The Griffin Has Landed

From my photo files--his hair is A LOT shorter now :)

Hey all,

For your information, I wrote a pretty good letter last week centering around an experience in which I woke up in a tub full of brown water.

As for this week’s letter, it fulfilled crazy expectations prophesied earlier. It was a crazy transfer week. My last days with elder Anderson were fun and my first three with Elder Taylor have been wild. It was funny because our mission president isn’t much of a jokester but he seemed to think it was funny that Griffin and I knew each other so when they [the two new greenies] were having breakfast with him right after arrival at the airport, Elder Taylor said he knew one of the missionaries here, named Elder Magleby and president went all coy and looked confused and said, “Magleby?... Magleby, do we have a Magleby here?” I think president had more fun with surprising Griffin than I did. He practically had me jump out from behind the wall to introduce myself to him. It was fun to be the butt of one of Presidents few practical jokes.
It was seriously great to meet with president about training; he gave really good council and advice. He’s a great man, with a mountain of faith. I love him because he doesn’t micromanage the mission so when a problem arises that everyone knows about and is sort of complaisant about it, he hears about it and just says it shouldn’t be that way and that’s the end of it.
His last day will be July 1st and that’s right around my two year mark so I hope I don’t get a new mission president to send me home after just meeting me. We’ll see.
My first half week with Elder Taylor has been way cool because I was really worried about his first impressions of Russia, Revdah and missionary work in general and we’ve been blessed with busy days full of miracles. He’s a great missionary already and will have a very successful mission. In our first day together we dropped off his luggage and went right back out to a new investigating couple, they fed us delicious “ЩИ” (shee) soup and tea and honey. Whenever we would slyly try to end the meal and get into the lesson they would go with it, then realize we weren’t eating and freak out and tell us to keep eating in command form. (It’s a grammar thing) They are a really nice couple and we’ve got a lesson planned today with a great member coming so it should be great. Their names are Vladimir and Nina. Think Bent and Mereta.
Also then next day we went to a great baptism and yesterday at a contact's house this Babushka asked us to fix her light socket that had broken. She gave me a crazy soviet tool that just look like a screw driver and I’m thinking “ What am I supposed to do with this, shove it in the socket?! It will explode all over us!” But on closer examination, in the handle it had fuse looking stuff and possibly a light bulb, so I thought “ah, it's a fuse tester, put it in, if it lights up, that means there's a current.” So I shoved it in the socket and it promptly exploded all over us. It was pretty scary. And we spent the next two hours trying to get an electrician over and fix it. And to my credit, he had the exact same tool to examine the fuse box and when he used it, it exploded sparks all over us as well. I think that may be the function of the instrument. It seriously was a miracle that we were able to find said electrician and had a good conversation with his co worker about the gospel. I think the whole fiasco may have been for him.

Well, that’s it for me,

Paka for now

Elder Black-Thumb