and we can walk home at night in short sleeves comfortably! We are also the proud owners
of a brand new toaster!! Up until now, we have been toasting our toast in the oven, a tedious
process at best. Russian bread is good but very crumby so we would have to vacuum out the
oven every week. Elder Peterson prefers toast every morning so we are feeling much better
about this new member of the apartment!
We have ventured out beyond our comfort boundaries. We have a family who lives about 40
minutes outside of town from one of the branches we attend. They invited us to come and
visit them in their home so we got directions to go to the bus station in our city and look for
marshutka 392 to, what I thought they said was, Zabrejnee. No problem. So we get to the bus
station and ask the clerk for tickets to Zabrejnee.
“Zabrejnee?,” she asks. “Nyet, Zabrejnee. “ (no such thing, she laughs).
“Da!,” I emphatically emphasize. “Zabrejnee!!” (Russians often knowingly say they don’t
understand us when they really do).
She says, “Prebrejnee?”
“Mojet bweet,” (maybe) I reconsider.
Long story short, there isn’t a marshutka 392 that comes to the bus station and everyone
we ask gives us a different story of how to find it. So we decide to buy bus tickets to Samara
which passes by Prebrejnee, and the bus driver will drop us off on the highway. Just a side
note, whenever we would call and ask for help from the members, who thankfully speak a
little English, they didn’t know how to help us because they have a car and never use public
transportation. So when the bus driver drops us off on the highway, he points us in the
direction of Prebrejnee. We took pictures (see below) because we thought we had landed
somewhere in Mexico. We were standing by an old abandoned cement structure out in the
middle of nowhere that was full of empty bottles and food wrappers. Luckily, we only had to
wait for a few minutes for Brother Izmalkov to pick us up and take us to his home. Prebrejnee
is a small town of about 13,000 people. It appeared that many people live in single family
homes which is unusual for most other areas we’ve seen. The Izmalkov’s contracted for their
home to be built, and it is very nice. They even have their own private sauna built in the
backyard. They prepared a wonderful lunch for us, and then we were treated to a violin solo
by their ten-year old daughter, as well as a vocal solo she has mimicked in English…"near, far,
wherever you are”…I wish I had a video of it. It was sooo cute! They have two other daughters who are very well mannered and friendly. Brother and Sister Izmalkov have been members of
the church for about twelve years and are stalwart members of their branch.
Word got out that we had been out to visit the Izmalkov’s and so another family who lives in a
neighboring village wanted us to come out and see them, too. Not to disappoint, we made an
appointment to go for Family Home Evening on a Monday night. This family is the mom and
her 14-year old son, her daughter and husband, and her mom and stepdad who live nearby.
The daughter served a mission in England several years ago and still speaks very well so she had
a busy night serving the food and trying to do the translating. We speak in Russian as much
as we can, but it is never enough. This family has a beautiful log cabin on property down by
the Volga River. They pump water from their own well and have a huge garden of fruit trees,
vegetables and fruits. We had to run off in a hurry to catch the bus home (which we figured out
how to do this time) and so we didn’t get a chance to take pictures of their home so they gave
us some photos they already had printed. To look at their home, you’d think it was something
out of a fairy tale. We are hoping to go back again in the late summer, early fall, and will take
pictures then. It is humbling to see these two families who travel a great distance to attend
church.
1 - On the way to Prebrejnee
2 - On the way to Prebrejnee
3 - Anastia Izmalkov
4 - Our awesome district/Malloy, Hughes, Glad, Ceimers, Wiseman, Hale, Semyonova, Braginyets5 - Komsomolski
6 - Bus stop in Prebrejnee
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