Ukrainian Feast

This is our authentic Ukrainian Christmas Dinner. In the pot is a dumpling filled with meat and served with mushrooms. The rolls have a fruit filling and sometimes a meat filling. There is also a a rice pudding dish, a cabbage salad type dish and a home made juice made with fruit. It was all very tasty, well most of it.

The Wise Men?

The branch president enlisted a couple of the branch missionaries to play the part of the wise men. The young men in the red and brown are missionaries. The young man in white is a student here. A large number of black youth come here for higher education and are being taught the gospel here and accepting the invitation to be baptised. They are humble and very pleasant young men. They come from Nigeria, Uganda, and other African countries.

Our Ukrainian Joseph and Mary

One of the funnest times we have here in Ukraine is when we are involved in an activity with little children. There are not alot of little children in the branches here. We hope and pray that the future will be full of families and children in the church here.

Christmas in Ukraine

We attended one of the branches ward Christmas party. It was so neat. Branch members took part in the Christmas nativity. These are the shephards. After the nativity children recited a memorized poetry in Ukrainian, our missionary who speaks Russian couldn't translate it for us, but it was just fun to watch the kids. After that we enjoyed a marvelous Ukrainian meal fixed by the branch president and other priesthood brethren. It was all traditional Ukrainian food and it was great!

We had a wedding here in Kharkov in December. One of the returned missionaries in our young adult group got married to a nice young lady from Odessa. The Youth spend alot of time organizing entertainment for the reception. This is a group of our youth that performed a song for the new bride and groom. Sorry we don't have the audio.

Rewards Come From Hard Work

One of our responsibilities as a senior couple missionary is to do apartment checks on the young missionaries to make sure they clean their apartments well at least every six weeks before transfers happen. These two young men earned the cleanest apartment and so Elder Bailey gave to them as a prize a home cooked meal at our apartment. The missionaries chose breakfast, so we made waffles, eggs and hashbrowns. It Yummy. This is Elder Thornburg and Elder Harris.

Dinner Together

We had a fun evening with the Mission President and his wife, President and Sister Campero, His counselor and his wife, President PodVodov and Sister PodVodov, and 4 senior missionary couple in our mission. We had dinner in our apartment. It is so much fun to get together with the Seniors.