This week was pretty slow. The first big highlight was the culture night on Monday. We went to the Siberian Choir concert. It was pretty cool, they had a big ensemble of singers, a traditional band with accordions and balalaika's. But the coolest part by far was their dance crew. They did all that crazy Russian breakdancing stuff with the squat jumps and kicking the legs out while you're in the squatting position. You know what I'm talking about, it was awesome.
Us at the Siberian choir performance

Us at the Siberian choir performance.

The second big highlight was that we had a couple meetings with President. In one of the meetings we worked out next transfer. He's still going to be looking at and praying about what we had all decided and he will probably make a small change or two, but it was really cool to talk through that all with President. You could tell he really valued our opinions and in a lot of ways it was like a big logic puzzle about who can go where and be with who and make everyone the most effective, especially when you consider trying to put people in certain places to give them the right experiences in order to prepare them for a future assignment. Anyway, that was a really awesome and spiritual meeting.

Other than that we had a couple first meetings this week that I hope will end up going somewhere but you never know. The other big highlight this week was our work with Misha and Olga. They are the inactive family that we thought was a headquarter referral. We have been seeing them often and it is usually the highlight of my day because we have been making a really good friendship with them. Misha came to church yesterday and loved it. He kept saying "Hey, I remember him or her. This is awesome." People were really nice to him also, so that went really well. I think it's going to be tougher to get Olga to come back. Lucky for us she works at an ice cream stand so we have to make frequent trips there and check up on her.

So Mom, when would be the best time to do the mothers day call? Should I plan on calling Monday morning here, so it would be Sunday evening for you? That would work out well for us I think. We can iChat if you liked that. Good luck with the family reunion and the hike. That family reunion would be really cool. I would like to chat with some old people about our family history. We are trying to do some finding methods by getting people into family history but it's kind of tough to get it started. Especially because the church programs don't really have any info about Russia.

Could you send me Coach Riley's address if you get a chance?

So this week it's been hard for me to find the balance between working hard and smart. I've kind of been seeing that nothing has been coming from meeting people on the street and setting up a meeting with them and teaching them lessons. They always fade off somewhere along the process. That's mission wide except for the rare exceptions. And it really makes sense, the people who have a friend that introduces them to the church are about 50x more likely to actually get baptized, and it makes total sense because they can see what the results are of living the gospel in their friend and start finding a testimony for themselves. Not just if two random foreigners come up to you and start telling you about their church. Even if its interesting to hear about, there's no desire there to change, so that's been really hard. And I just don't know what else to do to get a member referral. So I'm just trying to figure out what we can possibly do to actually get those quality investigators with good potential. Sorry for that little rant but that's what's been really on my mind recently. So I'm trying to find this better way because our area is kind of at a stand still it seems and nothing is really getting going.

Well I think that's it, we're still doing well. I'm happy, Elder Anderson is really easy to live with and get along with, so that makes things much easier.

Home teaching with Brother Paval.

This guy is on the wall of the office. So turns out I'm not even the first Topham to serve here.

 

Elder Anderson and I on the train to Omsk.

Us eating shaurma , we had to take it home that night cuz we were running late.

Us eating shaurma , we had to take it home that night cuz we were running late. Part 2.

Me in Omsk in front of the branch there with Elder Dawson. (It used to be a billiards hall)

Sorry I forgot my camera, so no pictures this week.

So earlier this week the new missionaries came in. This time it was only 2 elders and a sister. It was pretty messed up because one of the elders got his visa delayed by a day, so he came in a day later and it was tough for us to do the traditional orientation, but we basically just did the same thing anyway and didn't let him go to sleep when he landed and just sent him out on a train with his trainer that night. This rotation two sisters went home, Holmes and Clark. So now we have 63 total missionaries: 8 are sisters, 14 are seniors, although 4 seniors go home this week with no replacements. So yeah, it's a really small mission personnel wise. There are 2 full MTC groups ahead of me, and then only a couple scattered ones older than that. I guess they just called so few for that year because nobody was going home around that time.

Tell Rob thanks for the Email and to expect a letter.

Then this is particularly for Dad but interesting for anyone I guess: We will get more missionaries when we get Kazakhstan because that whole mission is dissolving. The president has to give all of his missionaries up, either to us in Kazy, to the Baltic Mission in Belarus, or to the Moscow Mission in the country surrounding Moscow.

So I guess the other exciting thing that happened this week is that we were in Omsk yesterday. That was sweet, it was a really quick trip. President and Sister Gibbons were going down there just for the day with the primary purpose of interviewing a senior couple who is going home. He suggested that we come along because we have both never been there. It was sweet because to Omsk is an overnight train ride. So it was crazy, we left Saturday night at 9:30, got in Sunday morning around 7:00. Elder Anderson and I went to the Elder's apartment who work in the smaller branch there. We studied, went to church, and worked the evening with them. Then got back on a train last night at 10:00 and we were here at 6:00 this morning. (I guess the train made fewer stops on the way back). But the train was awesome! My first legit Trans Siberian Railroad experience. We were lucky because we got to go in the same car as the Gibbon's and they had a nice coupe, so we got the nice coupe next to them (the nice coupe's only have 2 beds). So yeah it was a good trip, I slept a little at home this morning because the consecutive nights on the train had worn me out quite a bit.

Well I guess I really don't know what else to say... This is cool. At the last General Conference one of the Area General Authorities that was sustained was Uri Gushin. He comes from our branch here in Novo, he's the mission driver, he's a little guy and he had a mustache and he looked like Mario, but the church had him shave it off to be a GA. Anyway, it's awesome that he's a general authority now because we are friends and its cool that someone from way out here has that kind of calling.

Well other than that things are just kind of moving along. We've been seeing little progress lately with people in our area. It's kind of hard only being able to devote part of our time proselyting in our area, (granted it still is a significant amount of time to proselyte) just because your mind is kind of split on other things and we haven't seemed to really get our area going like I thought we would have by now. Just still struggling to find good investigators. I don't have anything to complain about obviously, because we get to do a bunch of other stuff that I've never dreamed about doing and it's not boring, but the days that we find that we have open for just work in our area, for whatever reason, don't seem that successful, I don't know its hard to describe. Maybe I'm getting spoiled by doing other things. It looks like this week we will have very little AP stuff and hopefully we can kind of jump start the area and then after that I can feel better about it.

I discovered that I really like a street food here and I've been eating it at every chance possible. It's called shaurma. It comes from these street vendors who are all from the Stan's - what do you call that? South West Asia? Anyway, it's kinda like that Greek thing, they have this big thing of meat being roasted and they just shave off the meat as they need it. Then then make you this burrito type thing with the meat, it's more Middle Eastern tasting than Mexican of course but it's awesome.

Well Everyone have a good week. Love you.

Humbly Seeking the Truth

Well another very busy week. I was with Elder Carr on Tuesday and Elder Terry on Wednesday. Thursday we were in Moscow, Friday in Finland, and Saturday and Sunday we watched Conference.

Elder Carr - that was quite a day with him. He literally talks to every person. One time we were on a bus. Usually on a bus I'll try to get a little quiet conversation going with the person next to me, but he just starts loudly kind of talking to everyone, and pretty soon people start getting involved like one time they started arguing between themselves on what you can and can't eat during the Orthodox fast, and one time a guy was being rude to Elder Carr but it didn't phase him, Elder Carr asked him his name and the guy said rudely, "Why do you want to know?" Then Elder Carr just started throwing out guesses, "Sergei, Andrei, Ivan..." and pretty soon the people around him started getting mad at the guy and said "Hey just tell him your name, be nice to the kid." It was quite the interesting day with him. We had a meeting with a big wig politician, he's in the parliament for the Novosibirsk oblast, and he's a communist. He wasn't very interested in talking about religion because he is a hard core atheist, but he was nice to us.

With Elder Terry we had probably the best lesson I think I have ever been on. Elder Hyde had met this guy the day before and he said we could come over. He is a very nice, humble man with a family. He basically agreed already with the idea of an apostasy, and we taught a basic first lesson and it was very powerful. Thinking back on it, the reason the lesson was so powerful was because he was humbly seeking the truth and because of that the spirit was totally unrestrained and was carrying the words that we said into his heart. It was great, at the end, Elder Terry just asked him, "So do you think the things that we have taught today are true?" and he taught for a second and quietly answered, "Yes, I do." It was amazing, those kind of lessons are very rare, and I was very grateful to be able to be there and participate in that.

Wednesday night was also Culture Night, we went to an opera at the big opera theater called "Madame Butterfly". It was awesome, and now that I think about it very interesting. I am an American, watching a bunch of Russians, dressed up as Japanese and Americans, singing in Italian, which is being translated on the screen into Russian. Now that's pretty cool. It was nice, I was able to understand everything from the Russian subtitles. The music was really cool. I really love that theatre, it's awesome.

We had a long layover in Moscow on the way to Finland, so we got out and toured Red Square. It was awesome, we had about 2 hours there so it was enough time to go around and see everything and get pictures, but not enough to really go in anywhere.

Finland was solid. We didn't have much time there. Just enough to go to the temple, eat lunch and go back to the airport. The temple was great, it was amazing because I had a couple specific questions that I was seeking answers to and the answers were so clear, it was incredible and I'm very grateful for that.

General Conference was good. The only bad thing was that I started feeling a little sick in Finland, then the travel on the way back without sleeping just killing me and I was feeling like junk all weekend, so I maybe didn't get as much out of it as I would have usually. But I'll do a good study of it in the Liahona. I got some good sleep the last couple nights so I'm feeling better, and I should be good going into this week. My favorites were probably Uchtdorf Sunday morning and Holland Saturday afternoon, I personally liked those the most. I thought the beginning of Elder Scott's about revelation and especially communications from beyond the veil and dreams and stuff was very interesting.

So for your AP - tracting question. First, when you say tracting, do you literally mean tracting or "proselyting". Because in our mission we rarely actually go tracting because its not effective. But as an AP we do have a little less time to do proselyting things, but for the most part we still spend about half to 75% of our time proselyting. The other part of the time is great, it's not like we do any office work or anything. Sometimes we will have some extra meetings like with President, or doing orientation with the new missionaries or other special assignments, but all that stuff is awesome and is a nice change so I like it.

Elder Topham

Elder Harrison and I on the express train from the airport in Moscow.

Me going into red square from the back.  You can't really see me, but I think its a cool picture.

Me reading the Book of Mormon in front of Saint Basils.

MTC group in front of Saint Basils.

Me in front of Bolshoi Theater.

Saint Basils and the Kremlin

I don't really know whats back there!

Me in front of the Kremlin.

Sweet

Well, last Monday everyone went to the zoo for P-day. Yes, that makes it my third time, that's what you get when you serve in the same city for so long, I imagine that I will be there again too.

My National Geographic picture that I took at the zoo of a polar bear catching a fish

We did some early morning contacting this week. The best method seems to be just taking short trips on the metro and talking to the people as they are waiting for it to come, go on with them and then get their number, but we are still working it out.

Wednesday we had ZLC, that was really sweet. It's cool - just us, 4 zone leaders, and President and Sister Gibbons and we just talk about issues in the mission and get fed by Sister Gibbons, so that was awesome.

picture at Zone Leaders Council

This week was pretty tough getting meetings. We spent a lot of time on the phone with contacts getting meetings set up, and we always ended up with meetings scheduled each day, but almost every single one fell through for whatever reason. People calling at the last minute to cancel, people not showing up and not answering their phone, we go to people's houses but they aren't there when they told us they would meet and all kinds of stuff, so that's been pretty discouraging.

Friday after district meeting was really fun. We went with Elders Ortner and Hyde to the park and set up a table with a bunch of Books of Mormon and other materials. We were there for a little over an hour and the other two for about two hours and it was great. I was just at the table talking to people who would come over to see what we were doing, and the other two elders where kinda going around or getting the people who would walk by. It ended up working great. We got over 20 books handed out - almost all of them with a commitment to read, and their number.

Saturday we were first to have 3 first meetings and 1 recent convert meeting. The first guy brought a friend and there was already a member chilling at the branch so we had a nice unexpected member present meeting. He's the guy in the pictures that I forwarded to you. The recent convert meeting went ok, we did that over at the Webb's. They live just across the street from the branch. One of the first meetings canceled, and the last one is quite a story...

Flashback to earlier in the week. Elder Anderson and I decide to follow up on a church headquarters referral from the Nauvoo Pageant. It's been in the area book for about 6 months it looks like, the phone number is bad but nobody had checked out the address. It was only like a 10 minute walk away from our place so we went there Tuesday night. All it says on the referral are two names, M and V, their number and address, and it's from D. We go and M answers the door, turns out he's a really old guy. He was super friendly and he kept saying stuff like "Oh how wonderful these big strong, smiling, American missionaries." Anyway we mention D and he says, "Oh that's my grandson." Then he says, " ok well, my daughter isn't home now you want to talk to her and he gave us her number. We call her the next day, and says "Oh great, please come over and teach us." So then we have this appointment for Saturday night. We think it's this golden investigator member referral. We go in, the daughter answers the door, and looks at Elder Anderson and says "Oh we've met before" and he is very surprised and says, "oh yes we have." I'm thinking what is going on right now? She goes out to put our coats away and he whispers to me.. "I've been here before, she's an inactive member." So turns out that we teach a lesson to an inactive member, which was ok. Also kind of sad, sounds like about ten years ago, she was the go-to person. We'll see, hopefully we can really help her. She works at an ice cream kiosk, so we might have to schedule visits to her very often.

Sunday was sweet because all of the missionaries in Novo got to go to the mission home to eat an Easter dinner, awesome food. Also, I had gotten your Easter package a couple days prior so Elder Anderson and I dyed some eggs that night. Turns out that Russians actually celebrate Easter next Sunday for whatever reason, but in church we are watching conference next Sunday, so they did an Easter program this week. Thank you very much for the package, we have tons of stuff now, I was giving out a lot of candy to the kids at church yesterday, they loved it, but don't worry we still have plenty.

Elder Anderson and I dying Easter eggs last night

Elder Anderson and I dying Easter eggs last night

The eggs

We are going to Finland on Thursday. The workouts have been going well, I'm really liking doing the stairs, got well under 2 minutes with hitting every stair (16 floors), so hopefully I can get that under 1:30 this week. Dad asked about Russian, it's good, I understand everything. I still make some mistakes while teaching, but relatively few. I make a lot of mistakes while talking about unfamiliar subjects but I'm understandable, and can talk around pretty much anything even if its a subject I don't know well. I can speak fast, so people don't get bored, so that's all good.

Good job on hitting hard now Dani, and good job on reading those books Matt, I really like those. And of course on getting the golden egg.

Well that's all, I hope Dad's tongue isn't too swollen.

Elder Topham

Me, Elder Anderson, and Brother Pyotr with our matching ties

With our investigator

Pictures our investigator took

Out of the Ordinary

We took that picture in our apartment this morning before we headed out. I haven't sent you pictures of the apartment, it's really nice. Some of the apartments around the mission have nicknames, like the palace, the cave, the pantry, and ours is commonly referred to as the bachelor's sweet because we are on the top floor of the 16 story building, 2 big rooms, nice floors, appliances. I think ours and the palace are the only apartments with dishwashers, so anyway I'll send you some pictures maybe next week.

It was another good busy week. I feel like we did a lot of random stuff that was kind of out of the ordinary, so that's really nice.

Monday- All the Novo missionaries hung out at the pantry. Sisters made brownies and we all played Bananagrams. I forgot how awesome that game was, and I was loving it, it was very hard to stop when it was time to go. Anyway, that night we had a first meeting with someone we talked to on the bus one time, his name is Gregory (accent on the O in russian with rolled R's) anyway it was a solid first, basically all he knows about religion is what he's seen in movies so he kept trying to compare what we were saying to movies and we kept replying, "Nope, haven't seen that one." Anyway it was solid.

Tuesday we spent a good portion of the day preparing for the leadership training and scheduling hospital visits (see below). We also launched the new reformed English group. It's been off for about two or three months now and Pres, with a task force of missionaries, came out with a new program to make it a more effective finding method. Anyway, the first day of it was Tuesday. Not a great turnout, but everything went really well.

Wednesday most of the day was leadership training. Pres, Sister Gibbons, we, and both sets of ZLs made presentations in addition to Dr. Hatch, the Europe East Area church doctor. Everyone's was really good. Elder Anderson and I talked about effectively using the area book and correctly reporting statistics. The highlight for everyone was the South Zone leaders. They are Elder Blake and Elder Carr. Elder Blake is from my group, and Elder Carr is the surfer from Malibu. Anyway Elder Carr is a legend in the mission because he brings in as many contacts himself as whole districts. He just is on a whole other plane when it comes to contacting, and it's mostly because he just puts his personality out there. Anyway, they did a whole presentation on talking to everyone, and it was legit, hard to describe in an email, just how funny they are. Then afterward, we took Dr. and Sister Hatch to our first clinic.

Thursday, we spent the day going around to different clinics with Doctor Hatch. He said he's from Cedar City and is a general radiologist. I felt really smart going around with him looking at the MRI and CT equipment, because one place thought they were really cool with their open MRI but I knew already that that gets worse quality images, and we found out it was only a 0.2 Tesla machine and their CT was only a 16 slice. Anyway overall it seems like there's a big difference in the quality of the medical care here. Even the really nice places have outdated equipment like that. It would have been cool to have Dad on those tours. The tours were pretty fun actually, and stuff wasn't too hard to translate. A lot of the medical words were cognates or we could just kinda guess what they were saying. But the nightmare was trying to set up the appointments, and it wasn't at all a language problem. It was all because of the organization of the businesses here and just the general customer service. We would be on the phone with people and they would tell us to call people who would tell us to call other people, then they would say, "Oh, we don't have the authority to schedule that. I need to wait until the boss gets in." It was just a mess.

Friday was district meeting. Then afterward we took our investigator Masha to the Webb's to teach her. She lives across the street from them. Anyway, we only had a little short informal first meeting so this was a big second one, and she is like super involved in her church and knows the Bible really well. Anyway, she comes and she has her big Bible with her ready to go, she listens to what we are saying, but she just was not open to hearing anything new. It was really sad because at the end we just told her to give it a shot and to pray about it, if the answer was no then that's all, but if it's yes then it's really important, and she wouldn't even do it, she said "I've already made my decision." It's just really sad when people close their hearts like that and don't even give it a chance.

Saturday we had a meeting with a contact from Elder Carr. He lives a little ways away in Akadem Gorodok. Its kinda like a little intellectual suburb with a bunch of universities and research centers, about a 30 minute ride away from the city. He told me that is where the Russians built the atomic bomb in the 50's. This guy was really interesting, lived all around the world, spoke English better than Russian but is Russian, so is his wife. They took us to a cafe and we chatted. He was so much into studying religion from the intellectual and philosophical side that he was really past like sincerely applying anything it seemed, and I've run into a few people like that on the mission, and that is also a really sad condition. After that we had a second meeting with Gregory, went really well, he's turning into a great investigator. Then we went to teach a babooshka and her non member husband. That was also really sad. She's been a member for a long time and her husband has seen tons of missionaries come and go, but just doesn't take anything seriously regarding religion It was sad to see the look on her face toward the end of the lesson, it seemed to kind of say to us, "Well, thanks for taking your time to try." It's really sad too, because this guy was awesome, friendly and everything, just didn't care I guess. It's just got to be really hard for her and it made me even more grateful for the blessing of coming from a strong united family.

Sunday we ended up back in Akadem Gorodok, with an investigator who we are going to drop, because he's not going anywhere, he did have some really cool family pictures of his grandpa in WWII and stuff like that. Anyway, before that meeting we were walking to his place and an older guy starts talking to us. He was a little drunk, after a while he invited us in, we said we had a meeting but we would come right after. So we came over after and by that time he was wasted. I told him, "Hey we aren't going to stay, so just give us your number and we will call you when you aren't drunk." He had no chance at saying his number, so I just took his phone and called ours and saved it, then we left. Then on the way home on the metro we met this awesome guy who looks like Michael Weston from Burn Notice, I don't know the actors name, and he acts just like him too. He has a wife and two kids and we really want to teach and baptize them because they would be an awesome member family.

Well that's the week. Sorry if the way I wrote it this way was boring. Let me know if you liked it or not that detailed, or if I should just stick to a couple things.

We have Zone Leader's Council on Wednesday.

Also, we are doing everything we can to find and baptize more fathers with families. That's the problem with the church here, so anyway we are going to be doing a little experiment. President wants us to change our schedule around to see if we can find more men. So for example, tomorrow we are going to wake up at 6:30, get dressed and go out to the metro and major bus routes to talk to men on their way to work, it will be interesting to see how it goes. Then we'll come back and do our studies and stuff. Pres told us that we can do whatever we want with the schedule but we have to take 30 minutes to exercise sometime in the day (as usual) and do all 3 hours of studies some time in the day.

Oh speaking of excercise, Dr. Hatch talked about how we should be doing more cardio and I totally agreed with that, because I feel better after good hard cardio workouts, but its hard in the middle of a city especially in the winter. So the next day Elder A and I hit the stairwell at 6:30 in the morning to get some cardio. We live on the 16th floor so there are like 32 flights of stairs. We just decided to go for it, jog down to the bottom and run all the way back up. About half way I started feeling it. We got up to the top really fast, but I think I just about died when we got up there. I felt like someone had kicked me in the chest and my lungs were bleeding. Anyway I just said (in my panting voice), "ok!... that was good.." Then we kinda just did some smaller sections. So basically I'm way out of cardio shape, so we are going to be hitting the stairs every other day now I think. But it felt really good.

Ok that's all, this was a long one this week, hope you enjoyed it. Have fun on spring break!

Elder Topham

Picture of me by the little train station in Akadem Gorodok.