April 21

Kaitlyn Hall's fantastic quote that Matt referenced (she was one of our Youth Speakers in Sacrament Meeting yesterday), "The Savior's arms are always outstretched to us, but if you want to be lifted up you need to hold on."

My questions:

1) Do you get many dinner invites in Steamboat?

2) Did you have any Easter Sunday plans besides church?

3) Can you look at the Mormon Channel website or are limited to lds.org?

4) We love your e-mails no matter what day they come, but curious as to why you've written on Tuesday the past couple of weeks?

5) How are Iris and Esther doing?  How old is their mother if they are in their 70's?  Hopefully they're still on target for their baptism.

6) What is the percentage of Navajo people that are LDS?

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Mom,

I sure did get the Easter tie from you guys and I did wear it yesterday! Thank you very much for sending it to me. I love the Bible Videos, I think they are done very, very well. It is so nice to watch them and see and hear how these things may have happened, because I think they have been a lot more accurate in their portrayal of biblical events in these videos than they have in any other video with scenes from the bible, whether it be produced by the Church or someone else. That is a fantastic quote from Kaitlyn! That is crazy that she is a senior, but I suppose it is also kind of crazy that it's been almost 3 years since I graduated high school.

I sure wish I could have been at Hires Big H this past week with you guys! That's too bad with Aimee and the elections! Growing up can be full of disappointments, but it's how you handle them that counts. I sure hope that she can find something fun to be involved with next year! 

Yes, we still wear suits to church and all other meetings. The weather hasn't been quite as nice all this week as it has been in some past weeks, but it is still pretty nice. Funny story, we usually use our heater at night because it still can get down to the 40s or so at night and we use it to warm up our camper in the mornings but our carbon monoxide alarm went off on Saturday morning so Elder Olsen (a senior elder who is in charge of all the RVs in the mission, there are only 7 of them and rumor has it that ours is the smallest haha) came by to check the carbon monoxide and took out the furnace to have it checked out in Gallup and turned off the propane to keep us safe. So... now we don't have any heat or hot water or stove and we've been sleeping in sleeping bags the past two nights and will continue until we get it all figured out. It's been fun, Elder Aguilera said he had never slept in a sleeping bag before or even been camping because he grew up in Chicago and Houston. There's my fun mission story of the week!

1) Not very many set dinner appointments as would be the usual in some other areas, but people feed us dinner here and there when we come for appointments or if we're just stopping by and they have cooked they'll usually offer something to us. There are a lot of very hospitable people here, because that is the traditional Navajo way.

2) Nope, not really. Today we're spending the whole day in Window Rock and even proselyting in Window Rock and then going to zone conference tomorrow in Gallup. This weekend we have Stake Conference, so there's some exciting stuff happening this week! 

3) I think we can go to Mormon Channel. But most everything on Mormon Channel is probably also in the Media Library (https://www.lds.org/media-library/video?lang=eng). We don't really have much computer time, though.

4) Because being in Steamboat we don't always have a reliable place to use the computer so we've had to work with what we could find. Last Monday the chapter house's computer lab was closed so we came back during lunch on Tuesday and emailed. Right now I'm emailing from Window Rock's employment resource center. 

5) They are hard to catch, they are always running around and are never home it seems like so hopefully we can get in with them this week! However, they did come to church yesterday which was great! Their mother is in her 90s (I think 95), but she is still doing amazingly for her 90s! A lot of the elderly Navajo people must have found the fountain of youth, because they herd sheep into their 80s and are still up and moving.

6) As far as on the reservation or tribal membership? I guess it doesn't really matter because I don't think I could answer either question. You could probably find the answer online somewhere. The biggest religions on the reservation is first LDS I believe and then second Native American Church (all night tepee meetings [just to clarify, tepees aren't Navajo, they are from the Plains Indians but Natives across the continent have NAC]). Even though the membership is high, the activity rate is very low down here.

I love you all! Tell them all "hello" back for me! 

With Love and Regards,
Elder Schaelling