Easter in Ukraine...a cultural experience‏ E-mail - May 6, 2013

Easter in Ukraine is an interesting phenomenon. Basically everyone actually goes to the Orthodox church and they walk around all day saying "Jesus is Resurrected" and then you say back "Yea, he's resurrected." We decided to go contacting with the tactic of just saying the normal greating and giving people the "Living Christ". It works extremely well, but I couldn't decide if it was almost inappropriate to do that and if most people think that we're actually orthodox. Maybe we'll have a ton of new people at church next week expecting an orthodox church and they'll see how absolutely true our church is and we'll convert a ton of people.

We went to shashlik this Saturday. Shashlik is Ukrainian for shishkabobs and I'm sending you a picture of the event. So normally we have about 20 some people at church but we had over 40 for Shashlik and about half were investigators, it was really cool to see everyone interact.

So for this last week we've been trying to invite all of our members including the less active ones to the shashlik event, needless to say, some of them were not super happy to see us. We went to a village to see one of them. Turns out 3 of our less actives live out there, one of which tried to sick her killer German Shepherd on us. Kind of scary. The funny part is that I couldn't understand every one very well in the village and that was freaking me out. I've been here long enough that I understand just about everyone. Then we figured it out...they were all Polish! There is a village here full of Polish Catholics...and 3 less active Mormons. They were all really nice and it was my first experience with Ukrainian/Polish rather than Ukrainian/Russian.

My companion is great we've become like best friends. She's just really cool. And really fun, and really supportive. AND this note is specifically for John...my companion's best friend/cousin is married to Marie Osmond's son. My companion has met her, talked with her, spent time with her family. And she says that Marie works a lot in the temple in Las Vegas, so maybe when you move out there, you should increase your temple attendance :).

I'm excited for skyping on Saturday...12pm your time.

Love you!!

PS...I almost forgot, I'M GOING TO L'VIV!!!! We're going this week for zone conference, I'm so excited!