, a man who was high out of his mind
or on some crazy drugs or drunk or something, started trying to climb up some
stairs and fell on his back. We went over to help him up and he was so heavy!
But we got him back up and leaned him against the wall and he found his way to
the food stand and started banging on the window, holding his bag of rotten
fish, trying to get them to give him some food. The cook was getting annoyed
and came out and dragged the man away from the window and put him on the floor against
the wall. We were just waiting for our food, and he got himself up 2 minutes
later an looked at me and pointed at me and started saying things, and I might
have said "Da" (yes) to him as habit when I can't understand what
someone is asking me. And he apparently said "You just wait. In 20 minutes
you're going to get it!" And he then tried reaching for his knife, which
he couldn't find, and then after much struggle, found his phone in his front
pocket, which he tried very hard to get it and when he finally did he dropped
it and I even picked it up for him, haha. He was trying to call his friends or
something to beat us up. At first we took a step back when he was reaching in
his pocket but he was sooo slow and so out of it he was not that intimidating.
He eventually fell down and crawled over to the side of the building where we
saw him laying there. There are actually a lot of drunks; you just don't notice
them. Like we also saw a guy fall straight on his back this week and just laid
there.
Marshrootka Party: So after that one experience, I just started trying to talk
with anyone and I'm very bad at Russian so it's easy for them to tell I am
American, and I started talking to a woman on the back of the marshrootka and
pretty soon we were talking to the whole back of the marshrootka, and we were
all laughing and it was a party. This was so weird because nobody talks on
public transport in Russia. They just sit there and look down, so it was sooo
funny.
Random Russia: So walking down the street I see a woman holding what I thought
was a strange looking baby. Up closer I find that it is a woman holding a
Monkey in little kid clothes! I then saw her with the monkey later
that day on the other side of town in a market, how random is that!
Kicked out of a hospital: So yesterday we had the great idea of visiting our recent
convert who was in the hospital because he just had surgery, and we wanted to
give him the sacrament, which we are able to do because he is a member. So the
hospitals are so sketch. To
explain it, it looks inside and out like an old insane asylum. They didn't even
have anyone by the front desk so we just kind of walked in and the guy with a
tag who I assumed was like the guard or something didn't say anything about it.
Ivan came out and we tried finding and open room to do the sacrament because it
so happened that the person he is sharing a room with is a police officer and
he didn't feel comfortable with that, so we found a bench and table where there
was no one around and were about to start and a nurse comes in and was yelling
at us and the guard until we left. So that was fun, very interesting.
We also got fed like kings again at
the sweet babushka’s house and we got a new investigator
Elder VanBuskirk
breakfast
fed like kings part 2
Yeah I'll buy the watch here. I have
really flat feet and I was wondering if you haven't sent it yet if you could
send insoles or whatever they’re called. I haven’t seen any yet, but I'll keep
looking!
No comments:
Post a Comment