Well, it is official. There will be a L'viv Mission created on July 1st if I am not mistaken. From the information I have so far, all the Ukrainian speaking missionaries in the current Kyiv Mission will become part of the L'viv mission, and the Russian speakers will stay in the Kyiv Mission. It is very exciting. At our zone conference in L'viv this past weekend we talked quite a bit about what this means for Western Ukraine. As you are aware our mission covers a very large area of space and has a mind boggling amount of missionaries. Plus with the new influx of missionaries we will only be getting bigger. It has been hard for the smaller branches and areas in the west to get as much attention and focus that they have needed simply because of the limitations of having such a big mission. The work in the soon to be L'viv mission will be able to pick up at a much faster pace.

I am very glad Brother Nelson got my letter and that he enjoyed it! Please send him my thanks for the language learning advice, it is really helping me make my study more effective.

You will never guess what I got to do this week!!!!!!! If you guessed that I got to play basketball and do missionary work at the same time then you guessed right! In Uzhhorod there is a very nice Olympic sports complex where we got invited to play at (since we were Americans and sometimes people assume Americans are good at basketball, in this case they were right). When we showed up to play we found out that we would be playing the second ranked 20 year old team in all of Ukraine. They are from Uzhhorod and they practice here for their tournaments. They were pretty good, but in the end it was a tie. We for sure held our own, the only hard part was we were all rusty and have not ran that hard in months. Not to mention we had no game plan, we just went in there and played playground ball. The next day we all woke up and were so sore. It hurt to walk around town haha! I feel like a pansy. We, being the four missionaries, joked around saying that we might have a hard time wining a race up and down the court but if anyone wanted to take us on in a speed walking or stair climbing contest they better watch out because that's what we do all day every day! Oh well, they invited us back so we are going to go play again tonight. I feel pretty well rested and way excited to play. I am even going to rock my shooting sleeve for the people of Uzhhorod.

We had a baptism this week at the same complex that we were able to play basketball at. We elected not to have a baptism in the river, though it would be very cool, it would have been way to cold and to make things worse the river is too shallow for a baptism. It went very well. My companion baptized him and on Sunday I gave him the gift of the Holy Ghost.

This week has been great! I love you all so much and I am excited to write you again next week!

Love,

Elder Hadfield