Barrett's email - February 19th, 2012

Happy Birthday Michael!!!

 Me and one of the 7 Sisters

Elder B and I were on a split. Almost a year from the MTC. I love that guy

for Gavin

Maybe I'll just send a redsquare picture home every week. I have a bunch and can't decide which one. This is not the one, just an option. Many more to come

You probably can't tell, but that's a boston terrier. The first and only I've seen here in Russia

Well, another week has gone by. Not much to report this time. Things really slow down in the winter. But spring is on the horizon.

So to answer some of your questions, me and Elder G are companions now. He is from Idaho. We live in the south east of moscow. If you have a Metro map handy, we live on 'Kantemirovskaya'. It's on the green line. As zone leaders we make a lot of phonecalls, and organize stuff and pass information along, and sometimes at conferences we give a little training. In fact we had one just last tuesday, a combined zone conference (why it wasn't called a mission conference, I don't know). But because it was combined, all four zone leaders did a combined training. We talked about obedience and how it leads to freedom. We even quoted Braveheart and played one of the Braveheart songs dad put on my ipod (thanks, by the way). It's a lot of fun.

B: How is the new apartment?

O: It's nice. A little dirty since the vaccuum broke who-knows-how-many transfers ago. And there's a slight ant problem, which is impressive because we live on the 9th floor of our building. I have literally never seen ants before. My last apartment was the biggest one I've been in. But my first apartment will always be home, I think. I love that little place.

Random Questions

B: How do you get your groceries each week? Do they have grocery stores?

O: Yes, they do have grocery stores. About a million in fact. Practically on every corner is a little store with a pretty basic selection of groceries. There are bigger places too. And in a few places they have bigger supermarkets, and they even have "hyper-markets" (pronounced like gippermarket, incase you want to say "I'm off to the gippermarket" the next time you go out to Costco), which are just the most gigantic places you've ever seen. They literally have everything you could ever want. In very select locations (I've only been to one, and only heard of a couple more) they have a store called Stockmans, where you can go to buy real American stuff. It's the only place in Russia where one can go to get, say, rootbeer, Oreos, Campbell's soup, etc. Granted, a box of oreos costs about 12 bucks, so I've never gotten anything there, but it's still pretty cool.

B: I haven't heard much about your investigators. How is the work coming?

O: Like I said, winter is pretty slow. Right now we're working with about 5-6 people. It's a fuzzy line between 'investigator' and 'english contact'. Most people like to speak english. But there are those who really are intersted in learning more about religion (the 5-6). We meet regularly with a really nice babushka who calls us her sons. There's a nine year old boy whose father is inactive but wants his son to be baptized. We have been meeting recently with a lot of inactive members, of which there are many in moscow. The winter really is a completely different world compared to summer. But the work is moving forward. There is a lot of activity going on in the zone.

B: How's the language coming?

O: I love Russian!! It is the most incredible language in the world!

Holy cow! gotta go. Have a great week.I love you

Elder Hamp