Family Home Evening (FHE)

Маша (Mary) is the FHE coordinator. She arranges for the lesson, picks the songs, assigns the prayers and decides what game we play at the end. She decided on her own that it would be nice to ask a person to share their favorite scripture each week after the lesson. She's doing a great job--Молодец! (or something like that)

The Russians love to play games. One of their favorite games is Uno. With a twist. Or two or three. They make the game livelier and you really have to watch what's going on. For example, when someone plays a card with a 1 on it, everyone has to slap the discard pile. The last person to put their hand on the pile of hands draws a card. They also use the match rule--if you have a card identical to the one just discarded, you can discard it out of turn and the game continues from you. You can also match any +2 card, no matter the color, and the person next to you has to draw 2 for each card played--often people end up having to draw 10 cards. A couple of times a draw 4 has been matched 3 times so the next person had to pick up 16! My favorite part of it is that they don't keep score.

Whenever someone moves away, whether it's a missionary who is being transferred or someone relocating, the Monday before they leave we do a little tribute to them: we go around the room and everyone tells what they admire about the person leaving and wishes him/her good luck. Our District Leader, Elder Kelly, got transferred, and Monday night was his last night in Novokuznetsk. Mary arranged to have a bunch of balloons delivered early and hidden in our apartment. After the closing song, she said we were going to do our tributes to Elder Kelly in a slightly different way. Each person got a balloon (or two or three). When it was their turn they cut the end off and sucked in the helium before talking. Sometimes they'd start to talk and then laugh so hard at what they sounded like that the helium all got laughed out of their lungs and they had to suck in more helium. It was a lot of fun!

Mary with all her balloons

Ьрат Владимир's voice was probably the funniest because he normally has such a deep voice and the change was very dramatic

Elder Howard, a burly wrestler, was excited for his turn to squeak

Mary

Elder Kelly, getting ready to say his farewells in like manner

This week in Russia:
We are leaving later this week to attend a couple of meetings in N'sibirsk before heading out for our visa trip. Since we will have very limited Internet access for a week, there won't be a new post next Sunday. Tune in again on March 25.