Barrett's email - February 12th, 2012 - New Mission

You already know?! You missionary moms. Haha. Yep, the boundaries are changing, and big. Holy cow! I can't even wrap my mind around it yet. So here's the deal as I understand it (the official church news report will be coming out on saturday): so on July 1st, when the current President of the Moscow West Mission goes home, the moscow west and the moscow missions will dissolve and then recombine to form one super-mission under President Sorenson. Right now Moscow West has Belarus and Kazakhstan, but on July 1st Belarus will go the the Baltics mission and Kazakhstan will go to the Novosibirsk mission, and all the rest comes to us. We will be gaining 9 new cities, 10 new branches, 9 new Senior couples, and the number of missionaries will double. HUGE!!!
So we've all known for a while that boundary changes were coming, maybe get a few extra cities, or on the extreme, split the area with West, But this - Holy Cow! Nobody saw this one coming. Wow. I don't even know what to think. I am definitely excited about it. Everything is going to change. We'll become more like every other mission in the world. President called the night before and asked the whole mission to meet at the Central Building for a special meeting. And the whole mission came. That probably won't happen anymore with hours of train rides between us now, haha. A very interesting time to be a missionary in Moscow, that's for sure.
You may have noticed no pictures again. This time I am on a split and the computers in this post office have some sort of firewall or something (I didn't fully understand the window that popped up) that won't let me attach files to the email. But I have a bunch of pictures of me infront of snowy St. Basil's in my big shapka. Potential plaque pictures. My next visa trip will be in the beginning of march, so I'm hoping there will still be a good amount of snow about. We'll see.
One question that I've gotten a few times, while we're talking about it, is How do the visa trips work?
So because of Russian laws or something, we (as in every missionary) have to leave the country every 3 months to renew our visas. All the american missionaries go to Kiev, the latvian sister goes to Estonia, and the Senior couples I think have a choice because I've heard of them visiting Kiev, Estonia, Latvia, etc. So we wake up really early to catch our flight to kiev. Back in the summer we were able to visit the Temple and do a full session, but now since Ukraine did daylight savings and Russia didn't (for whatever reason), we don't have enough time. Sometimes the office Elders hire a driver (a member of the church whose full time job is to drive people from the airport to the temple, just to give you an idea of how busy that little temple is), and he'll drive us around to see the sights if we want. Back in the summer he took us to lunch to get real ukrainian food (I accidentally got liver) and he takes us to the big grocery store to get all the stuff that you can't get in russia (unless you want to pay a ton) like Oreos, and certain flavors of the really good ukrainian cookies (super kontiki). And then we fly back that night, the office takes care of all of our paperwork, and we're good for the next 3 months. I can't believe I have another one coming up so soon. My third, the one just before my year mark. I know, I don't like to think about it either.
Ok, well, gotta go. Love you all. Have a great week. The Church is true
Love
Elder Hamp