April 8, 2013

Hello family!

I don't even know where to start for this week. It hasn't been the best week I have had on my mission. Sunday night last week I started feeling sick. Just a sore throat no big deal but by Monday I was feeling pretty achy. I was least able to sleep during the day for p-day. Tuesday was actually a really sweet day. We met with marina and set a baptism date with her. It is for June 15 so we've got time but it just takes a little bit for her to understand. Little by little she'll get there. She actually stayed for all 3 hours of church yesterday. Then Aleksey was talking to his friend about meeting with us and then his friend wanted to meet with us. He is pretty sweet. Knows English pretty well and is kind of searching for what the world has in store for him. We’ll see where things go with him. Then we went with a member. Well a mom and her son. He is 40 and hasn't been to the temple and they haven't done any family history work. We talked about the plan of salvation and committed him to write down his mom's life history. She is around 80 and the coolest lady ever.

We thought we were going to be getting on a train that night but when the assistants finally sent the right tickets we found out they were for 5 in the morning. That meant waking up at 3 to get to the train station on time sleeping a little on the train, doing weekly planning, and then getting to Samara. While we were in Samara we worked with Sister Clyde (her 3rd cycle she was trained by Sister Scoville) and Sister Johnson who just got here 2 weeks ago. It was cool working together. I remember training for the first time and having no idea what I was doing. I would have loved to be able to work with Sisters. By the end of the day I had no voice and was feeling pretty crappy.

We woke up Thursday morning at 3 for the second night in a row to get to the airport on time.  Our group was pretty small. The Sartori's and Elders Taylor, Malloy and Campbell. I had a pretty sweet conversation with the couple sitting next to me on the first plane they live in Samara so I gave his number to Elder Taylor. They have been married for 35 years and they were still happy to be together. I haven't seen that very often here in Russia so that was cool. After that I couldn't talk though. My head was already hurting because of sinus pressure so being on 4 flights was...great fun. Pretty much it meant a 30 minute earache on every flight while we came in for landing

Anyway, I survived. Friday I was feeling pretty awful so Sister Sartori got me an appointment at a clinic here. Going to the doctors in Russia was for sure a culture experience. She looked in my ears down my throat and pried open my nose with the biggest tweezers you have ever seen all the while making official doctory noises and the conclusion of all that was that I was indeed sick. She wrote out a list of things I should buy from the pharmacist and that were that. We asked for a throat swab but she refused to do it. She said it would make my condition worse. I should take all these medicines first and then after a couple days they could do it. At the end she said "Agreed?" I wanted to say no but I felt like the right answer was yes. We went home and got ready for the train that night and called a taxi.

We had a little trouble at the train station involving a bloody nose like Niagara Falls a 15 minute deadline to get on the train. We found med punkt and they were real nice in hind sight but at the time I didn't enjoy her attempt of shoving a yard of fabric soaked in anonymous liquid up my nose. That didn't feel so great. Anyway, we got on the train and got home and all is well.

Well, love you all!

Cectpa Pearce.