Changing' Things Up--Again

Yesterday President Gibbons arrived in Novokuznetsk for a brief visit and a meeting with the missionaries. One of the things he told us is that plans have been approved to change our mission from three separate small districts to one large district prior to forming a stake in Siberia. That is a very big deal, and something President Gibbons has been working on almost since he arrived last year. Moscow has a stake, and three other missions in Russia--Novosibirsk, Saint Petersburg, and Samara--will soon have pre-stake districts. The work is moving along!

During that meeting he also announced that our mission boundaries will be changing again this summer. Last year two cities in the eastern part of our mission were moved to the Vladivostok mission. That saved a lot of traveling for the mission president as well as for missionaries on transfers and visa trips. However, effective in July, the entire country of Kazakhstan will become part of the Russia Novosibirsk mission. Kazakhstan is one of the ten largest countries in the world, so we'll be back to our previous status of being the largest mission in terms of land mass. In terms of missionaries, we're probably one of the smallest with only 55 missionaries and 5 senior couples.

Kazakhstan is presently part of a Moscow mission that will be dissolved in July, so we don't have to open up the country. Even though the country is so big, there are only two cities with missionaries at this time. It will be challenging for those who work there, since it's a predominantly Muslim country. We were told there will be a write up on the changes in the Church News later this week.


This week's Russianism:
Many of the cars here have a remote ignition. We'll be looking out the window and notice that suddenly the lights of a car blink and exhaust starts coming out of the tailpipe. They warm up the car before they head outside--it takes a long time with our temperatures--and the lights blink every once in a while. Here's a picture Dave took of two cars warming up. The lights just happened to blink at the same time and he quickly snapped the picture. We never saw this the first part of our mission, but that's probably because it was warm!