Zone conference

Monday the 20th was our first zone conference. It was held in Veronezh, a couple of hours south of Lipetzk. Here the AP's are leading a discussion on "English Club." English club has been a very successful way to bring people to the church and eventually have them take the missionary lessons. We are not allowed to "teach English" but it is a chance for people to come and increase their vocabulary by talking to native speakers. They come with the understanding that there will be a spiritual thought at the end. We have three people attending ours each week. After this discussion, we should have a greater effort to bring more.
Elder & Sister Frost live in Veronezh, are dearly loved by the missionaries, and prepared a wonderful meal for us at the zone conference. They are humanitarian missionaries and also support the branch there. L to R Elder Stegeby (Sweden), Sister Williams, Sister Francom, Sister Glasacheva (Russia), Sister Frost, and Elder Urmston.
Some of the Veronezh missionaries preparing a song for conference. Really the first time we have heard a hymn beautifully song in Russian. Our little band of members in Lipetzk have pitch problems but do sing with gusto.
Veronezh has the only church owned building in our mission. It was originally a theater. This is the foyer. The rooms are all very large. They have the only gym where they play volleyball and basketball.
This is a multipurpose room off the foyer.
L to R Elder Eliason (ZL) Elder Harris, Sister Woolley, Elder Frost, President Woolley, Elder Hansen, and Elder Turner (AP). Elder Turner worked with us in Lipetzk until his call as Asistant to the President. We really miss him.
One of the suggestions for attracting people to talk to was doing magic tricks. Here Elder Stegeby performs a trick on Sister Williams.
Sister Hoagland, Elder Bressler (AP), ?, Elder Kvasnitsky (Ukraine), Elder Hoagland. The Elder I don't know temporarily replaced Elder Anisiforov (our branch president) who is on an assignment in Kazakhstan. They are really having trouble with Visa's in that country. President is working hard not to have to shut down the work there.
This picture is of the Lipetsk sky resort. It was taken from our apartment. There are no mountains between here and Wales in Great Britain. This was taken last week and today it is almost clear of snow. We have finally started to thaw out here. It is a real mess but soon we can walk on dry ground instead of ice. Right now we have a challenge to walk around large puddles of water.
Last week Sister Hoagland ventured into baking for the first time. It was difficult to find baking soda and we still haven't found baking powder. She had to make butter milk using a lemon when she made banana bread.
We have family home evening on Wednesday evenings. Here we are playing a game called evolution.
A street scene during a lull in traffic.
Sister Hoagland's banana bread. We had to look at a few stores to find bread pans. The price of the bread pans were not marked so we were really surprised that they cost us about $10.00 a piece. Not typical of prices here.
On Saturday we looked out and saw funeral activity outside our building. That was interesting to us.
Here is our wonderful Anastatia (Nastia). She helped us shop on a couple of occasions. We had her stay for Lasagna. She was so excited and it turned out wonderfully. Nastia is a student at the university and will graduate in a few months. She also is the branch pianist and teaches our institute class on Thursday evenings. We have a wonderful group of young ladies in the institute class. Wish we had some young men available for them too.

Sunday evening President and Sister Woolley came and gave a fireside on the Book of Mormon. President Woolley has a first addition 1830 Book of Mormon which he freely shares with the people in our mission. He lets them hold it and open it. It should be in a museum, but it was he loves to share it with the people. He told the story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and because he has such a love of the book he has studied the subject extensively. As a result he gave information that I had never heard before. Very interesting.

The Woolley's drove us down to Veronezh for the conference in the morning. We stayed with Elder & Sister Frost. As we got in late, we only had a short visit, but it was fun to finally meet them as we had been emailing each other ever since we received our call to the mission.

Our little Lipetsk group had to leave before the end of conference to catch a bus home. It was a rush, and then it was so warm in that bus it became very uncomfortable. It has warmed up but the heater was still going full blast. We like to take pictures as we ride down the highway, but the windows are so dirty we couldn't do that.