E-mail dated 7/27/09

Happy 26th. Today the whole country of LIberia is celebrating thier independence day. This year makes them 162 old. Lets have a little history lesson now. Liberia was colonized by the United States during the administration of President James Monroe. The capitol city (monrovia) was named after this president. This holiday is the biggest holiday of the year for these people (which is a mystery to me because the are celebrating Independence, when I know darn well that all of them want to be in the United States anyway). I am lucky to be emailing you today because the cafe we normally go to is closed so we found this very small and very slow one.

We were able to have our baptism on Saturday. Emmanuel Jayjay has come a long way since I started teaching him. He's always had the desire to be baptized but he wasn't willing to work towards it . Slowly he started to realize that he wasn't going to be baptized until he did something. He changed his life. Before all he was thinking of was girls. Now he has asked for work off on Sundays and has a strong desire to get married in the temple. I was actually kind of surprised that he was able to make all these changes. I'm very happy for him.

You asked me a question about tracting. Yeah we don't do any of that (I mean no knocking on doors, because they don't have doors) . But we do contact as many people as we can. Society here is outside so everyone is outside almost all day. The problem is that when we contact people they don't really react, so its hard for me to contact when I know darn well that they won't act on our message. But that doesn't stop me from doing it. This week we actually had a man, that I contacted come to church. Upon finding his house we taught this man the message of the restoration. He was so humble and completely under stood why we need the priesthood. He basically told us that if he finds out this church is true then he will join. And if he joins he's got a massive family that would most likely follow him. My hopes are high.

Well I love you all. Enjoy, August is around the corner.

Elder Degen