The week of May 20 was the first time I had come down with a cold for quite some time. I was able to attend English Club on Tuesday but by Wednesday I had a sore throat and was not able to attend family home evening on Wednesday and Institute class on Thursday. Was able to go out with Elder Janson looking for some members. Saturday we had to have sports night at the church as the weather was bad.
While suffering from my cold I was able to look out our window and see our street being paved. I was told that never happens here, but we were pleased to see it. Have of the crew working on this project were women who manned shovels to clean up the street from the dirt at the curbs. They also raked and moved the blacktop behind the paving machine. You can see the red van across the street in the process of being covered.
Now it is completely covered. It has not moved from that spot since we moved here and we wondered why they bothered. The tractor below was used to cut a furrow between the road and the uncurbed areas. It also was used for front end loader duty. Another tractor was used with a sweeper attachment to clean the surface prior to paving. They are also used to haul large trailers with debris.
Thursday was our district meeting. This is our district for the past six weeks. We learned that Elder Stegeby will will be moving on to the city of Tula. Hard to believe that Elder Bishop has been here for six weeks already. Elder Janson will receive a new missionary fresh from the MTC for his new companion. Elder Bishop is going to have to step up now and help translate for us.
They requested a goofy picture too, so here it is. I Think Sister Hoagland wins the prize, don't you?
The Lipetzk primary in action. Sister Hoagland is helping Ani Rashonyan with the music. She is also using LDS.org, as it is a fantastic resource for primary. I have been teaching the teenage class with Elder Janson doing the interpreting. This week was a challenge with 4 boys who really didn't want to be there. I wish I had the skills to make the class more fun and interesting to them.
Elder Janson setting up the camera's for our district picture. One is just toppling over. Elder Stegeby has the neatest little tripod and can work almost anywhere. Its legs are flexible and can grip doors or other objects as well as sit on uneven surfaces. We have a TV, but all programs are in Russian so we have not watched any TV since moving in.
Just about finished paving the street.
A couple of sunsets from our apartment.
Sunday we had the Rushanyan children for dinner. Their parents have a farm and their employees got drunk so they had do go do the chores. We were disappointed they could not come. Anastasia was there too. All the girls speak some English so we didn't need the Elders to interpret for us. Radic is 14, Ani is 20 and Rima is 19. Those three girls would be a real catch for someone. They are faithful and knowledgeable Latter Day Saints.
On P-day the elders took me shopping for ties. Most of mine are serving their second mission and I am tired of them. We went to the local street market to see what we could find. Not much at the first market which was also the largest.
The next market was smaller and only had one stall that sold ties. Fortunately it had a large selection. Here the Elders are having a feeding frenzy. I was able to buy three pretty nice ties for $6.00 each. We purchased a total of 17 ties from this shop.
Natalia above and Misha, her son came to dinner last week with Elders Janson and Stegeby. It was nice to get to know them better. Those in the branch who do not speak any English are harder to know without these one on one visits. Natalia has been a member for 5 years. She works at some kind of care center and lives about 30 minutes out of town in a house with her parents. Misha is 11. Natalia is also paid to take care of all our legal paperwork, such as registering all us missionaries with the city, and contracts for our rental agreements. We all have to re-register every time we come back from our visa trips. Inexplicably we did not take any pictures of Natalia and Misha while they were here so I had to pull them out of a group picture.
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