Stear clear of drunk Russians

I read this e-mail at 1:45 this morning and as you can imagine, once you read it, I didn't sleep much the rest of the night. Jess has only been there less than a month and he has been sick twice and accosted by drunk Russians. I hope I make it through the next 20 1/2 months. The Lord will protect them, I know, but this is a little scary. I need to strengthen my faith so I am going to the Temple today in hopes of doing that. I am also going to put his name in the Temple so he can get over the stuff that he is battling with his health. I will trust in the Lord and turn this over to Him since I can't do anything about any of it myself.

September 10th e-mail from Russia
I'm glad everyone seems to be doing great at home. I loved all the pictures I got and I can't wait to get a picture of those babies that isn't an ultrasound, I'm sure they will be some pretty cute little girls. Well first before I forget, if you do send me stuff, I would want nothing but American medicine! Cold medicine, sore throat stuff, all that stuff is junk here in Russia. They think they can just put everything in a weird tablet form that doesn't work. Don't worry about stuff like peanut butter, I know that used to be a popular thing to send but Sister Woolley gives us each a jar of peanut butter at every mission conference. When are you coming to Russia again? I hope you like it here, it will be a bit strange at first. You'll notice everbody smokes and there's litter everywhere but it is really a pretty cool place. This is a little about my last week. Sunday morning I started getting a headache and diarrhea. I felt miserable all day Sunday but I just thought it was because we were fasting. I thought I could just sleep it off that night so wasn't worried. The next morning, Elder Hiatt and I got to go to a city called Kaluga. It is one of the three cities in our zone and since Elder Hiatt is the zone leader, we get to go on splits every once in a while. The bus ride was about 2 hours long and I tried to sleep as much as I could because I still felt really crappy. The bus was super hot and bouncy. That's another thing you will notice in Russia, the roads are so horrible here! We got to Kaluga and Elder Player and I got to spend the rest of the day together tracting and contacting. It was really fun, even though we don't speak well, we are still able to get our message across to people. We knocked on this one door and the second the guy opened the door he told us to come in and he ran back into his kitchen. I said I smell apples, and he said ya apples, and brought us each a nasty rotten apple. Russians pick up apples off the ground instead of off the tree so they are usually pretty questionable. He had us go into his living room and sit down. He asked what we want and we told him we just want to talk about our church. He wasn't interested in that but he could tell we weren't from around here. When he found out we were from America, he got real excited and started asking us about all these different movies but we couldn't really understand so he dug out all his movies. He spent about 5 minutes trying to put a dvd in for us to watch. We were trying to tell him we don't have time to watch movies and that we should go but he wouldn't hear any of it. Finally he gets the movie going and it turns out to be Fly Boys. Don't ask me why he thought it was so important that we see that movie. He kept trying to make us eat the apples which we didn't. Finally we got our point across that we needed to go and so we said goodbye and left. As we were walking out of the building, we both tossed our apples into the bushes and then we hear this guy say something. He had been leaning out his window waiting for us to leave the building. Luckily he didn't notice that we threw the apples but he just wanted to tell us a few more things. Most Russians really just love to talk. Even when they know you don't understand a word they are saying, they just love to talk. We had a ward activity that night which was held in their apartment since they don't have enough members there to have a branch building. It was lucky that it was in their apartment because I was just feeling awful. I ended up going to bed at around 9:30. I had to get up 3 times to go to the bathroom though so the next morning, the other elders had me call Sister Woolley and see what I should do. She told me to call Sister Corbett and told me she's a nurse. What I didn't know was that she is also just a regular sister missionary! I thought she must just be here on a mission with her husband or something. So I called her, told her in great detail what had been going on and she told me to just call her back the next day if things hadn't slowed down at all. We hung up and I said, she sounds pretty young. The other elders told me that she was just a normal sister missionary who happens to be a full fleged RN, they thought that was pretty funny. Hopefully I never see her. We ate lunch in Kaluga and caught a bus home. I was feeling okay because one elder gave me some immodium that seemed to be working. The rest of the week was pretty tough. We kept trying to meet with people and they wouldn't show up but finally we got a hold of a guy who used to meet with the elders but stopped for some reason. When we met with him, he seemed very interested and had lots of questions. When we asked when we could meet with him again he said how about tomorrow? This was yesterday so we have another meeting with him tonight. His name is Ivan and he is really cool. I can't wait to meet with him again. So this is where my day got interesting. We had English Club last night. I teach the advanced group and Elder Hiatt teaches the middle group. Only one guy showed up in my group so it was just me and him. I had him try to teach me some russian. His name is Nick and he is probably just a bit older than me. He's pretty strange but he's a nice guy. He always walks with us most of the way home after English Club. Well after we got sick of trying to speak Russian, we started just talking about stuff in English. Elder Hiatt told me that Nick was gay about a week ago or so, so when Nick asked me what my opinion on proposition 8 was, I knew I was in for a weird time. The rest of the conversation was pretty awkward and not fun. Needless to say, I was happy when time was up. Well I thought my night couldn't get any weirder but it did. We were walking home and we were about a block from our apartment and it was pretty dark outside. These three drunk guys and a drunk girl started yelling for us to come talk to them but we didn't want anything to do with them so we just kept walking. All of the sudden one guy ran and grabbed Elder Hiatt by the arm and stopped him. They said they wanted to know what we were doing here and where we were from. We said we we were here to preach the gospel so he started saying, okay then preach to me! It was obvious that they weren't interested in what we had to say so we were just trying to tell them that we have to go home. They didn't want us to leave so one grabbed my backpack strap. He said they wanted to talk to us over in this dark spot with all these trees. We definitely weren't going over there but he had a pretty good hold on my bag. He started pulling me over there and Elder Hiatt was trying to help. He turned to two old ladies and said call the cops. By this point, another guy had come up and started shoving me around while his friend was trying to pull me to the trees. When Elder Hiatt said call the cops, they got mad and started shoving me even more saying, why do you want the police? The one guy kept shoving my head and trying to shove me to the ground. I said a little prayer and knew I would be fine. All of the sudden, two older Russian guys came and started telling the younger ones to leave us alone and let us go. They didn't want to at first but finally they did. We started walking away and Elder Hiatt said let's run! So we ran the rest of the way home. It was a pretty crazy experience but we sure felt blessed to have gotten away without even a scratch. It could have turned ugly fast but I know the Lord watches out for his missionaries. Don't worry mom, Elder Hiatt said that was the first time that has ever happened to him so it's not like it is a common thing. He said I shouldn't even tell you because when he told his mom something that happened to him, she freaked out and called the mission office! haha, So please don't do that. We really are watched over and protected. Anyway, that was pretty much my week. That was so cool about Shauna's nephew. Our apartment is on the same street as his but we're sure it's not the same one. The weather has been actually pretty warm lately. I've been sweating like crazy, partly because I think I had a fever for a while but Elder Hiatt gave me a blessing today so I am on my way to a full recovery. I love you guys and am praying for you as well. Thanks for everything!
Elder Geddes