Another Report

July 7, 2008

President Mickelsen:

During the past week we have been working in the office daily and getting instructed by the Office Elders.

We spent two days being trained by Andrey Kudinov about the accounting processes and procedures. Some of them were new to Elder Fry as well. We will implement his directives as we work.

We were told to have an office coordination meeting and Yulia said that they had them with the former office couple. I am unclear as to what we will be coordinating, since Olga and Brat Pyotr work independently, but we will have them.

We attended the baptism of Serge in the 3^rd Branch building Saturday. It was run well and very spiritual. He was confirmed in 1^st Branch Sunday.

We are still working with the landlady to get internet hooked up and the refrigerator fixed.
We are keeping up with the reading schedule and appreciate the direction.

uestions:
1. We have been attending both branches each Sunday, but are unclear if we should continue to attend both. What is your direction?

2. Is there an ultimately responsible party in the office? I know Olga, Brat Pyotr, and Yulia work for the Moscow office and we as a couple manage the office elders. Does anyone have over-all responsibility for the office management?

3. The mechanics of the Novosibirsk Zone Conference are a mystery to us. Who actually drives this process?

All is well in Siberia

Elder & Sister Simmons

June 29, 2008 Weekly Report

Weekly Report

June 29, 2008

I decided to publish our weekly reports to the mission president so these are out of chronology.

Dear President Mickelsen:

In accordance with the Mission protocols, we are writing to report on our week of June 22^nd to 29^th. We would also be sending a letter home, but as yet we have no Internet connection in our apartment. We will keep trying to get that activated through Olga this week. Meanwhile, we have sent a brief note from the office Internet connection to our daughter reporting our arrival.

We have moved into unit 40 and cleaned the entire apartment including surfaces, dishes, appliances, and anything else that did not move out of the way. We feel much more at home here today than we did on Monday. We have made it ours and considering that Olga surprised us by paying three months rent on it, we consider it home for at least that long. We have reimbursed the mission for our portion of June and will pay the July rent by the 4^th.

We have been welcomed and feel accepted by all we have met. We are grateful for the loving spirit of the staff and missionaries and have tried to return the same. If there are any fences to be mended we would appreciate your counsel.

Elders Fry & Lunt have oriented us to the office and begun to show us our duties. We plan to be in the office from 9 am to 6 pm Monday through Friday with only occasional exceptions for outside duties.

Wednesday the left bank elders planned to take the Hughes and ourselves shopping at IKEA, but the Hughes had workers installing their internet and could not make the appointment. Elders Pister & Harper agreed to take us anyway and would re-schedule with the Hughes. Three other elders joined us for the trip. We bought a few small kitchen items, ate at the IKEA and had the elders back on duty before 6 pm.

Friday the District Meeting was held in our apartment. Elders McCleary & Gambardella came at 11 am to help us set up and their meeting ran from 11:30 to 12:30 pm. Sister Simmons made Tortilla Soup, veggies, and a sheet-cake for them and they seemed to enjoy it. Most of the companionships were gone by a little after 1 pm and the ZL’s stayed to cleanup until about 1:30 pm. I was very impressed with the meeting. The ZL’s were well prepared, very business-like, and the lesson was a strong spiritual discussion about identifying and finding the “Elect”. It could not have been a better run meeting if they had been 50 year old high priests.

We attended the First and Second Branch meetings today and were asked to speak in both Sacrament Meetings. Sister Simmons introduced us and bore her testimony. I preached a brief sermon on I Nephi 3:7 and bore my testimony. The elders translated for us in both Branches. I felt that we were well received. Second Branch had only 18 present and the Branch President was sick so Misha conducted and taught Sunday School. First Branch had about 35 attending including 8 missionaries. (Office Elders, Zone Leaders, Sister Companionship, and us). Elders Bressler and Hoopes escorted us to church and Elders Fry & Lunt brought us home where we served them the left-overs of Friday’s lunch and discussed the office procedures further.

This next week we plan to work in the office daily, have the sister companionship to dinner on Tuesday, and host the YSA fireside on Sunday. We have coordinated with Misha on the fireside and expect him to call us with a count of expected attendees. We will also be working on an inventory of mission-owned items in our apartment this week and will turn it in to Olga. I will assist Elder Fry to make the agenda for the Tuesday presidency meeting and sit in on that meeting and the Wednesday meeting if appropriate.

We are still working on several challenges with the apartment. Olga is still trying to locate the landlord; she does not have a contact point with her as yet.

1. The refrigerator continues to ice up and we cannot get the freezer door open, or after prying it open, getting it tightly closed due to the ice formation. As a result, it does not really keep the food cold.

2. We are unclear about what things we should repair/replace at our expense and need some clarification.

3. The landlord seems to be storing things in the apartment, both in the living room credenza (books) and a lot in the “porch” area.

4. The kitchen counter-top Formica next to the sink is split and a piece is broken out exposing the pressboard to moisture and causing it to swell, retaining water & bacteria.

Finally, I need to purchase a bag like the elders carry, considering the rule against using backpacks. There was one in the Holmes’ things left unclaimed when we went through it last week. If that one is still available I would like to have it. Otherwise, I will buy one on Saturday.

We are excited to get started on our office assignment and look forward to a great week.

Sincerely,

Elder & Sister Simmons

July 7, 2008--Life on Sacco-E-Vansetti Street

Life on Sacco-e-Vansetti Street
July 7, 2008 

First, a word about our street. If you go out of our building’s front door you look at an island of trees and wild grasses between our building and the street. Each building in our cluster has such an island, but ours has many mature, blooming trees where the others to the left have one or no trees. This picture is taken facing the building from the street looking through the island.

The street immediately in front of our building is badly chewed-up with long patches of damaged surface exposing the crushed rock 6 or so inches below. Several of these damaged spots are genuine “potholes” as much as 10 inches deep. During the frequent rains while we’ve been here these spots fill with water and present a real hazard to the inexperienced sojourner on Sacco-e-Vanzetti Street. The experienced ones drive around the potholes, weaving from one side to the other as they maneuver around them at fairly high speed. Every once in a while we hear the squealing of tires as a novice discovers the hazard or the serious clunk of someone who didn’t see it in time. 

The other picture is a little fuzzy because I had to take it in a hurry while walking, but it is an open storm drain on our street just to the right of our driveway. I hope to remember it when the snow comes. It could be a real surprise if I don’t.

Our street is named after the two Marxist labor organizers in the 1920’s who were tried and convicted of the murder of a paymaster they were accused of trying to rob. Several prominent people like Upton Sinclair came to their support, but they were found guilty and executed in 1927. Our street is named for them, presumably as a martyr’s reward.

There are 17 homeless dogs living on our street, mostly in the yard of the Neighborhood association office. Here Sister Simmons is walking by the grass-fronted office, heading west toward our apartment. Ours is what appears to be the third building in this picture.

This picture is taken out of our window to the right (east) looking at the Neighborhood Association campus where the dogs spend most of the day until about 8:00 pm. Then they make the rounds of the neighborhood, stirring up some other dogs and making a great racket until about 11pm. Then things seem to settle down for the night with only the occasional outburst of barking. This happens nightly. I have seen this pack attack another dog who was in their territory one morning and give it a pretty good chewing before it escaped, but they don’t seem to bother the people.

The picture also shows the building under construction directly across the street from our building. They work on this building 24 hours a day. What you see is only our side. It covers about a city block in a donut; bordering the street with a courtyard in the center.

The next picture is looking slightly to the left (west) about 10 o’clock from our window. It is some kind of industrial complex, but people live in it during the night.

This style of parking is not at all unusual in Novosibirsk. I have come to understand that the rule is, “If you can physically do it, it is ok until someone stops you.” This car was parked like this at the corner of the building in the previous picture when I got up in the morning and wasn’t moved until about 9 am when a man walked across the street from our side, got in the car, and drove away to the west. People walked around it all morning like it was a tree that had fallen in the night. No one seemed to react angrily or put out, they just moved around it.

To the far left (west) of our window we have a nice view of the Ob River. It is dammed about 5 miles to the south, creating the Ob Sea, a lake about the size of Lake Tahoe. We have a beach on the west (called the left) bank just about across the river from where our street would end. This picture was taken as we crossed the river in President Mickelsen’s van.

That’s it for a description of our street. As CSN&Y sings it, “Our house, in the middle of our street, our house . . .is a very, very, very fine house”

DS

July 5, 2008 Why are we here?

Why are we here?
July 5, 2008 
Ever since our call came we have asked ourselves and one another,” Why Russia?” Since our arrival and getting things in order we have again had time to ask” Why am I (we) here?” The answer may have come in an email from Wendy Sheffield, one of the authors of the Family Enrichment Program manual that was the subject of our first mission together where we shepherded this little book from 2002 through 2004.

In case you, collectively, need reminding, that was the generic Family Home Evening book written for non-LDS groups to instruct in the basics of the Family Home Evening program as a humanitarian effort managed by LDS Family Services and specifically by us under the management of Lee Hardy. As you may remember when we took the assignment the project had distributed less than 500 books in the prior year. After two years we had shipped out 87,000 books in 330 projects all over the world.

We have no idea what may come of this, but the events of just these last two weeks are very interesting. First, Wendy sent us an email saying that she was leaving on July 1 for Asia (Taiwan, Indonesia, & Singapore). She writes, “The East Asia Area are holding “Family Enrichment Seminars” (printed 200,000 FEP manuals in English, Bahasan Indonesian, and Mandarin Chinese in preparation). I’m going over to present many, many training sessions on FEP.” That’s a lot of books and a very big project. It more than doubles what we did in 2 years.

She goes on, “Here is some email info that was forwarded to us from a missionary couple in the Ukraine re an FEP pilot currently underway.” This email, summarized, says that a senior missionary couple, the Lee’s, are promoting the FEP among the Humanitarian and CES missionaries in the Europe East Area—that includes Novosibirsk. They are using the books in four ways:

1. NGO and Government social service agencies
2. CES senior missionaries as teaching tools in seminaries and institutes
3. Humanitarian senior missionaries for possible projects of strengthening families classes in their areas
4. Family-to-Family projects where a member takes a book, practices the program, invites another family to Family Night, teaches the concept and gives them a book to try for themselves, and finally invites the family back for a repeat family night and feedback on the book.

With the exception that we were not allowed to “promote” the use of the manual like they are doing, everything was word of mouth, this is almost word-for-word what we said to people who heard about the FEP books and wanted to somehow use them. The Lee’s are doing exactly what we trained groups to do in 2004. Their area president asked them to have 200 books printed in Russian and they have been distributed. They received approval for another Area Initiative project to print another 1,000 books and were told that they could print more.

They write, “We know that couples in our Area are now teaching the “Strengthening Marriages and Families” classes. All but one of the couples in our Kiev Mission are teaching.” They just heard that the humanitarian couple in the Donets’k mission has started classes.

I know that I am speaking into cyber space here, but I cannot adequately tell you, collectively, how excited we are to hear that four years later “our” little manual is being used right here in our Europe East Area with the blessing, and even the encouragement, of the Area President. If this is all true, it is a blessing and a miracle that it and we, should be here.

During our initial interview with President and sister Mickelsen we were asked about other missionary experience in our past and we mentioned our FEP mission. During our second week, after we received Wendy’s email, I again mentioned it to President Mickelsen and he got interested in a possible pilot project here. We later found out that our mission's CES couple, the Hughes’, received a copy of FEP at a training seminar last month, and to top it all off, our mission humanitarian couple, the Bowden’s, were introduced to the FEP and want to do some projects right here in our mission. Is this incredible, or what?

As far as I can tell, Family Home Evening as we know it is not wide-spread in the branches we have visited. If the Family-to-Family method takes hold here it could strengthen the member families as much or more than the guest families. I hope the branch presidents will catch the vision.

When the Bowden’s return from their “visa trip” to Madrid, we will spend some time talking over how we used the book and how they would like to approach the projects they have in mind. Who knows, maybe we can help in some way help them to strengthen the families of our mission, both in the branches and in the cities. We don’t know if anything will come of this, but it is exciting to contemplate.

Why Russia? Why are we here?

DS

In The Branches on Sunday

July 1, 2008

Since the church is a dedicated chapel, I cannot take pictures inside so there are no pictures for this article. However, I have added some pictures to the article about our apartment so if you have already read that one, go back and check out the pictures.

DS

Going to Church

We are not attached to a particular branch, but are assigned to mentor the three branches on the east side of the river. They are identified by number that designates the order in which they were organized. On our side of the river they are the First, Second, and Fourth Branches. First and Second Branches meet in the same rented hall at the Gagarenskaya Metro stop. (The stop was named after the astronaut Yuri Gagarin) The Church has a long-term lease on the third floor where they have renovated it into a church facility with a chapel they call the Sacrament Hall, classrooms, Branch President’s offices, nursery, kitchen and restrooms.

You can tell which is the Relief Society room by the white table cloth and flowers on the table, and the Young Women’s room by the YW Values banners hanging above the chalk board and around the room. The Sacrament Hall has a slightly raised stand with the Sacrament table on the congregation’s right and the bishopric’s chairs on the left of the podium. The hall is about 80 feet by 25 feet and can seat about 100 in 10 rows of stackable chairs with an isle down the middle.

We have been assigned to the First, Second, and Fourth Branches that meet on the east side of the river. The First and Second Branches meet in this building and the Fourth meets in a small town farther to the east called Sniggeree (Spelling is my best transliteration) The first Sunday in Novosibirsk we attended both the First and Second Branches. Second Branch meets at 9 am and First Branch meets at 2 pm. Elders Bressler & Hoopes escorted us over to the building and the office elders Fry & Lunt brought us home after the First Branch meeting and stayed for dinner.

Second Branch had the smallest congregation with about 18 attending. The branch president was ill so his counselor, 19-year-old Misha Nickoliachev, son of District President Brat Pyoter (brother Peter)Nickoliachev, conducted most of the meetings. Being short of priesthood, I was asked to help pass the Sacrament and did OK except I think I didn’t wait to be dismissed by the conducting counselor and went and sat with Sister Simons too soon after the Sacrament. The First Branch had about 35 attending plus eight missionaries including the sister companionship (Cropper & Bertluskia), the District Leader companionship (McCleary & Gambardella), the office elder companionship, and ourselves.

In each meeting, we were asked to introduce ourselves and bear our testimonies with the help of the elders translating. Cindy spoke about us and about our family, why we came on a mission to Russia, and bore her testimony. I preached a short sermon based on I Nephi 3:7, where Nephi says he will go and do what the Lord commands, and bore my testimony. It is a little difficult to speak in short phrases and try to remember what you were saying while the elder translates it. I’m sure my short sermon was a little disjointed, but each congregation was attentive and I guess my message got across.

Part of the combined RS and PH meeting in the third hour of each branch was devoted to a discussion of the Sacrament; what, when, how, and to whom it is to be administered; and both branches talked about improving reverence in the Sacrament Hall; just like home.

We were very comfortable among the saints and all were friendly and some demonstratively glad to see us. We hope to be a positive influence in these branches and do something to strengthen them.

DS

Novosibirsk, June 22nd-29th
The first Week

Backing up a couple of steps. When we woke up in the Mission Home on Monday morning about 6 am we sat in our respective beds and talked a while about what we were getting into. We tried to encourage one another and talked about the importance of our being here, serving the Lord and the whole thing, but when the topic turned to our apartment, neither of us could hold back the tears. In spite of our best efforts to put a happy face on it, we both saw it as our worst nightmare; a stuffy, concrete-walled three rooms and a tiny kitchen, 935 square foot cell that smelled like the accumulated sweat and dirt of generations as our home for the next two years. It was awful to contemplate, but we were determined to somehow make it into our home. It was just not a pretty thought.

The picture above is our street and our building, #44, is the third by the trees. The picture below is the security door to the building. We have an electronic key to open it. When we arrived “home” with our few bags of produce and lump of cheese from the outdoor market (Renik), we found that our memories were pretty good about what we had seen on Sunday morning, but we had not seen it all. The kitchen was tiny and stunk, the living room was linoleum floored (rolled out, pattern askew, and loose) and lined with 2 broken-down brown couches and a credenza on opposite walls, the bedroom had a queen-sized bed and small dresser that left only about 30 inches of floor on three sides. The bath room contained a plastic washing machine, deep porcelain tub, and about a 2 x 2 foot floor space in front of the sink. The “toilet room” was a 5 x 3 foot closet with just enough floor space for your feet if sitting down; my knees almost touch the door & my head hit the door when I bent over to sit down. The second bedroom had two twin beds shoved together, masquerading as a king-size bed which left less than 3 feet of free floor space around it. A storage porch off this room was cluttered with years of discarded “stuff” and unknown vermin. This was our home.

After a thorough inspection, we looked at one another and silently agreed—it had to be cleaned before we could live here. This began 5 days of washing, chipping, scrubbing, repairing, replacing, testing, and discarding. By Friday we would be ready. The picture to the left is the living room.


The kitchen was Cindy’s first project while I cleaned and repaired the rest of the apartment; helping with stuff she couldn’t do. The refrigerator was about a third the size of ours at home (made almost entirely of plastic) with a small freezer whose broken, split door was iced up solid, requiring a major, but delicate, effort to open it. There were many appliances (toaster, blender, crock pot, mixer) and a variety of pots and Pyrex dishes in the cupboards, but all were of questionable cleanliness and unknown functionality. The kitchen counter next to the sink had a 10 inch split, with a missing piece the diameter of a golf ball, exposing the deteriorating pressboard beneath. We cleaned every thing in that kitchen with soap & hot water, boiling water, bleach water, and wore out many rags and scouring pads.

I replaced light bulbs in every room. I repaired drawers and re-hung closet and cabinet doors. I cleaned floors, walls, beds, counters, light fixtures, windows, shelves, closets, and every inch of linoleum and carpet. If it didn’t move, I cleaned it. If it did, I killed it.

We took a break on Wednesday, the missionaries’ preparation day, to make a trip to the IKEA store on the left (west) bank of the Obe River. On the way we saw the Obe River Beach located on the opposite shore of the river from us. If our street went across the river, it would hit the beach.
Elder Pister and four of his fellow missionaries met us at our Metro stop (in front of the mission office), took us on the Metro to the end of the line, then onto the IKEA free shuttle about 3 more miles further to the IKEA shopping mall, anchored by a huge, Home Depot-sized, IKEA store, complete with its own cafeteria. We bought a few needed household items and the Elders dinner before returning to our Metro stop in front of the mission office and on to our home by 6 pm; the end of P-day. This picture is of another shopping trip taken later in the company of Olga (Visa Clerk & general helper and the mission driver President Gushin)

Our little apartment is now our home. It is clean, neatly organized, functional, and very comfortable. It is hard to imagine that it is the same place we abhorred less than a week ago. The apartment itself has not changed all that much, but our attitude about and toward it has. We are no longer worried about the condition of the couches, just happy to have something to sit upon. We love our little washing machine and don't mind having to move the wash from washer to spinner with each cycle. Cindy's kitchen is the center of the home, with its good smells and functionally "close" quarters. The formerly moldy closets and wardrobes are now filled with good things from the 10 boxes we mailed to ourselves from Sacramento. We have learned to love the close quarters and be happy with the things we have. Quite a change.
DS

In the Office June 30, 2008

Just a short entry to let everyone know that we are ok. We don' t have internet in our apartment yet so I have to compose at home and copy it to the blog in the office. All is well. We will post several things this week.
DS