Another Week in Nizhny Novgorod

Dear Family and Loyal Blog Readers,

Well its been another interesting week here in Nizhny Novgorod. As of
today all of the Russian schools start which actually made last week
quite a pain, because everybody we meet with decided to take last
minute vacations before school started so we had almost no
appointments and spent a ridiculous amount of time street contacting
and knocking doors, which is always an interesting experience.

On a plus side we met with Mikhail twice and talked to him a lot about
the prophet Joseph Smith. We had him read the Joseph Smith history and
I could see him began to gain a testimony of the prophet. After we
got done he said that he thinks that it is real because according to
him the Bible says that a story like Joseph Smith is possible. He is
still hung up though about how we worship the Sabbath on Sunday and
not Saturday so we just need to work with him through that concern. I
think he is progressing a lot and he loves meeting with us, he even
made us borscht!

In an unfortunate turn of events Zhenna is not going to be able to get
baptized soon. She is only 15 and her mother did not give permission,
and even threw out her Book of Mormon. Her older sister Asya will be
baptized though because she is 18, but its was very sad to hear that
they couldn't be getting baptized together.

We have an exciting month coming up though with baptisms ever week! On
Saturday Stanaslaus (the African man) is getting baptized and I am so
pumped for that. Then a bunch of other people are getting baptized,
but unfortunately none of our investigators! However we think that
Mikhail might want to get baptized soon and a guy we met on the
street, Andrei seems incredibly interested in the church, so we have
hope things will work up.

To explain why I was in the woods. We had a picnic for all the church
members in Nizhny Novgorod out in the woods outside of the city. It
was so much fun, and I had a blast with all the word members. The
youth here are really amazing and all have incredibly strong
testimonies. Plus our non-member friends Sasha and his girlfriend came
so that was quite a bit of fun. As with every Russian activity, we had
a ton of  watermelon, because Russian love watermelon! They eat it all
the time, I have only been offered a meal three times were watermelon
wasn't involved.

We liked going out in the woods so much we did it for P-Day today. The
Assistants to the Mission President are in Nizhny and all the
missionaries in Nizhny went out to the forest again in the morning. We
spent the whole morning in this huge sand pit  that had been dug out
jumping off the dirt cliffs into the sand. It was a blast, but then it
started raining! So we ran and tried to hide in the forest, but the
trees weren't blocking too much rain, so Elder Bressler tried to build
a shelter. It didn't work so we just sat there and ate sandwiches in
the rain. Also the Russian army was doing some sort of exercise out in
the woods so we could here machine gun fire in the distance!!! Finally
the rain stopped and on our way out I looked up and a MiG-29 (a
Russian jet fighter) flew over doing airelon rolls! It certain was an
eventful P-Day.

So that's about all I've got for now. I'm working on getting pictures
to you guys, but me and Elder Erikson are still trying to figure out
the computers. At any rate, keep being awesome everybody and enjoy the
start of school!

As Always,

Elder Zachery Brasier