G'day mates! Well, I suppose that is for the wrong country but still... Hello! To start, you will never know the frustration I deal with trying to email...oh man I tried to send my email like 40 mins ago but the computer spazzed out and froze and deleted everything, luckily I had it copied. Then it wouldn’t let me load the web then a million other things happened haha. So be thankful! Looks like you had a great trek across the beautiful prairies of the West! That is awesome! I enjoyed the pictures and the video of Adam was really cool too! That kid has some good hand-eye coordination doesnt he? Put him in the circus or something. Or just keep him playing ball, that’s probably a better idea. Glad you had a nice place to celebrate the big day, sounds like Best Western was "real nice." I look forward to seeing the Crazy Horse pics, I have seen pics of it before and it looks just amazing. That is a wonder of man I suppose. It will take so long to create but as you said when it is finished it will be a work of pure art. Mount Rushmore looks awesome, glad to see General George and Honest Abe are doing good. Haha but that is great you were able to go see all those awesome places such as Martin's Cove and Yellowstone. All the pics are just awesome! Don’t get me wrong, Ghana is beautiful, but something about those great American landscapes is just celestial. Yellowstone Lake looks sweet! On a similar note, I got a pleasantly unexpected text this week telling me I owed duty on a package. You guys are awesome haha! I got it today and unsealed that bad boy and WOW! Thank you soooo much!!! You guys are like a nice cup of Hot Chocolate on a cold day, wonderful! That was a stupid analogy, but whatever thank you sooo much! I enjoyed the pictures of everyone, looks like everyone is doing good and your treks across the great US look like they have all gone well! Thank you for the pants and belt, they are greatly appreciated. My favorite ones are falling apart a bit so I am glad to have some new boys in the lineup. Almost everything in there was something I was considering asking for in future packages, especially the man cookies [He loves EL Fudge cookies, they are shaped like an Elf so we named them man cookies J]. It just isn’t a good day without a man cookie eh? I look forward to spam n cheese sandwiches! So don’t worry about sending a package with shaving cream, I found a place that sells Gillette shaving gel so we are good on that one! Man I will enjoy some stuffing at some near point!

But let’s see, what happened this week...We had combined district meeting on Tuesday and reported on what happened at MLC, afterword we instructed the zone on recent convert retention and reactivating less actives. It went well; it was a pretty good instruction.  After that we went back to the municipal to submit letters, as they requested we write a letter to them requesting everything we needed for the service project. We waited for like 30 mins until the head honcho of waste management finally allowed us to see him at which point he informed us we were supposed to make a CC to THEM. The real letter was supposed to be written to the MAYOR of Cape Coast...all for some boots haha. So we redrafted, then the next day dropped them off at which point we were informed by some guy they don’t even have boots to loan out. So yeah, they led us on for no reason and made us draft the Articles of Confederation for no reason. Ha but luckily we were able to have the other elders in the zone locate enough boots and shovels and we had a successful service project today! We got into the mud pit full of water and shoveled all that garbage mud out along with all the plants that were in there. I got covered in mud, but we made it look good and now it should not be a problem. Lots of elders disappointed me though, they refused to do any work...That doesn’t really make sense to me, that’s kind of the reason you traveled here on a p day. They just kind of watched the rest of us work. They must be BYU fans or something haha. We worked for 3 hours though in the swamp. I had fun wielding a pick axe to get the plants dug out of the thick heavy mud though. I am tired, but feel good. I decided this week I’m gonna start running all the steps at the apt. to get into shape. That was always one of my favorite workouts during track. It is one of those things that absolutely sucks, but really works well and gets fun the more you do it. So we will see if I have enough motivation tomorrow morning to do that instead of reading Liahonas like I usually do haha... The work this week has been a bit slow, but shows great promise for the future. We had a woman come to church LAST week with the Relief
Society pres and went and visited her. We set up a time to see her, but she was absent when we went(one of the features of Cape Coast so far). But she was at church again this week. We saw her after and scheduled a time with her. She also really opened up to us. She told us her whole story and it’s sad, but shows the Lord is trying to get her into the Church. First of all, she is really smart, probably about 40. She told us that 10 years ago she went to Germany and worked for some politician there. She was very successful and rather wealthy. Well, she found out that her husband back here took a wife while she was in the land of my forefathers, leaving her. She stopped going to church after that, thinking God had abandoned her and didn’t step foot in a church from then until last week. Also, she lost all her wealth. A lot of her money went to charities and helping people. All those she helped have turned their backs on her. She is now living with the Relief Society pres. She asked us why the Lord would allow these things to happen to her. Why would He abandon her along with all the rest of those people? Well, that morning I read a personal favorite of mine, a talk by Hugh B. Brown about the Currant bush. I am sure you know it, if not go read it. I felt prompted to share it with her as it explains that sort of thing perfectly in the right perspective. The Lord is the Gardener here, at times challenges will come and we will ask Him, "Why did you do this to me when I was making such wonderful progress?" But in the end we WILL look back to Him and say, "Thank you Mr. Gardener, for loving me enough to cut me down." It really touched her heart, the Spirit edified us. She is very excited to learn about Joseph Smith and find the Lords true church. Those are her own words. I am very excited to learn with her. It will be awesome! Another wonderful thing that happened this week is one of the members gave us 5 referrals this week! This guy is just dropping them like candy on the 4th of July! What a stud! So we are going to go visit them this week and see what’s up! Hopefully we can help them and get them more interested in the Gospel! What else? Well, there has been no running water in Cape for the past 1 month, luckily for us we have big water tanks so our apt is hooked up. But as for the churches, no such luck. There were 4 baptisms that needed to happen and no water! But one chapel did so we had to get everyone there. It was sweet though, the baptisms went well. We went to support everyone. I felt bad for one woman who was being baptized though. Her priest-age son was the one doing it and he kept dropping her in the water because he couldn’t pull her out. He tried like 5 times and it wasn't happening. So somebody else had to do it. She won’t let him live that one down I’m sure haha. We also have been planning this YSA activity that will take place in November. We had a meeting and I heard a sweet idea from Elder LeBaron, we won’t be doing it but it should totally happen in the ward back home! It’s called Flight 103, IDK if you have heard of it, try googling it or something, if you can’t find it I will describe it later, but basically you have everyone in a room like they are on a plane and it crashes, so they all die. Then you are led around different rooms representing different stages in the plan of salvation. It sounds like an awesome idea for a mutual activity or something. But we are planning to play games with them and have different activities. We will be having 2 meetings this week to talk more in detail about it, but it should be sweet!

I have a quote of the week again, “Save the neck for me, Clark." Uncle Eddie Christmas Vacation.  Now that I have had chicken neck, and spine, I can agree with Eddie. It’s delicious! Nothing like the crack of spine/neck along with the taste of groundnut soup. Haha, take my word for it I guess. Thanks so much for everything though, you are the very best! I am so grateful for all you do. I am so happy to be here serving my Lord. This is His work. I have really enjoyed studying the D&C this week; it is going to be my new study source now that I am almost done with the BoM again. So many wonderful things are found in the scriptures. We are so blessed to have the word of the Lord in such abundance, the world is missing out! That’s why we are out here serving though right? Thanks again for everything! Have an awesome day! Love you!!!!!