Mime Time‏

Zdrastvuitye!

Exchanges week!! Man, exchanges are always such an adventure! They are pretty stressful though because you want the Sister Training Leaders to think that your area is booming, so you schedule every meeting you can get for the two days that they are there and then you have nothing to do for the rest of the week. Good times. Sister Sotnikova and Sister Wilson from Samara came to Penza for exchanges. We saw some wonderful miracles while working with the sisters! Guess how many Book of Mormons we gave out in the two days that they were with us?? Guess. 20 Book of Mormons! It takes Sister Thomas and I at least two weeks to do that on a regular basis. Flood the earth with the book!

Sister Sotnikova (the Russian Sister) and I camped ourselves at a busstop one morning and ended up having some wonderful conversations with people. We even gave out a Book of Mormon! After about an hour and a half of hanging out there we had to split because there is a handicapped man that likes to harrass people on the streets. I honestly love watching him because he is literally hilarious. He only bugs the men, so we never have to worry, but it's usually good to leave when he comes around. He walks around the streets yelling gibberish into a dead walkie talkie and he always carries around a broken broom handle that's covered in colorful duct tape. He likes to pretend that his broom handle is a machine gun and he "shoots down" the pigeons on the sidewalks with it. He even does the sound effects. Sometimes he walks up to men standing at the busstops and whacks them on the butt with his broom stick. Literally so funny! He doesn't do it hard, but enough to startle them. Quite entertaining.

Sister Wilson and I had such a fun time serving together again. Just like old times. We visited a new convert named Lada and she is quite a character. She is a pretty old lady and she works as a model for the art school. Sometimes the students give her their reditions of her face and she hangs them up in her house. She has about 60 drawings, paintings, and sketches of her face on her walls. I was pretty much in shock when I walked into her apartment. So much Lada everywhere! She loves to show them off. After we were done ooing and awing over her face, we shared a spiritual thought and we were able to commit her to invite her son to have a lesson with us. He is an investigator, but we can only visit with him when he is at his mom's house. She is such a great missionary and she agreed to help us out. 

Sister Sotnikova and I had a pretty awful lesson with one of our investigators. The member who helped us out on the lesson literally did not help at all. She brought her very energetic baby with her, they were both starving when they came, and they only stayed for about 20 minutes. The member asked our investigator one question, didn't like her answer, and walked her kid around the park for the rest of the lesson. Before she left, she chewed out our investigator for the way that she lives and then she left. Neither of them are very fond of each other anymore. Our investigator was pretty offended, but she loves the missionaries, so not too much harm was done. Sister Sotnikova and I spent about an hour after the "lesson" cleaning up that mess. Members give me ulcers sometimes. I love them, but they give me stress.

After exchanges, as expected, we had nothing to do for the rest of the week. We did a lot of area exploring since I don't really know the area super well and transfers are coming up next week. We are fairly certain that Sister Thomas is going to be leaving since she has lived here for almost 7 months. We'll see though! President Schwab just informed us in his weekly letter that "in the coming transfers there may be significant changes in companionships and leadership", so we're all interested to see what is going to come to pass in the near future! I can't wait to see what happens! Last I heard, there are going to be 5 new Sisters coming in, so the likelihood of me being able to train is pretty high. Exciting!

Anyways, during our area exploration we were able to meet quite a few really cool people and we placed a couple Book of Mormons. We were able to find a Russian Cemetary as well, which is something I've wanted to visit on my mission bucket list. Russian Cemetaries are pretty weird because there are little baby fences surrounding the perimeter of the actual burial plot and the head stone. There are lots of idols and crosses in them. Pretty creepy. The cemetaries are always in the forest, so I got lots of bug bites as a souvineer. Side note, I'm pretty sure that I'm just straight up allergic to Russian mosquitoes. I have a few bites on my legs and they all look pretty poofy. The mosquitoes have been fond of biting my hands lately, so I have a beautiful Orian's Belt bite formation on my hand. So beautiful. We went over to our favorite less active witch the other day and she gave me some weird cream that actually really helped. Love them witch doctors! They always know what to do! At the end of our visit with her, she gave us a ginormous zucchini that's about a foot and a half long and six inches thick. Zucchini bread anyone?

The monkey dome that Sister Thomas and I went to last week wasn't much to talk about. We would have had to pay extra to see the reptiles, so we just opted to look at the primates. The monkeys there were really cool, but they all looked so sad. One of the monkeys was literally having a nervous breakdown in his little pen. So sad! We had to pay 2 dollars for every picture that we wanted to take (how they would have been able to keep track of that, I have no idea), so we don't have any photo evidence of our attendance in the tent. They had a few mokeys out that we could pet and this random lady threw a monkey at me and told me to hug it. Not going to lie, it was pretty cute. That's about as close as you can get to hugging a boy whilst on a mission. I let the monkey rummage through my purse and thankfully it didn't steal anything. Fun times. Now there is a huge circus tent set up next to the monkey one. Unfortunately none of the performances are on Monday, and I don't think we would have been able to get permission for that anyways. Trust me, getting permission to go to the circus has been attempted before... many times. Sister Thomas and I saw a car packed full of mimes on their way to the circus... that was a funny sight. How do they talk to each other?

Well, that's all for this week folks! Hang up your self portraits and give a monkey a hug!

Do Svidanya!

Love,

Sister Megan Wagstaff