HBD Captain Rick:

This week has been awesome. I've kinda settled into my new area. Petersburg is complete opposite from Fishhook. The missionary work here is very slow. The past few days have pretty much just been visiting some members then walking around downtown all day. Everyone here knows who the missionaries are, which makes things a little hard. It only takes a week to tract out the entire area. The branch here is super small but they are all awesome.

We sang happy birthday to Captain Rick from season four on Deadliest Catch. He's currently out in Dutch Harbor fishing. I met his manager, whose a member here. He invited us to call and sing to him bc no one is out where they are. Pretty much everyone in Petersburg are huge fishers with million dollar boats.

The weather here is killer. It dumped a bunch of snow then its been raining ever since so everything is icy. It's super scary driving here.

Elder Dunn is my new companion. He's pretty sweet. He's kinda just like me. We're both pretty chill.

Anyway I don't have a lot to talk about this week, but I'll write more next time. And I'll get some photos once it stops raining.

Love and miss you all,

Elder Ogden

Dawn's B-Day & Baptism celebration dinner 

with the Willardson's and Christensen's! 

(Dawn is wearing the yellow sweater, with her family to her left)

            
                    Photo from the plane ride to Petersburg Island

"Golf" Street

New Area: Petersburg and Wrangell

This week has been amazing. Thank you all so much for the birthday wishes. It was an amazing day. Dawn was baptized and confirmed a member. Our missionary schedule has changed. We got transfer calls!

On Saturday Dawn was baptized. It was the most amazing thing ever. So many people were there to witness her baptism but not everyone could view it. The entire baptismal font room was filled. There were even people standing in the hall just to hear the ordinance. It truly was my best birthday. Dawn was then confirmed a member and received the gift of the Holy Ghost the following day. On Sunday we got to eat dinner with Dawn and her family, the Willardson's, and the Christensen's. The Willardson's were so kind to have us all over. It was in celebration of Dawn, her baptism, and her birthday since it was on the 8th. The entire thing was to die for. Food was fantastic. The Willardson's and Christensen's are the best for helping Dawn and her family be comfortable with this big transition in there lives. Now Dawn's family is considering learning more about the church and investigating.

We received a major switch up in our schedule as missionaries. I believe it is world wide. We used to have a set and rigid structure for our morning and evening schedules. Now we are told the fundamental objectives or things we need to accomplish and are allowed to do things the way we like, tailored to our own needs. We've only been doing it for a couple of days now, but it has been awesome. It definitely helps me get out of bed were as before I was too tired to workout right away. 

Now for the really exciting stuff. Transfer calls! We got them early Saturday morning. I found out I will unfortunately be leaving Fishhook after a short six months. It has been amazing serving there but it's time to move on. I will now be serving with Elder Dunn on Petersburg Island! So cool. We cover Petersburg and Wrangell. I flew down this morning and it has been absolutely gorgeous.

 Love and miss you all

 Elder Ogden


Bennett didn't include any photos in his email, so I added some of his new area where he will be serving:

"Thank you, you came here":

This week was really fun and amazing. We visited a graveyard where apparently the graves randomly catch on fire. I played squash ball for the first time. Elder Hoyer and I have been really trying to do street contacting and it actually worked out amazingly. Dawn, an investigator, is getting baptized this coming week.

Last P-day Elder Hoyer and I went to see a graveyard with some other elders. It was pretty interesting. Apparently the graves catch on fire randomly and that's what makes them famous. The sign in front is pretty neat. It says "Chin'an, Gu Ninyu" which stands for "thank you, you came here." We also went and played squash ball with the rest of our zone. There's a member in our stake that has their own court and was kind enough to let us come over. It was really weird playing squash for the first time. I thought it would be a lot like racquetball but it's not. The ball doesn't bounce nearly as much. It's a lot harder to play than it looks.

We've been trying to do a lot of street contacting this past week. It's been really hard. Especially since there's no place in our area where we can simply walk around and talk to people so we often times just try in downtown Palmer. Even then it's hard finding people just walking around because it's cold and everyone drives everywhere. But the other day we found THE ONE. We we're walking around and saw a man standing by himself smoking a cigarette in front of a bar. Well the first thought we had was he's probably not interested considering the situation but we immediately realized we needed to talk to him. We crossed the street and began introducing ourselves. In doing so he threw his cigarette on the ground and had a desire to hear what we had to say. We said a prayer with him as well as taught him the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ in addition to giving him a Book Of Mormon telling him a little about it. It was amazing talking to him because he was literally one of the few if not the only person outside at that very moment in our site. What was even more amazing is that he actually had a desire to clean up his life. He wanted to change his life and make it inline with what God would want. Elder Hoyer and I are were thrilled to teach him as we have been praying for more people to teach. Unfortunately he'll only be in town for one more week as he heads back to Kotzebue once he finishes his classes down here. Hopefully he finds the missionaries up there.

Dawn's baptism is coming up this next week. This is very exciting especially since it's something we all have been looking forward to for four months now. It should be an amazing experience. It will be the day before her birthday and the day of my birthday. I can't wait to see her become a member. We've been teaching her for close to five months now.

Chin'an, Gu Ninyu

Elder Ogden

Graveyard 

                        

Member's house who really likes to Hunt!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

This week was a hoot and a holler. I got to go on exchanges for three days. Our investigator gave me an awesome present. We had Christmas. Got to FaceTime the family.

I got to go on exchanges with Elder Janes for three days while Elder Hoyer and Elder Taylor went to Valdez to check up on those missionaries. It was really crazy looking after two areas. Elder Janes and I stayed busy 24/7.

There's this awesome neighborhood all lit up with lights. The best part is that it's tuned into a radio station so the lights are set up to match certain notes on different songs. Everyone goes to it pretty much every week so we decided to stop by. I took a video. I'll attach it below.

We taught Dawn again. This time her family was there as well. They actually came to church on Christmas which is a huge step for them. Dawn has been hoping and working with them trying to get her kids involved which will then lead to her husband getting baptized. She's amazing. She hopes her husband gets baptized soon that way he can baptize his daughter. The family still has a ways to go so it won't be anytime soon but it's still incredible seeing the progress they are making. Dawn actually got me a gift since I've been here so long and have taught her everything. She gave me a silver token with my name and the Ten Commandments engraven on it. It's amazing. The reason why she put the Ten Commandments on there is bc when we taught her the Ten Commandments the spirit was so strong. The lesson went on for over two hours, and at the end we all just started crying. It was weird but awesome. By far one of the best experiences on my mission.

We went to our first counselor in the mission presidency's house for Christmas Eve. We went as a zone since he lives really close. It's was pretty fun. He's been holding on to our presents for the past two weeks so the best part was actually getting the presents we should have had earlier.

 Facetiming the family was fun.

 Happy New Years

                              

Christmas gift from investigator Dawn

                                 

                               Facetiming with Bennett!                             

 

Every year our family gets matching PJ's

for all the cousins. So I sent matching 

jammies for Bennett and Elder Hoyer!

All he needs for Christmas is a Flowbee!

Not a whole lot has happened this weeek. The only exciting thing is that we had Zone Conference. Elder Hoyer and I have been struggling to find effective work recently. We have plenty of stuff to do but nothing really effective. That's been a bummer.

I tried cutting my hair again. It didn't work out too well. I started out by doing the sides and back with a number four (attachment on the hair cutter) and thought it looked good. I started to feel a bit more confident and decided I could do the top. I grabbed the biggest size I could see and just went straight down the middle up top. I looked in the mirror and said "oh fetch!" I guess the biggest size was a five and I had no clue as to how to clean it up and make it even so my hair has been looking a bit spotty these past few days.

We had the Valdez Elders come stay with us for Zone Conference. They spent two nights. It was super fun having them stay. It was Elder Stoddard and his companion. Elder Stoddard and I came out together and became pretty good friends. We pretty much stayed up all night talking. Zone Conference was pretty fun as well. I was dead tired after sitting in the same room all day.

Happy Holidays

Here's a photo of the Palmer Zone. Idk why my forehead is so shiny but whatever it is here it is.

Baby isn't cold outside...and inside!

Hey. This week has been solid. The heat in our apartment went out again. It's so cold my eyelashes keep freezing together. The Palmer Stake put on this nativity show for all of Palmer and Wasilla. Church was only 45 mins long. The way it's supposed to be.

This week our apartment's heat has been off. It was absolutely freezing. It was the worse feeling. We would come home after a long day in the cold and have no source of heat. We literally ran a little space heater in the bedroom 24/7. We did all our planning, exercises, studying, eating, etc in the bedroom. The only time we would leave the room was to shower and get ready for the day. Even then we didn't spend a whole lot of time in the actual apartment. It got to the point where I cold see my breathe in the apartment. To our joy our landlord responded and helped get the heat running again. We are now back into the swing of things as usual.

Its been getting really cold up here. As I always write about. But for some reason our mission president has really been pushing getting outside and talking to people on the streets. It's really funny because there's literally no one outside so it makes it really difficult to accomplish anything. It really only works for the missionaries down in Anchorage. Just the other day we were walking in the streets looking for people and my eyelashes would get stuck together. It got so cold they were freezing together as I blinked. It's crazy. The worse part is everyone says this is warm for this time of year. 

The Palmer stake has an annual nativity show. They get everyone from the community to bring nativities from all over the world, big and small, traditional and crazy. It was awesome. They also have live nativities with kids. It was unbeleiveable to see every room in the church building filled with hundreds of nativities. It was absolutely amazing. Everyone from Palmer and Wasilla as well as people from Anchorage come up to see it. It goes on Saturday and Sunday so our church services were shorter. We only had sacrament meeting for 45 minutes. That was neat.

Anyways hopefully it gets warmer or snows more. One of the two.

Elder Ogden

We have to dress all the up for the outside

Bennett's doing all the talking:

This week has been pretty neat. Elder Hoyer is officially my new companion. We attended a surprise party for this random old man. We had the Ward Christmas party. It's finally cold outside.

Elder Hoyer is really different from Elder Agad and Elder Bacon. That's for sure. Elder Hoyer isn't very social. He likes to stay quiet. It forces me to do all the talking, which is interesting. It's definitely going to be an interesting transfer serving with him. He's been telling me a lot of stories how he reports people to president. There's a good number of Elders in this mission who don't really like him for that reason so I'm kinda seeing this transfer as a test from president. Jk. But for real it probably is. 

On Saturday we got this text from Linda inviting us to her 89 year-old fathers surprise birthday party. Linda is a lady we accidentally visited. For some reason when we showed up at her door we were planning on meeting Alvin, a potential investigator who apparently doesn't live there. Linda is super Jewish. she goes to Jerusalem at least once a year and plans on moving there. The one time we met her she talked for hours. Anyways she invited us to this surprise party so we decided to go. When we showed up there was only five other people, a pastor and his wife, Linda, and three random old ladies. It was odd. The only gift we found that we could give was a physical copy of 17 Miracles. Hopefully the old man watches it. The pastor gave us a weird look when he saw what it was. Lol.

We had the ward Christmas party on Saturday. That was super fun seeing everyone at the church. It was amazing seeing our investigators being involved with the church. It's getting cold here. That's for sure. It dumped just the other day leaving a bunch of snow. I had to pull out the sorrels.

Happy holidays
Elder Ogden