Poltava

This city was one of our favorite places to visit. The members were happy, the missionaries were happy, and the people in the city seemed happy. For the first year and a half, the branch met at the Chess building which provided us with a large room for sacrament meting and smaller rooms for class rooms. We enjoyed zone meetings in this place because no one bothered us and it was close to our hotel. We initially stayed at the Hotel Kiev which was old but adequate. Later on, a new hotel was built down by the University and we stayed there. We also got a new rental which was constructed to look like a chapel. It really turned out nice except for the lack of heat in the winter. We had a number of different rooms and the members were very happy with the facility. There is supposed to be a chapel built very soon just in front of the rental. We always thought the missionaries had nice big apartments in Poltava. The one apartment in the center of town was really nice and roomy with a great kitchen. We actually held a zone conference in the apartment out by the police station and the apartment was big enough to accommodate all of us. You can’t talk about Poltava without talking about Golovach, a small village outside of Poltava, where a number of members resided. One family was the center of church activity in the village, Brother Valodia and Sister Nadezhda, and they made sure the missionaries had a great time when they visited Golovach. The missionaries usually spent all day Saturday in Golovach. They helped Brother Valodia plant and harvest his garden. We had a great dinner that sister Nadezhda prepared with things from the garden and things she had bottled. This was before we could not eat in members homes. I tried to pay her for the food for all of us and she got very angry at me. I was able to return the kindness by getting some Army colored garments for her husband. He worked on the railroad and she could not get his white garments clean so she asked if I could help. I called my son, and told him to go to the distribution center in Bountiful and get the garments. The one lady would not give the Army garments to him because he did not have an Army ID card. Finally, another lady interrupted her and said, “his father is a mission president and has asked for the garments – give them to him”! Sister Nadezhda wanted to pay for the garments and I just smiled and told her this was payment for the feast we had months previous. She got mad at me again. Some of our most tender moments were in this village: we held meetings, gave temple recommend interviews, gave blessings, and held the hands of one of our members who was very sick and was ready to pass on. They had the best, I mean the all time best, baptism site in Ukraine just outside of the village on the bend of a small river. We tired to get to as many baptisms as possible in this area. It was so peaceful and picturesque. We remember the story of one older lady who had been captured during WW II and had been sent to Germany as a prisoner. When the war was over she and her sister were freed by the Americans but were given to the Russians, she said the Americans were good to them but the Russains took all the gifts the Americans gave them and made them walk back to Ukraine. She cried and asked “why would they do that to us”. She said very few people survived the walk back to Ukraine. One day on our way out of Poltava, we stopped in Golovach to give temple recommend interviews to an older couple who had joined the church a year earlier. We attended his baptism in the river. The wife told about how they had prayed that morning asking that the electricity would stay on so that “President McQueen could conduct his interviews with the lights on.” The electricity often went off in the morning and she knew we were coming about nine o’clock. My wife looked up and noticed that the one light bulb in the hall was burning brightly as was the lamp in the room where I was interviewing. The wife went on to say that during the spring time they were worried that the late frost would kill all the fruit blossoms so they prayed that the Lord would “spare every other blossom”. She went on to bear testimony that they did have a good fruit crop and that the Lord indeed spared every other blossom. We were so glad we stopped and had this wonderful spiritual experience. The most interesting place to eat in Poltava was the University cafeteria. One of the companionships made friends with the lady who ran the cafeteria and the missionaries taught her how to make hamburgers and all the fixings. We had Thanksgiving at the cafeteria in November 2000 and the food was great. Turkeys were killed in Golovach and given to the cafeteria lady who proceeded to make a traditional Thanksgiving feast. Elder Callister and his wife were doing their mission tour at the time and were able to eat Thanksgiving dinner with us. Zone conferences were always a treat because the missionaries from Sumy would prepare some sort to play or production for all to observe. The play where everyone was dressed up in the armor of God outfits was particularly good. The spirit at our zone conferences in Poltava was always strong and I think it was because everyone was so happy serving in Poltava and Sumy. The missionaries in Poltava felt they were in the choicest city in the mission and the missionaries from Sumy felt they were all “Top Gun” candidates. After zone conference, we would often go to dinner at a Chinese place that served a cabbage salad with a real strong garlic sauce. The salad was huge. We liked our last hotel because the room was nice. It had air conditioning and heat and its own hot water source so they never ran out of hot water. The people were nice and actually remembered who we were from month to month. We would walk in the door and they would have our key ready. They didn’t ask us for passports or anything. It was kind of nice. The members in Poltava made the city enjoyable. They loved the missionaries and were extremely supportive. When we called a member to be the branch president, he accepted the calling and did a wonderful job from the very start. In fact, he is still doing well. The church in Poltava is in very good hands because of the caliber of members who attend church. We would drive from Kharkov to Poltava, a two hour drive, and then stay there for a couple of days and then drive on to Dneper or Donetsk. It took three hours to get to Dneper and seven to get to Donetsk from Poltava. The drive to Dneper was really a pretty drive through little villages and over a few rivers. In the winter time, the road could get very icy and at times it was hard to see where the roadside ended because there was so much snow. We would love to build our Dacha on the bend of the river in Golovach. The air is clean, the river clear, the sky blue, the soil dark and deep, and the memories good – Oh, so good.