Russian Institute- Latvian Relief Society

Elder and Sister Davis were assigned to a Latvian speaking branch of the church but we often work with Russian speakers and it can be difficult to communicate with them.  There are a few words we have managed to learn though we can't spell any of them because the Russian or Cyrillic alphabet is a bit different from what we are used to. These are the words we know...

Спасибо - pronounced "spa-see-ba"- means "thank-you"-
Да - pronounced "da": means "yes"
Нет - pronounced "nyet": means "no"

Okay, we know, that vocabulary is not very impressive. So when we decided to visit the Russian Institute class in Riga, we knew we would be clueless about what was being said.

But the teacher is so good, we didn't need to hear what she was saying...we just had to watch the interaction between her and her students.  The class started with four people...

Dmitrijs & Olga

Eva & Maksims

Immediately the interaction and questions started. The teacher was enthusiastic and compelling...and asked a lot of questions.

Sister Kovalevskiys, Julia and Roman

             Roman, Aleksejs & Eva

There was a lot of scripture study going on!

                        The class ended with 7 students...

remember all the kids rely on bus schedules to get to class.

And the next day Sister Davis didn't fair much better with her language skills. She had been invited to a Latvian Relief Society activity.  The Sisters were making advent calendars out of cardstock, tissue paper and markers. Each square is a pocket that they put scriptures in to read each day to count down the days until Christmas.

With everyone chattering away in Latvian, Sister Davis didn't have a clue what was being said but it didn't matter...everyone was having a great time creating their own masterpieces.