Church!

16.9 Today, again, was long and tiring but very fulfilling. We awoke at 6AM and left at around 7AM to the bus stop. We caught the 121 bus to the Molodezhnaya metro station—a 30 minute trip—where we hopped onto the metro. After one train switch and an hour later, we arrived at our stop where we walked about a mile to our Church building. Y’all should be grateful for church buildings just down the street, just saying. Sacrament was great—the topic was honesty. One of the speakers was Luke, an African who speaks only rough English; it was sometimes difficult to understand his talk but you could tell it was from his heart and that he truly believed what he was saying. Again, half of the congregation is African, most of whom speak French. Whitney’s calling is to serve in the nursery every other week, but her co-teacher wasn’t there so Shelley and I offered to help. It was a bizarre experience to play with children who spoke English, who already knew how to communicate with us and could understand us. We found ourselves talking to the four two-year-olds like we do to our students, saying things like, “Do you want a snack? I want a snack.” The kids would just look at us and say, “Yes, I want it.” Every time it shocked me that English came out of their mouths—and I’ve only been here three weeks. The children were absolutely adorable. Kylie is black and is the adoptive daughter of the second counselor in the Bishopric; her vocabulary at two is unbelievable. Jacob has curly hair and big brown eyes and a crooked smile that instantly melts your heart; he’s also quite mischievous. Thomas couldn’t have been older than eighteen months; he had white blond hair and clear blue eyes and was too shy to really interact with us or the other kids. Andreus is the son of a member of a high council member, who is Russian and met his American wife at BYU—theirs is such a cute picturesque family. After two hours of bubbles and making Lego soup, the entire ward congregated before the baptismal font downstairs, where we welcomed two new members of the international ward; both are African and only speak French, therefore the baptismal and confirming ordinances were done in French. It was a new and exciting experience for me. The adults and the children eventually wandered home, leaving only the young single adults and the CES missionaries. We were going to watch the CES broadcast from last week, with Elder Holland’s talk, but the internet was down so we watched Elder Jensen’s inspiring message from earlier in the year. I’d seen it before, but it was still meaningful. Vlad had invited us to go to the Moscow Stake viewing of the broadcast that evening at the central building (like the Stake Centre), where we could meet his Russian friends, but the three of us were absolutely exhausted so we cancelled (he then told us he wouldn’t make it either) and returned to our apartment for a relaxing evening.