Zone Conferences, Baptism and Couples' Cowboy Party

Our Ride from Denver to Frankfurt

We are back in St. Petersburg and trying to get over the jet lag.  For some reason it's much easier to go west than to go east. We lost a day in the process, too. We left Utah on Sunday morning, arrived home on Monday night, but felt like we had only been traveling for one day.

Tuesday we caught up on office stuff with the Archibalds. They came in from Kaliningrad for two weeks and took over for us. When we arrived ten months ago, they were our trainers in the office, so we knew everything was in good hands while we were gone.

Zone Conference

Wednesday and Thursday were Zone Conferences. Half of the mission comes in for each day, every six weeks. The time between these just flies! The highlight this time was President Rawson teaching us that if we push a little harder in preparation, we can really improve our performance! He did this with Elders each day, too, but the exercise with the Sisters is more fun to watch.

Here are Sisters Camano and Mohlman on Wednesday. 

And here are Sisters Gregson and Gregory on Thursday.  

Blindfold Exercise at Zone Conference

Each day, part of the training was a "race" around an obstacle course on the second floor of the Stake Center, where we held our conferences. Each racer was blindfolded and had to follow the instructions from the three team members who could see. Our team won on Wednesday! We won because we skipped waiting for the elevator and went down the stairs instead. Sue never takes the elevator--too slow. She knew Elder Adams could hang onto the stair railing and go down pretty quickly, which he did. [Anyone catch the "iron rod" analogy here?] The prize was two bags of caramel popcorn, which we shared around the room with everyone else.

The Russia St. Petersburg Mission Song

The other new thing this Zone Conference is our "Mission Song." President Rawson has wanted to have one, and finally got it written. The tune is "Rise Up Oh Men of God," and the new words have all the catch-phrases we have in the mission. Our favorite is "work inside the fence, but outside the box," referring to our limitations within Russian no-proselyting rules.

Speaking of Russian laws.... While we were gone last week there was an announcement that we must destroy any LDS Church materials that mention Family Search or familysearch.org. And at the end of March, www.familysearch.org will be blocked in Russia. We are not surprised. Russian laws require that on-line databases with information about Russian citizens be physically situated in Russia. They say it is for privacy protection. That's why this blog is actually resident at blogspot.ru. Google and Facebook have servers in Russia for the accounts of their Russian members. Linked-In is blocked in Russia. Of course, there is no way for the LDS Church to separate the data about Russians from the others in the world's largest genealogical database. So it will just not be available here. Russians wanting to use it can do so at Family History Centers in other countries, including at the LDS Temples in Helsinki, Finland, and Kiev, Ukraine.

President Rawson, Brother William Ball, Brother Valashov

Friday we had the privilege of attending the baptism of William Ball in Avtovo Ward. He's originally an American, from Sacramento, but moved to Russia in the late 1980's and has been here on-and-off. His wife is Russian and so he's been here most of the last 20 years. He has been studying the LDS Church for 5+ years and now is in poor health. He really wanted to be baptized before he dies!  

Saturday morning we cleaned house--and boy did our little apartment need it! It keeps snowing, just an inch or two each day. But this means the streets and sidewalks are muddy. We take off our boots/shoes as soon as we come into the house, but the front hall floor was pretty dirty!  

Saturday afternoon and evening was the Stake Cowboy Party! That's spelled Каоббой in Russian. It was a "couples" party. The Stake President stood up at the beginning and said that the teenagers and Young Single Adults have activities all the time, and there should be something for all the "old married people." And he said it was important for couples to have a regular date night. They need to get out without the kids sometimes--even if the budget is only 150 rubles. That's a bit more than $US2.50.

The decorations for this party were amazing! Mostly done by Brother Leostrin [father of the Stake President]. He can build anything! He built the swinging doors into the Cultural Hall. He built the "horse" that Ken is sitting on.

And he built the cacti out of corrugated cardboard with toothpick thorns. He came dressed as the Indian Chief, among all the cowboys. Lots of people took lots of photos--including Ken, but too many to post.  He put more on his Facebook page, as did Bro. Zaretsky.




This was a dinner party, but done in an interesting way. Each couple was pre-assigned to a table of about eight people, and each table did its own food! And after initial eating, it was acceptable to wander around the room and sample "left-overs" from other tables. Sue liked this--lots of interesting food, and no one was slaving over cooking massive quantities of anything.

The Stake band played, and they are pretty good! Numbers included "Knocking on Heaven's Door," "Fools Rush In," and "Pretty Woman," They all sang in English, with an Elvis accent.


Each ward or branch also did a short skit or song or some such for the program. These were interspersed between band songs and recorded music for dancing. Here is part of the Nevsky Ward skit. All of them were clever and fun.

It was a great party!

Then we came home so Ken could edit videos and Sue made a major dent in the income taxes. [Ugh!] 

Happy Saturday night!