His first greenie has arrived

Hey everyone,

We had quite the week this week, it went really, really fast. Elder Cecil and I just worked as usual and nothing too big happened until Tuesday when we were supposed to go to Moscow. Elder Cecil had a visa trip, I had to go get my companion, the sisters went to pick up their new companions so everyone left except for one poor elder who stayed with the senior couple for a couple nights. Anyway, Elder Khussainov bought the train tickets and said at 4:00 we needed to be at the station. We showed up at about 4:20 which we thought was plenty of time to catch our 4:30 train, the only problem was that Elder Cecil and I showed up to the wrong station. There are two here in Veronezh and we had a bit of a miscommunication (the first one in my whole 10 months of speaking Russian... not) Anyway, we called Khussainov and he made some quick calls. There happened to be a member of the church from Lipitsk, the neighboring city, in Veronezh. The trains leave from Veronezh and end up going through a small station near Lipitsk. The plan was that she could beat the train to that station and we could catch on there. Well, we didn't make it. To make a long story short, we ended up having to buy overnight bus tickets from Lipitsk to Moscow so Elder Cecil could make it on time for his visa trip. At first I was a little annoyed about what had happened but by the end of the day I was pretty pleased about it. First of all, I got to know this member lady from Lipitsk who is actually really cool. She served a mission a few years ago and is just a good lady. Then when we were getting into the town, she got a call from a young girl in the ward who wanted her to come talk to her mom. The girl has been a member for almost 2 years and her mom has been pretty against the church this whole time. She is just now starting to open up a bit to the church. Yulia, the lady we were with, said that she could come talk to the mom and that she would bring two elders with her. When we got there, we were able to just get to know the mom a bit while Yulia talked with the younger girl. Her mom is a pretty nice lady, asked us lots of questions about where we were from and our families and stuff and why we were on missions. Then we got to sing a couple songs and Yulia kind of took over from there and did an awesome job solving a lot of this ladies concerns. At the end, Elder Cecil and I just bore testimony and were able to share our reasons for being on missions. As we were leaving, the mom told me that she feels a lot better now that she knows the people her daughter spends so much time with are actually pretty good people. I am not sure if we helped at all, but the spirit was strong as Elder Cecil and I bore simple testimony about the truthfulness of the gospel. It was pretty cool. I would even say it made the overnight bus ride worth it.

Our bus left at 9:30 and got to Moscow at around 6. I thought at first that the bus might just be better than the train just a bit, but I was so wrong. First of all, one of the first passengers that got on the bus after us was pretty drunk. He went to the very back of the bus and just started moaning and groaning. A lady behind me asked if the driver could kick him off before it was too late. The driver went back to talk to the guy and by the time he got back there the guy had already passed out. They all agreed that it was probably just best to let him sleep, so off we went. I was able to sleep pretty good the first half of the night, but then I woke up around 2 and couldn't sleep hardly at all the rest of the night. At one point, the guy from the back walked up the aisle past me to talk to the driver. He smelled like pure throw up. As he started walking back, sure enough he stops at my seat to talk to me and ask for some help. He was having a hard time getting the buttons on his cell phone to work so he handed me the phone and asked me to do it. His first mistake was that the phone was upside down, so he was trying to punch the number in on the back of his phone, ha. Anyway, I felt pretty good about myself for helping a drunk man covered in his own throw up make a phone call at three in the morning on a bus somewhere in the middle of Russia... only on a mission does this stuff happen.

We finally made it to Moscow and met up with all the others at the train station. We got to the branch building and just waited around for a couple hours for our new companions to get there. I finally saw my companion come in and realized he is about a foot taller than me. I also realized he speaks very good english. His name took me a few minutes to figure out. His name is Elder Khasbiullin... I'm still working on it. Anyway, he is by far the coolest Russian elder in our mission. He is so nice and he is exactly how I wanted him to be, excited and ready to be obedient. I thought about myself as a greenie and how excited I was to see basic street signs just because they were in Russian and how I wasn't affraid to tell my trainer "that's not what the white handbook says" and I thought, it would be easy to be even more obedient if my companion wants to stick to all the rules, even the small ones. Today, my companion asked me if I was going to wear my suit coat and I said, no but you can if you want. He said, ya but they told us in the MTC that we should always look alike. I chuckled a bit and figured I had at one point said the same exact words, only in english. He is 23 years old and has been a member since he was 8. He played college basketball and some professional as well. He is very excited that we have a basketball court here in Veronezh and president wants us to somehow figure out a way to use his basketball skills to find people to teach the gospel to. I'm up for anything. He is a very happy guy and has already helped me a lot with some words. Also, he knows that we as American missionaries need to speak as much Russian as possible so he doesn't try to speak to me in English just because he knows it. He wants to speak to us in Russian to help us. So far, I'm liking this a lot.

We had a really long training/orientation meeting there in Moscow with all the new elders and sisters. It was pretty good but I was so tired from the night before on the bus and I was also really hungry since we hadn't eaten hardly anything. We got fed pizza hut and then had a choice to either go contacting or go to a famous art museum. Of course everyone picked the art museum, even though it meant we would have to take part of our p-day today to work. The museum was pretty cool, once again, really long but I enjoyed it. There were some pretty awesome paintings. There were a lot of paintings of Christ. There was one painting of Judas after he had betrayed Christ that I thought was really cool. It was painted with mostly all dark colors and you could see Judas standing and looking at a mob of people in the distance. You could just feel his guilt and a realization of What have I done. It was pretty cool. After that, we just gathered our stuff and headed back to the train station to get on another train. I will be going back to Moscow in two weeks for a visa trip, then two weeks after that I will be going back because Elder Perry will be coming to our mission to speak to us. I'm excited.

I got the package, but I didn't open it. I was really tempted to because I was really hungry and everyone was telling me to just open it, but I stayed strong. It will be all the sweeter on my birthday. I still haven't heard anything about calling home but I will let you know as soon as I hear anything. It still doesn't seem like it was that long ago we called home for Christmas. Our apartment is really nice now that we have our furniture. We have had some issues with leaks and stuff that are still bothering us but today we finally got a mirror in our bathroom so I guess just one step at a time.

Our converts are doing okay I guess. Inna has a hard time getting to church sometimes, she works a lot. The bad thing is that she doesn't really see it as a big problem to miss church. Sergey is doing as good as possible, as long as his mom is around. She makes sure he gets to church and stuff. We had a lesson with him where we went over the plan of salvation. It was the first time we've gone over it since his baptism. I just asked him what he remembers about it and he proceeded to draw on the chalk board a very detailed plan of salvation. There were just a couple things he didn't remember but I was very happy.

That sounds like it was a crazy wind storm, hopefully nobody had too much damage done. I'm sure all the school kids weren't too disappointed about it. I have been wondering about the other missionaries from our stake. How many do we have out right now? I can't believe it's about time for a few of those guys to come home.

Well, thanks for all the letters and support. We kind of have a busy day so I'm in a bit of a hurry. We have to go buy some serious groceries and get my companion settled in a bit. Plus, we have to use part of our day for missionary work because of the museum. I love you guys and hope all is going well for you. I'll talk to you next week and hopefully I'll know when we get to call home. Love you!

Elder Geddes