Elder VanBuskirk: Dylan: Starting New Fresh Trends

Welcome back comrades,

This week we had our first Zone Conference with our new Mission President, President Ottersen. He is a sweetheart and from So-California. I had the most amazing interview with him and I feel very grateful that out of all of my mission presidents, he is the one that will be with me for a year, because I feel like I can relate to him in many ways. So in short, I love him and his wife.

They talked about some of the changes of the new mission, and the biggest one, probably, is that we will be having "business informal days" for safety and for more effective finding from Wednesdays to Saturdays. So how it works is we wear normal white shirt and tie from Sunday-Tuesday, and when ever we have a lesson or appointment (we keep our shirt and tie in our bag and throw it on). We have to report how many conversations, numbers, and harassment's we get a day and report and than they send all of our reports to salt lake, we are experimenting this for the church and most likely soon every Russia mission will be doing this. I am very excited. When you are here everyone just stares at you and they don't even try to be secret about it; they think we are a sect or spies, and that we work for the government. For example this week a man came up to us with his 2 little kids and started yelling in our faces using every cuss word telling us to go back home, etc. And later this week we went to find some package and it was in a even more sketchy than usual area, and this guy from across the street asked where we were from and I hesitantly responded California (sometimes we get good responses) and this guy with his 3 friends started cussing in both English and Russian, yelling at the top of his lungs flipping us off as we walked all the way down the street, we went for a while and then crossed but he must have seen us because we tried going around them and we were in this sketch part and he sees us through some sheds and the 3 guys started yelling at us some more following us telling us to stop and come over to them because they wanted to 'talk", we just hastened our pace and went around some buildings until we lost them.

There was plenty of other stuff that happened this week but I'll just send some pics. This is the greatest work on the planet and I am forever grateful to be a part of it.

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