E-mail dated 10/13/08

Degen family:

Wow snow!! I hope your ready for winter. As for me I will be enjoying the rain for another month or so. October is actually the month of thunder and lightning. HOLY COW can it thunder here. I swear world war three had broken out and every country had decided to attack Sierra Leone (I'm not quite sure why they would). Man it was loud. Yesterday we had a huge storm coming in and Elder Kpodi and I did not want to be caught in it so we began to go back to the apartment early. We didn't quite make it so we began to run to not get to soaked. That is actually a common sight with us in the rainy season.

As for the spiritual aspect of it: We had 2 more baptized on Saturday. Marie Kargbo and Elizabeth Wilkinson. I actually performed the baptisms again and it went very well. They both showed up to church on Sunday and both recieved the Holy Ghost.

Oh another thing we did this week. we had a zone service project at the Cemetery. first of all cemetery's here in Africa are not as nice as cemetery's in Utah. This country has alot of problems with the living to worry about so the dead are kind of in a mess. 12 missionaries cleaned one corner of the cemetery for four hours. 8 of them had cutlasses (they look exactly like swords) and they were cutting down all the green so they could see the gravestones. I was stuck pulling weeds for four hours around the headstones. It was actually fun and it looked so much better. It was just a funny sight to see 8 missionaries with swords attacking anything green in front of them.

Kalli I'm pretty sure Halloween isn't celebrated over here. thanksgiving is not either. but I will try and do something to celebrate them anyway. I hear alot about American Politics over here. For some reason they would rather talk about american politics than sierra leone politics. Don't ask me why.

Thank you for the information about my friends. I don't really hear from anyone but family. So Grady got his call. Sweet. I do hear from CJ as Lisa forwards me his emails. And we both write each other. Sonja as well. Thank you for all the information and I hope you have a great week.

Elder Degen