10-08-12

"Have you ever eaten corn flakes with a fork?" "No...why?" "You're about too!"

Hey there everybody!

Gosh, it's pretty wild being way out here in Orenburg. We live about a

30 minute drive away from the center of the city and are right by a

McDonalds. Actually, as it turns out, both the McDonalds in the city

are within our area so...we're well provided for!

My new companion is Elder Treter from Greendale Wisconsin. And, as it

turns out, he was President Barrett's home teacher for awhile. Go

figure, huh? He's a super smart cookie and pretty much rocks at

Russian, at lesst as much as you can rock coming straight out from the

MTC. For example, you remember the apartment situation I had in

Dachney where there wasn't a frying pan and the washing machine didn't

work out and there were just issues all over the place? This is almost

the exact situation, except with two crucial changes, I can speak

Russian now and we have a frying pan. Anyways, the tube under the sink

broke after the first use and in looking up the word tube (to be fair,

I don't use the work tube all that often) Elder Treter told me

straight up, without looking, what it was. I'm rather impressed with

his word bank and how quickly he's picking up words. Pretty dang cool!

It's fun to see how the Lord prepared me a little less than a year ago

for the problems that came this first week in opening a new area with

an apartment missing lots of things. We had no materials this week

either, other than a box of Book of Mormons, which is good enough, but

I remember just being super stressed out my third cycle in getting all

that stuff worked out rather than just rolling with it this time

around. I'm thankful that God has given me some experience and an

awesome companion to work with.

Orenburg is super pretty by the way. I'm bummed that all the trees

have already turned color and most of the elaves have fallen since I

think it would have been just as pretty as Marks had I come a week or

two earlier. The people here (at least the couple hundred we've run

into) are pretty dang nice, including a man who we met on the

trainride over here to Orenburg. He came to church too, and liked it!

Like Mom and Dad mentioned, Orenburg is indeed famous for it's shawls.

I'll look into those. What exactly is a shawl anyways? Guess I'll find

out!

At Church this past Sunday we had 41 people, which is pretty dang

cool. Apparently 3 months ago there were about 15 active members there

in the branch (sound familiar?) but when a new senior couple came they

did some crazy awesome less active work along with the set of

missionaries baptizing 2 new members getting us to the point where

we're at now. I'll have to figure out what they did exactly and see if

we can apply it to other cities, because that'd be great to in a 3

month period do that much work in any branch. We'll keep it on the

uprise now that we're here in Orenburg north!

There were a few kinks I had to work out with the internet, so I'm

going to end here before anything else happens. Have a great week now,

ya hear? Thanks so much for everything. That's way exciting to hear

about the new age requirements for missionaries. It'll be really odd

to start seeing 18 year olds here in Russia. I bet that'll flood the

office with mission papers now since they just opened it up to so

many. Cool to hear! I see conference I think this weekend, so I'll

comment on it all next week too!

I love you lots. Thanks again for everything. Be good now, ya hear? :)

With love

--

Elder Peterson