May 10th

Hi Family!

Hope you all had an amazing Mother's Day! There are so many mothers in our family these days, how cool. I really don't know what to write you all, seeing how I just talked to you all yesterday. So, I'll try to think of some things...

Um, my companion is from Maui, just so you now know Mom : ) She says you probably went on Front Street in Lahaina? Or maybe you saw Maui Ocean Center? Those are I guess some pretty places and common tourist attractions, sound familiar? I also emailed President about whether or not you could pick me up from my mission, so he should hopefully write me back this week and I'll let you know soon. Dad, do we have relatives in Idaho? My comp has a Hakes family in her Ward, Dennis Hakes? He is supposedly from Texas and invented some sort of udder/tit cleaner? Haha I hope we're related. That be a cool family claim, tit cleaner (for cows).

Anyways, we had a grreaattt! week in terms of the service here. We finally got to know some of our investigators here in our Area. Actually, there are only like four investigators we inhereited here that are progressing, so it should be interesting... We kind of inhereited a little bit of a mess, like I said over the phone yesterday. The Area Book is kind of out of shape, and our apartment is kind of destroyed, so, at the moment, we can't even live in our area. We get a lot of time to contact on the way into our Area, but it's not the same somehow.

We met with an eternal investigator named Vladislav. He's met with the missionaries for some three years now, and had his first baptizmal date in January, but that fell through. He is a very nice older man, and believes the Church is true, but his wife is Russian Orthodox and is very anti. He said they were married in the Russian Orthodox temple, and that if he gets baptized Mormon, than that marriage becomes invalid. I don't know if that is really true, we need to do our research on that still. He has a testimony, but my companion and I are trying to figure out what doctrine exactly he is not understanding, because, if he were understanding true doctrine, then he would be willing to get baptized regardless. We're not sure how much time we're wanting to spend on him yet. We'll see. We baked his wife cookies and brought a really sweet member couple with us on our last lesson. I think that softened her a little, but she is definitely not the friendliest.

We found five new investigators last week, woohoo! Three of them we actually think our gypsies haha... Two of them are male, and they actually proposed to about three or four times we were with them. I'm not sure we'll be meeting with them again, we'll most likely pass them off to the Elders haha.

We found a girl named Nastia, she works on the weekends just outside our apartment giving kids horse rides. My comp loves horses, so we started a conversation with her and ended up teaching her a lesson on the street. We then met with her again this week and taught her another lesson. She is a very sweet girl. She smokes, and lives with a man she's not married to, but that is rather normal here in Russia. She seems to have a little light about her, so I only hope she will make the time for us to teach her a lesson that is not on the street. She says she works 24/7.

We found a boy named Ivan. He is 18 and was taking his nephew to some sort of sport class right next to our Church when we stopped and talked to him. He seemed very interested at first and my comp and I were just so excited. We met with him one other time, but then for our second lesson, he didn't show-up. His phone has been shut-off since then too, so we can't seem to get a hold of him. We had invited a member with us to be on the lesson with him, but becasue he didn't show, we ended-up teaching her instead. It was an amazing lesson. Really. I had kind of been having a lower week for whatever reason, didn't really do or say anything about it, but I just wasn't really feeling a lot of joy, but this lesson was as much for me as it was for her. She is an active member, and she says she just feels like the standard in the Church is so high sometimes, so she doesn't ever feel acceptable or good enough. I've really noticed that women all over the world struggle with this feeling of insecurity with themselves. It's so sad and it seems that Satan really knows how to get Heavenly Father's daughters to feel down. She is abeautiful, sharitable woman though. Her husband left her when she joined the Church, and had raised her daughter on her own. Her daughter is awesome too. She is actually a RM and served her mission in Hawaii, which is crazy becasue it is really rare for Russians to go foreign speaking. Anyways, we just talked about the love of God, and I had kind of discovered something this past week, that the true measure of success is in Moroni 7 the last few verses about charity. Really, charity is a gift we can be given from Gos if we ask for it. And, we are given it, we begin to become like Him, which is the ultimate goal.

Gotta run, out of time! LOVE YOU ALL!!!!

Sister Hakes