Baptismal Dates

Hello everyone,

Well, I successfully made it back from my visa trip. I won't lie, I was a little nervous about the whole thing but after all was said and done, I felt pretty good about the fact that I was able to get where I needed to be when I needed to be there in one of the biggest greatest cities in the world. I hated the train ride up to Moscow though. It was so long and boring! When I got in my compartment, I was the last of the 4 to move in. The other three had been in there for who knows how long. There was a man, a woman, and a devushka who was probably about 23 or so. I wasn't too happy about having to share a room with her, the older people didn't bother me but she was wearing some sort of tights pants things and a small t-shirt. I tried to be nice and ask them all where they were from and they just looked up at me like I was some sort of creature and told me where they were from and not another word was spoken to me for the rest of the 13 hour trip. I was pretty bored so I just ended up falling asleep. I woke up around 6:30 or 7 and studied and read and stuff as long as I could and then tried to go back to sleep which just didn't happen for me. I slept pretty poorly and kept waking up to a younger girl sleeping about 2 feet away from me. It was weird. The good thing was that the train lady woke us up at 3:30 for some reason so we could be ready by 5. I was glad to get woken up so I could quit trying to force myself to sleep. Anyway, I honestly felt pretty cool getting off that train. I had packed as light as I could so I had my small jacket with a backpack and that's all. I headed to the metro and had to wait for about a half hour for it to open. I found my metro and made it to the stop I needed to be at. I asked one person which way to go and another person where the certain house was and I found the a.p.'s apartment without problem. My whole group met up there and we ate pretty much every thing in that apartment that qualified as breakfast food. I felt bad for the a.p.'s but oh well. Anyway, it was so much fun to be with my group again. They are all doing really well and we are all growing so much. We spoke Russian to each other mostly all day. We got taken to the airport by our mission driver and just waited for our plane to Kiev. In Kiev we had about an hour and a half, so we thought, so we just kind of walked around. I changed some money and bought a spoon that says kiev. Elder Guynn was so impressed with the money that he changed exactly the same amount of money as I did just so he could keep the bills. While we were there, we saw a couple that looked pretty american pointing at the different souvenirs so I asked them if they were from America. They were so happy to meet us. They had been in Ukraine for around 3 weeks getting approved to adopt a baby. They said it was pretty rough trying to be there that long without knowing the language or having any kind of real translators. They said they went to the store looking to by sugar and milk and came home with salt and yogurt. I can see how that could happen. Anyway, we helped them find out how much a few things were then said goodbye. When it was time to go check in, we all headed to the desk. When we handed the papers to the lady, all she said was, "oh, you'll have to get some different tickets" We had gotten the check in time and the take off time mixed up so we tried to check in about 5 or 10 minutes before take off. They found out how many of us there were and just like last time, made things happen for us and we got on the plane in time. It was a really big blessing. Usually people aren't too kind in airports but the last two times we have been extremely late, there has been one really nice worker who just decides to help us out. Pretty interesting huh. Oh ya, in the airport in moscow I got stopped by a cop. Two days before that, I had gone to this really neat army shop near my house and they have for sale all the different patches, pins, hats, belt buckles, everything you need if you are a cop or military. I bought a cop patch and had Sister Lowery sew it on my backpack. The cop stopped me and said, do you understand Russian? I said ya, and he said, take off your backpack. What is that? I told him it was a souvenir and he simply said, take it off. I took it off and he took it from me and walked away. Crazy huh. It was only 18 rubles so I'll buy another one and probably just wait until I'm home to sew it on. We got back to Moscow after a crazy landing in which we all thought we were dead. The Russians have this thing where they applaud when we land the plane. Some moron started clapping the second a wheel touched the ground and I'm convinced the captain must have turned around to see who was already clapping and we swerved all over the place! It was kind of funny. We got back to the office and got fed dinner. I made it back to the train station, found out which track my train was on and I found my room. I was the first one to move in, followed by one really nice guy. I had been up since 3:30 that morning so I was just so tired. It was around 11 o'clock and I just wanted to go to bed. The guy said the same thing, he told me he was going to go smoke then go to bed but when he got back from his smoke, I guess he felt like talking. I told him I was from America and that's about it, he just went on and on, somehow got onto the topic of the olympics and boxing and some party he went to in Germany. I was just fighting to stay awake when I felt a tap on my arm and the guy said, you can go to sleep now. Ha, I fell asleep while having a one on one conversation with a guy. I said, oh I'm sorry, it's just that I've been up since 3:30 this morning and he said, oh, I see, ya I just was going to tell you... and went on to tell me another 15 minutes worth of stuff about the olympics. Finally I got to go to sleep. I slept really good that night. I got back to Veronizh and headed straight to the branch building. I was so glad to be back. I missed sacrament meeting but I went to sunday school and priesthood after two days of not showering or shaving. It was pretty bad. Anyway, that is the visa trip story for this visa.

It just so happens I had some spiritual experiences this week. I'm really glad Dad served the mission he did though. I see myself learning those same lessons that he learned. I'm grateful for this challenge, I feel like it will make me really search out the spirit and spiritual experiences because I know they happen. Anyway, there are two Russian sisters serving in Lipitsk, the town about 2 hours from here. They were here in Veronezh and asked us for a blessing. I have done the annointing for probably around 15 blessings but I haven't ever done the actual blessing. I felt like this time, I would be picked to give the blessing. They had actually called the night before so I had all night to think about it. I knew for some reason it was going to be me that gave the blessing so I was trying to prepare some stuff in my mind, going over the grammar, making sure I knew how to seal the annointing and so forth. The next day, sure enough, Sister Gorkavenko asked me to give her the blessing. I laid my hands on her head and said her name and was just full of the spirit right then. I can finally say I have sort of had one of those experiences where I was just speaking. And I was speaking well. I'm sure I still made a few mistakes but I just felt good. I gave her a blessing of health and comfort and closed the prayer. It felt so good, I won't forget that day. Another great experience happened yesterday. We had a meeting with a 16 year old named Sergey. His mom is a strong member but he has lived with his dad for most of his life. He knows a little about the church but has just never joined. We have met with him once before, and we tried to meet another time and he supposedly took the wrong bus so he didn't make it. Yesterday, he showed up for his lesson and we taught a good lesson about the gospel of Jesus Christ, faith, repentance, baptism, gift of the holy ghost, and enduring to the end. We challenged him to be baptized on the 27th of February and he agreed. Keep him in your prayers. He is a really good kid and he is ready but it will still be a miracle if we can baptize him on the 27th. He has smoked since he was 7 years old, thanks to a great older brother. He says he has been trying to quit anyway because he doesn't have the money to support the habit and he knows it is not healthy. He seemed pretty confident that it would be no problem to quit so let's hope he can. If he gets baptized, it will be because of the faith of his mother. She has never lost faith that if she does what she's supposed to, the Lord will bless her and her family. She's a really strong woman. We actually have another baptism planned for the 27th, a 23 year old girl named Ina. I don't think I told you about her because I wasn't sure what was going to happen. The sisters here both just got transfered, right after they set a baptismal date with Ina. President figured it would be best if we took her since we know her and it would be harder to all of the sudden have two brand new sisters teaching her. So, we are working with her and are planning to baptise her on the 27th as well. Keep these people in your prayers, baptism is a big step, especially when you are such a minority here.

It sounds like you guys have had a lot of fun lately, I'm sure it was a blast having so much family around. I can't believe Tanner is getting back, that's pretty crazy. It is still getting warmer here and I have gone back to my lighter jacket and don't even really have to wear gloves anymore. I hope this is the end of the winter and we aren't just having some warm days. Thanks for writing, tell everyone hello for me. I'm glad you are all doing so well. I love you guys.

Love, Elder Geddes

Mom's Reasurance

Hey everyone,

The church has switched to a google powered email and so President has asked us all to switch to these new addresses. Let anyone know who doesn't get a weekly email from me. First of all, I got Aunt Shauna's package, it was awesome, I ate it pretty fast though so I didn't have to share as much with my companion! Mom, don't worry about my apartment being too cold, we have the old radiator things on the walls, it's just that when it's really really cold outside, it's pretty cold inside as well. Right now, our apartment is around 68 degrees. The weather has been warming up here, it seems like we might be coming to an end of my first Russian winter. The wind has been blowing a lot lately so it's still pretty cold outside but the sun has been shining a lot and the river is actually starting to melt as well. That's neat that the Lowry's emailed you, they asked for your email address a while ago so I figured they would. They are pretty great people, I really enjoy serving with them. They just recently had a visa trip as well. They go to Finland for their visa trips because they like to go to the temple there. On the way to the airport in Moscow, Elder Lowry got pick pocketed and lost his wallet. He had around 37000 rubles in there that he was planning on switching to Euros in Finland. Also, he had his temple recommend and drivers license in there. I have taken my drivers license out since it doesn't do me any good here anyway, that way if I lose my wallet I will just lose my temple recommend, some money and a credit card, all kind of easy to replace. But don't worry, I don't plan on losing my wallet. I will be in Moscow on the metro by myself this weekend though. I'm not too scared of anything other than getting to the airport on time. I hope everything goes well. There was some really bad communication between us and the office so I didn't buy my tickets until today which means there were no good timed trains for me to get on. I get on a train tomorrow at 4:21 in the afternoon and get to Moscow at 5 in the morning. Don't ask me what I'm going to do from 4:30 until it's time to go to sleep. I hope nobody else is in my room but I'm sure their will be. I hope they are all either quiet business men or just a nice family or something. I don't feel like spending the night with 3 old bobushkas sleeping around me. Either way, I'm sure it will be hot and stuffy and smelly after being in a small compartment for 13 hours straight. So I will meet my group at the airport and go to Ukraine with them. I have a train that leaves at 10:30 that night and it doesn't get back to Veronezh until 11:30 or so the next morning. By that point I will be more than ready to be back in my own apartment in my own city. I'm pretty excited about the whole thing though since I haven't seen anyone from my mtc group in a long time. I can't wait to see them all and hear how they have been doing.

We had a pretty boring week this week, not a whole lot happened. We got to go to Lipitsk yesterday and go on splits with the sisters there. All four of us elders from Veronezh had to go. The main reason for the trip was so that Elder Traasdahl could give a baptismal interview to a girl there. It was a fun trip. On the way back, we had a pretty crowded bus so we just had to find a seat where we could. The very back of the bus had a bench seat all the way across that the other elders ended up sitting on. Elder Traasdahl and I got normal seats in the row in front of them. Once we got going, we looked back and noticed that a very loud guy (holding an empty bottle of what must have been some pretty strong alcohol) ended up sitting in between Elder Waite and Elder Khusainof. He quickly found out that Elder Waite was American and wanted to talk to him the whole ride. At one point I looked back and saw them in the middle of a good ol' fashioned thumb war for some reason. Obviously Elder Waite wasn't understanding all the stuff this guy was saying but he looked like he was concentrating pretty good on the thumb war. The drunk guy had a friend that had obviously been babysitting the guy all day and had had enough of him. The drunk guy started annoying the friend so much that the friend stood up and they started fighting! The friend landed some punches then sat down. I was laughing so hard watching Elder Waite in the middle of this drunken fist fight. Eventually the elders moved to some different seats. We had about a half hour left on the trip when the drunk guy started getting pretty bored. Do you remember the scene from Shrek 2 when Donkey is making that clicking noise with his tongue on the road trip and they tell him to stop then you see the donkey's head slowly come forward right between Shrek and Fionna's head? That's what this reminded me of. Elder Traasdahl was asleep and I was just sitting there when all of a sudden there was a head right inbetween ours. We told him to sit down and he did but then he started coming up again. His phone was ringing and he put his face about 2 inches from mine and said a few times "MAMA... MAMA..." he pointed to me that it was his mom calling. I said Answer it, and he obediently answered the phone and talked to his mom for a few minutes. At one point, he must have felt that the ride was too quiet so he let out a loud whistle. His friend came back and said some stuff to him and he stopped. The guy was harmless, thank goodness, so it ended up just being pretty funny. I was just worried he was going to throw up or something.

Anyway, that seems to be all that has been going on for me. It sounds like you guys are all doing pretty good. That's great that the babies were blessed, I'm sure that was a lot of fun. I was laughing pretty hard at the stories mom told me from the dinner afterward, nothing like a good dog poop story to lift one's spirits. I'm excited to get the pictures when my package comes. I will get to go to Moscow again for Zone Conference on the 24th so maybe it will be there by then. With all this stuff going on, February is going to be gone before I know it. Today is the second Thursday of the month, or, the ultimate p-day as I like to call it. Every month on the second Thursday, the priesthood bretheren get together and have a small lesson followed by a big dinner. For some reason, our branch president thinks it is good for the missionaries to be there. I won't lie, I look forward to it all month. Speaking of food though, I have eaten some pretty nasty stuff lately. This one lady keeps feeding us when we meet with her and it is just not good. The first time it was something called Hollodetz. I remember reading about it before the mission but I kind of thought it was a myth. They take something like the knees and ears of a pig and just boil them for a really long time, like 5 hours or something. They take the bones out and then cool down the junk thats left. What it ends up being is pork jello. You know what grease drippings look like the day after? Or that film stuff on top of homemade soup the next morning? Take that, add some shredded meat, and eat it! It's not good at all. The last time we ate there, she gave us stuff called greshka, which is like a kind of cracked wheat or barley or something. It's not that good but it's tolerable. Along with it she gave us fried eggs, which by fried I mean white on the bottom. She probably cracked the egg and left it in the pan for a total of 10 seconds. It was super runny and gooey. I choked it down though. Sometimes it's not all that fun to be fed.

Well, I'm glad everyone is doing good and having fun. Have fun with all the upcoming activities you have. Thanks for everything, I love you guys.

Love, Elder Geddes

Can you say COLD!!

Sorry I am a little late getting this post out. Emily and Jason blessed the babies this weekend and I was pretty involved helping out. These pictures were hard for a mom to take. My son seems to be freezing and I can't do a thing about it. Bob tells me he lived through a few apartments like that and he is none the worse for wear so again, I have to learn to trust in the Lord that he will be okay.


Hey everyone,

Well we had kind of a boring week, not a whole lot happened. Today is the first day of my 5th transfer and I will be with Elder Traasdahl again. Things have been improving so it's not as bad as I once thought it was. I am still interested to see if president will keep us together for one more after this since it will be Elder Traasdahls last transfer. His mom knows the Christensens somehow, Chad and Sheri. She gave them a call and talked to them a bit and asked if they knew me. Small world. It has been warming up a little, enough for our apartment to heat back up to a reasonable temperature anyway. By the way, don't worry, we don't have a furnace. We have a gas stove though but we always make sure it's off. Anyway, the weirdest thing about our apartment is that every once in a while we would have no hot water, which isn't that weird, but lately we haven't had cold water! I have to say, I would rather go without hot water than without cold. You have to put the shower all the way on cold and it is still so hot that you can't hardly be in it! Plus, the water pressure is really low when it's all the way on cold so it's kind of like being trickled with molten lava. Elder Traasdahl claims that if you lay down in the bathtub as flat as you can, the water has more time in the air and is therefore a little cooler by the time it hits your body. I didn't try it so I'm not sure. The other thing is, the past few days, right at lunch time, they have been shutting off the water completely. I have been smart enough to take the one and only flush of the toilet before Elder Traasdahl realizes what is going on. I have needed it lately because I think God is punishing me. I might have accidentally broken the word of wisdom when I ate an entire box of jello for breakfast one morning. I had made it the night before and so it was ready by morning and I just couldn't wait to eat it. The problem is that I had to make it in a gigantic bowl because it was all we had so it looked like there wasn't that much jello in there. I think there was more than I thought but I just finished it off. The next few days my stomach was feeling pretty weird. I think the jello reset itself in my stomach, at least that's what it felt like. Once I felt better from that, I think I did it again when I ate an entire can of corn for lunch. It was on Tuesday so we had already started running low on food so I just ate the corn. Either you aren't supposed to do that or the chicken we ate wasn't all the way cooked. Anyway, I think I might be over all of these weird things. We finished the last transfer with a total of around 50 rubles. I would say that is pretty good. Hopefully this transfer we will be able to be a bit more thrifty. I forgot that you get the newsletter, we didn't even get it this last zone conference. I think they must have forgotten it or something. Ya there has been two baptisms here in Veronezh since I've been here and one kid got baptized last week from Lipitsk, a city about two hours from here. They came here because they don't have a font there. This poor kid was 9 years old and his mom is a member. They tried to baptize him when he was 8 but he is really scared of the water and they didn't get him all the way under. It took him a year to get the guts up to try again. I was really impressed with the branch president. He did the baptism and he did a really good job. The kid was really scared again, as he got in the water, his legs just sort of melted and he started to just kind of curl up or something. He was shaking and breathing funny trying to be as brave as possible. The president knew he didn't have much time and that he would only have once chance so he said the baptismal prayer with about as much authority as I've ever heard, then dunked the kid with more authority than I've ever seen and lifted him straight out of the water and out of the font in one move. It was really cool. The sisters here just set a baptismal date with a girl yesterday. The sad thing is that both sisters will be gone by the time the baptism takes place. Sister Werner, the red haired sister, got transfered to Minsk and one of the native sisters, Sister Vlasova, got transfered to Kazakstan.

I can't remember what I asked you to send in that package but if you can, send me a jump drive and two normal garment bottoms, hamburger helper if it is big enough, oh and most important, if you can send me our most recent family picture and maybe a few more pictures that you can find, and I think there was something else I wanted but I can't remember. Just follow the spirit and I'm sure it will all be fine! Anyway, it sounds like you are all doing really well. Tell everyone hello for me that I don't write as often. I love you all, take care.

Love, Elder Geddes