My dearest family and friends,

The work continues, we see miracles and blessings, and always we run into hilarious things.  We had a few really cool things happen this last week. 1-a few weeks ago we were walking down this road and this lady was outside of her house and we said hi and got to talking, she told us she had heard about the book of mormon, we gave her a new translation of the book of mormon, and we told her we would stop by.  So we stopped by and she let us right in, went and got her book of mormon and comes out and tells us she hasn't read a lot because she has been busy.  We asked her how much she read, and she shows us that she is halfway through Alma!!!! We were like actually, that's a lot! So we asked her how she liked it, if she had any questions, etc.  and she says "This book is so clear. I have no questions. I wonder why people say bad things about it? Probably because they don't know the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And some people even say it's not about Christ, and I think they should read the cover because you know girls, it says Another Testament of Jesus Christ." We were like yep, that is exactly right! Then she proceeds to tell us the whole story of Nephi and his family crossing the ocean, how the Book of Mormon and Bible compliment each other, and she explained how she obtains personal revelation.  I almost cried!! It was a miracle, and send straight from Heavenly Father!! We will definitely continue meeting with her, she is soo nice and wonderful.  2-we were in Kherson yesterday and we met with our investigator Luba (she is hilarious as ever) and afterwards, we are walking to the bus stop.  She lives kind of in a random area, and you walk through a small grave yard to get there. So we come upon this lady just taking a stroll through the grave yard, and i say hi, and we get to talking.  She is so sweet! She loved us "sweet american believing girls" haha and accepted a book of mormon and wants to meet with us.  Whether it turns out to be anything, it was a miracle! She said she lived in a completely different area of the city, she was just taking a walk, and the whole thing was one of those miracles in disguise kind of thing.  The Lord is blessing us in our work, and I see His hand in it every day!

As we were meeting with Luba, she was telling us how she thought she was going to die earlier that morning because her heart was racing "sooo fast" and she almost started crying saying "I though i wasn't going to see my spiritual sisters ever again!" haha we love her, we just have a hard time keeping her on track with the Gospel, because she loves to talk to us so much. And during the lesson, she goes and gets these face cards and was like "girls, i think these are of the devil. it's probably why i'm sick"  we made it clear that we do not play cards on the mission haha, but i didn't have the heart to tell her that in "real life" i love card games...oh well!!  She also told us about how she loves this priest name "Father George" and how they have this secret love thing going on, and she wants Sis. Johnson and I to be the witnesses at her marriage celebration haha. So I asked her if they were really getting married, and she said "I don't know." haha.  So at the end of the lesson I said the closing prayer and during the prayer she starts talking and I thought she was telling me to bless her friend, but then she just says "Sorry, I just wanted to add something into your prayer. please forgive me DeMille."  haha Sis. Johnson almost lost it laughing, and I just kept going with the prayer.  Love it!!  We also met with our investigator Valentina, the one who is having a hard time quitting smoking.  She is so amazing though and has great faith! On the back of the brochures we give out, they have questions that you can answer and scriptures that you can read.  She is the first person I have met that actually read all the scriptures and answered the questions! We were so proud!  

We love Nickolaiv so much! There are some great members here and we have been trying to get to know them more and share spiritual thought's with them.  This woman Tatiana is like the greatest member I have ever met.  Her little house is so cute and she is just telling how she likes to live modestly so she can pay tithing and serve the Lord.  I love it!!  We are trying to love Kherson more, but the branch has some issues and we are all trying to make a team effort to help the branch out.  We met with this member Marina over in Kherson (the one we helped get to the temple) and she was telling us how she is having a hard time with her mom (her mom recently got baptized, now doesn't want to come to church) and she is so upset. We found out Marina just started working a lot, so we explained to her maybe her mom just misses her while she is at work.  Then marina looks at us with this sad face and is like "She doesn't even make me breakfast anymore. I have to make it myself." haha it sounded funny coming from a 40 year old woman, but we held our laughter in and gave her some comfort.  

Well, I love the work! Honestly it's easy to love the work when things are happening, and it gets a little more tough to love it when you are finding all day.  But I'm determined to be more positive and let the light shine to everyone.  I'm getting more bold about sharing my testimony and how i feel about the gospel, and it just feels good! The Lord is blessing us and I love it.  Thank you for all your prayers and support!! I love you all!!

Cectpa DeMille

dear family and friends,

We have been working so hard in this area, and it's paying off!! Good news, Sister Johnson and I are both staying in this area again :) this will be our 4th transfer together, crazy!  I will give you all the highlights from last week. We went to Simferopol (a city down south about 6-7 hours away from us) for zone conference.  We took a train on the way down there, and a bus on the way back.  We stayed with the sisters down there and we went on splits with them that night, it was fun, it was my first time doing splits with other sisters in ukraine.  It was a long 2 days of basically sitting on a train, then in zone conf., then on a bus, but it was great.  Zone conference gave us a good opportunity to discuss what is going on in our mission, how we can improve, and how we can re-dedicate/re-committ ourselves to the work.  We talked a lot about Consecration and Sacrifice.  President Van Bruggen just asked us to think in every situation "What would a consecrated missionary do?", so we are working hard and loving it.  We are doing a lot more night contacting and we meet a lot of great people, along with some crazy creepers, but it's all in the experience haha!

There are of course, a few funny things that happened.  The elders in nickolaiv said they were contacting the other day and this drunk guy approached them and they just told him sorry sir, you are drunk and walked away. Then the guy yells after them "no, YOU are drunk!" haha i'm so glad i follow the word of wisdom.  Also, we have our lovely/funny investigator in Kherson named Luba (love, in english).  We went and saw her and she was showing us around her house, and she has a shrine in every room of icons that she prays to! Haha it was no good.  Then we are asking her about this cute little kitten that was at her house the previous time we were there.  I was like, "where's the kitten Matilda?" and she was like "Probably, she died.  I cried. I can't find her :(" and i was like "well i want to cry too, Matilda was cute." and she was like "sister, don't worry. don't cry. i still have the man cat here" haha i laughed, she is so hilarious.  Then later we were telling her we had to go back to Nickolaiv and she asked us just to have a sleep over at her house and we told her we couldn't.  Then she was like "ok, i see that you have to go. but i will miss you so so much." haha and she was like almost crying. We love her haha!  We were contacting last week, and we met this guy and gave him a church invitation, then he said to us "I'm Jesus!" and we were like say what? and he was like "well, you know, He's my brother." haha then he said the same thing like 3 more times "I'm Jesus! well you know, He's my brother." I love meeting people outside.  We have also recently made friends with a lady who sells flowers on the side of the street, and she thinks it's so great that we are from America and that we like Ukraine haha.  So we are talking to her last night, and she is like introducing us to everyone that walked by saying "come over here! these 2 girls are pure, natural americans! can you believe that? and they actually LIKE ukraine! wow!" haha we tried not to be a little embarrassed and just laughed! 

We had a cool experience yesterday on the way to a lesson.  We were walking through this park thing, and I saw this guy on a bench and he was reading the Bible.  So we went over to him and told him who we were and told him about the Book of Mormon.  He had such a light in his eyes, even though he was telling us that he had recently lost everything and is going through a difficult situation.  It feels so good to testify about the Gospel and tell people that we know that our message can help them.  We also met with an investigator named Valentina.  She has an addiction to smoking (again, i'm SO glad we have the word of wisdom), and she is looking for a new path in life.  She has great faith and loved and believed the story of the Restoration.  We gave her the 12 Step program in hopes that it will help her with smoking.  We had a great lesson with Vika last night about Sacrifice (talk by Elder Oaks, last general conference).  She still is scared to get baptized, but we encouraged her to keep reading the Book of Mormon and praying and such. 

Well, i just want you all to know that i love the work!!! It's hard, but great.  God protects us, supports us, and watches over us in our part of His vineyard.  It feels good to know that I can labor in this part of the vineyard a little longer!  I love the truthfulness of the gospel.  We were talking to a woman the other night and she was a Jehova's Witness.  We told her that we KNEW our church was the only true church on the earth, and we both felt so much joy as we testified that God restored His church. It was interesting as we were talking to her because she wanted us to see how her church was right, but she never once said she knew that her church was true, or that it was the only true church on earth.  It feels good to know that we have the truth and I find so much joy in it.  We are trying to bring people to Christ, even if it seems like an impossible task.  I love you all and I'm grateful for your prayers and support! Keep up the good fight!

Cectpa DeMille



Sis. Johnson, Sis. Maxwell and Sis. DeMille



another week!

family and friends,

I'm not going to lie, nothing very exciting happened this week and it was one of "those" kind of rough weeks as a missionary, but we see blessings and I'm grateful for that.  We got some new "rules" from our Pres. Basically they are all the rules from the white handbook, but a little pepped up you could say haha.  We are doing a lot of finding outside and a little less studying.  I know that we will see blessings from it, but it was a little rough to get started with the new schedule.  Basically the highlight from this week was us saving this half-naked 89 year old guy's life haha.  So this is what happened.  We have a new investigator in Kherson and we went over to see her, she is an older woman, like 65 (i think that is still young, in ukraine it's old haha).  She is like a care taker for her best friend's dad (the 89 year old).  His name is Misha and he is like really old (for ukraine haha).  So we go over there and look over the gate and Misha is laying on the cement and there are goats running everywhere! We yell for Tonya (our investigator), and she is not home.  I think what happened is Misha was just sitting outside on his chair just looking at the sky you know, and the goats from the goat pen behind the house break loose, start running wild, and knocked poor misha off of his chair!  Who knows how long he had been laying there before we got there! So we try to open the gate to help him and it's locked.  So what do 2 sister missionaries do? Yep, climb the fence in our skirts haha.  Then we help misha up, and he is like so sunburned and tired, poor guy! While we are helping him, all the goats keep ramming us (seriously) and trying to eat our skirts (seriously).  We had to hit them with water bottles to get them to stay away!  So we take misha inside and give him some water that he downed in like 3 seconds and he fell asleep like 5 seconds later. It was quite an adventure and now Misha loves us haha. The next day we saw Tonya and she was soooo grateful that we helped him haha.  It was great!

The rest of our week consisted of us finding and trying to meet with people.  We met some interesting people, to say the least.  Some lady told us our fortunes--I need to learn an asian language such as japanese or chinese, I look like my mom (her heart told her that, then I proved her right with a photo haha), and I am very wise apparently.  Another lady offered us her borshte recipe, another lady told us we aren't saved, someone cast us out of their little village (because everyone is orthidox according to her), and another guy argued with us for about 30 minutes about how we are wrong and not real servants of the Lord.  We had a sort of depressing lesson with one of our families that we are teaching, and the husband told us he believes in reincarnation and he isn't interested in learning or reading, he just likes to discuss with us.  Things like that pull at my heart strings a little bit, but we just move on.  Other than that, it's just work around here! This week we are heading down south to Simferopol for another Zone Conference, which should be great.  

I know that our church is true because I can feel it and I just KNOW, you know? Not only that though, it's very logical! It's hard to tell people here that God has restored His church again and they don't listen or take the time to even think that it could happen.  The more I study the Bible, the more I realize how much the bible matches up with our church and how crazy it is to me people who supposedly know and study the bible, can't see that there could be one true church on earth.  But we are trying to find the elect who will realize that, and want to join that one church!  Well, I love you all! I know the church is true and I will continue to tell everyone who will listen!

Ukraine has huge sunflower fields in the summer

these next pictures are old but from when we played pin yourself in the celestial kingdom  haha

Cectpa DeMille

summer

family and friends,

I think my memory might be failing, but I don't know if St. George ever got as hot as it is in Nickolaiv....I might have heat stroke!  Haha jk, but kind of not really. It's really really really hot. But it's all good, we love missionary work and sweating to death! So this week included: hiking through a dusty village 3 different times to find an investigator, no baptisms, a really cute kitten, and some new investiagtors.  The details:  we have a rule in our mission that the sisters teach women, the elders teach men, no if's, ands, or buts.  So the elders have been "passing" some women to us, and it's great, but we are soo busy!! But it's a blessing we have some wonderful people to teach and we get a lot of good experiences.  One of the women, her name is Love. (a lot of women here are named love, hope, faith, etc..) and she kind of reminds me of Professor Trelawney (spelling??) on Harry Potter and she is so hilarious!! She had the cutest kitten and tried to feed us fresh goats milk and we graciously declined (it's totally against our rules to drink that stuff).  We walked into her gate through her garden, and she comes over and is like "Hi girls! My name is love, and I love you!" haha she is great.  After 3 times of hiking through a village, we found our next investigator from the elders, Tonya.  She is way funny and speaks in half Ukranian, so I can barely understand anything.  Those 2 women are both in Kherson, and then we have a new investigator here in Nickolaiv named Valentina.  She is such a sweet and sincere woman who wants to quit smoking.  I'm excited to keep working with her, she is great.

So our baptism didn't work out with Vika.  We are going to keep working with her, but she is just scared and doesn't want to ruin her relationship with her parents.  I was really sad, but we will hopefully move forward soon.  It's all part of the ups and downs of doing the Lord's work.  Our favorite young woman in our branch here (dasha) is so great! We are helping her study Preach My Gospel to prepare for a mission.  She decided to go contacting with us last week after our lesson.  We were handing out info about our church and free Liahona's.  No one was really wanting to talk to us, and poor Dasha was so sad! She couldn't understand that no one would want a free magazine about Christ or hear about our church.  She was almost crying, but we had a good talk about it and it was a good experience.  We love her!  A super funny thing happened last week.  We were walking to our apartment and these Babushki that we always chat with called us over and we were talking about life, and they loved my outfit. I was wearing like this pink dress thing and a white shirt, and they told me how cute and bright i looked haha.  Then they looked at Sis. Johnson (she was wearing a black shirt/grey skirt) and they told her she looked like a "dead tree" haha.  They were so concerned and asked her if she had money to buy a dress like mine and she was like "yeah, i've got some money" and they were like "gather your people together and gather money so that you can buy a dress ok?" haha it was so funny! Then they told us that we should just take our nametags off and find husbands.  Good advice, right?  Another funny thing.  We always walk this short cut way to the branch, and the elders called us one night and told us not to take the short cut anymore.  We asked why and they told us this story that they were walking through the short cut and this guy comes out of nowhere (drunk) and is like (in english) "give me  your money, i have a hun." haha a hun, yes. At first, i thought "a chinese warrior, sweet!" then i figured out that he meant to say Gun. haha. my bad!! So we don't take the short cut in case the "hun" is out and about.  

Well the work moves forward and every day is a different challenge and joy, but it's great to be involved in the Lord's work.  I really feel like these 2 cities have changed me and I love both of them a lot.  The Lord's hand is in this work and He is aware of what is going on.  I promise that He is actively involved in all of our lives, we just have to let Him in.  I have been studying a lot in the New Testmant and Book of Mormon, and I love seeing the parallells and truths in both books.  I really do love this work!  I have already had a lifetime of experiences and Ukraine has touched my heart.  I have recently paid attention a lot to how Christ influences our lives and how satan does as well.  I am reminded of the scripture that says everything good comes from Christ.  If we are filled with anger or doubt or impatience, all of those feelings come from satan. On the opposite, if we are filled with love and patience and humility, we have the abundance of the spirit in our lives.  I am so grateful for the knowledge we have and the opportunity to better ourselves each and every day.  The Lord knows us individually, and He loves us!! And I love you all too!  I love this gospel.  Until next week!

Cectpa DeMille

the girls at the branch

just a small church to pray in for the orthodox

dixie bbq right in Nickolaiv, the usa flag as well.  too bad it's a bar....

us with our investigator Ulia.  her and sis maxwell came to Nickolaiv today to walk around with us.

Lenin square

the lenin statue in Nickolaiv (there is one in every city in russia and ukraine i think)