E-mail dated 4/12/10

This past week was very busy for Elder Bird and I. Wow! Well to start things off I'll just give a summary of my weeks events. I used to have pretty normal weeks with nothing much out of the ordinary happening but this past week was anything but ordinary. On Wednesday we had to move the missionaries out of the Freetown apartment (the apartment where I started my mission) because the landlord wanted a big increase in rent. We spent the whole day transporting furniture and bags and anything else in the apartment to where it needed to go. Now we still don't have another apartment for these four elders so we are squeezing them into two different apartments. Two of them are moving into our apartment, so we had to make alot of adjustments to our apartment to make it capable of accomodating four elders instead of two. That took the whole day.

On Thursday we had a Zone Conference in Freetown and on Friday we had a Zone Conference in Bo. We had more of a testimony meeting rather than actual instructions because of 3 Zone Conferences scheduled this week. We watched Bruce R. McConkies final testimony he gave in General Conference right before he passed away. That started our testimony meeting. It is pretty good.

On Saturday we drove to Monrovia, which took up most of the day. We actually listened to some of the conference talks from this last conference on the car ride over here to Liberia. Sister Squires and us cheated by downloading them and burning them on CD's. I think I could listen to Elder Holland speak all day long. He is pretty good.

Now I'm in Liberia and for P-day today we helped the Paynesville apartment clean their apartment just in case Elder Golden wants to inspect apartments when he visits. Elder Albright (my MTC mate) taught and helped all of the missionaries in Paynesville and Congo Town make Pizza's. His family owns a pizza place in Shelly, Idaho and lets just say that the pizza was amazing. I'll definitely have to go to shelly this summer and see how the big boy stuff is made. It is pretty good.

I don't even know what a "leave of absence" is. I was told by the scholarship office that everything was good and that I didn't have to do anything else. Please just do your best. I don't think I'm a senior in college, maybe just by the amount of credits I have. I think I should be a sophomore, but i don't think it really matters.

Have a great week.

Elder Degen

Rice is Life

Brother Seawright: My man, you are a grandfather. Elder Naeata is currently training his first pekin. Remember Suliaman Milton from Congo Cross. Yep thats who he is training. Your speed record to Bo was broken this last week. The road is completely finished now and president flew thier in 2 hours and 45 minutes on Friday. Elder Ogoloma told me that Annie came to church for the first time in two months yesterday. Things seem to be turning around now. Thanks for the email.