April 4 journal

Dear Family and Friends,
How the time flies! We are enjoying being in our apartment, although Mom is still moving things around and getting everything more to her liking. We have been pretty busy with stuff, so haven’t had time to spend as much time “moving in” as we would like. I’m not sure what’s keeping us so busy, but it seems like we just get started and something comes up and we’re gone for several hours.
We started teaching two new families this last week, both young couples with two or three kids. As is normal here, they’re not married to each other, but have been living together for several years. Then they start having marital problems and look for solutions. We are happy to help! We taught one couple the first discussion last week, and are going to teach them the second one tonight. The other couple we have met with twice, and will teach them again tomorrow night. We’ll probably review the 1st discussion, since the “wife” wasn’t there the first night. She was really friendly last time, though. We invited them to general conference Sunday, but they didn’t come. One of our families that we have been working with for a few weeks did come to the Sunday morning session, stayed for the luncheon afterwards, then left before the second session. We’ll meet with them again on Wednesday, so will see how they liked it. They are the ones we challenged to get married and begin living the word of wisdom a couple of weeks ago. When we met with them on Saturday night after conference, they still weren’t ready to get married yet (They’ve only been together for 22 years), and haven’t quit smoking yet. But they’re still learning, and hopefully soon their hearts will be touched and they will be ready to make changes. We taught them about faith in Christ again this last week, and talked about how important it is for us to form a personal relationship with our Heavenly Father and our Savior. They seemed very receptive to it. The Gospel is really a giant step for someone with little religious background, but the potential is so great!
We started teaching a lady from Nigeria on Friday, she runs a day-care center here in town. She seems very receptive, but when we went to teach her she had a visitor from Germany that sat in on the lesson. He was older, about our age, but very negative. He stressed that he doesn’t believe in God, that there is no such person as Jesus Christ, and that all religion is a waste of time. We tried to tell him of our beliefs, but he said he didn’t want to hear it, and that religion is just a crutch, and that he didn’t want to hear our message. But he didn’t leave. We gave what message we could to Lillian and made an appointment to teach her again this weekend, but don’t know what kind of reception we’ll have. Guess we’ll see this Saturday.
We are going to Skagway on Thursday to meet with a girl named Brandy who had the missionary lessons last summer, but her parents wouldn’t let her get baptized until she turned 18, which was in February. She wants to get baptized, so we’re going to go over and review the discussions and the baptismal interview questions to see if she’s ready. If she is, we’ll set a baptismal date and initiate the interview process and set up a program. I visited with her on the phone last night, and she seems really sharp and excited that we called. I talked to her branch mission leader a couple of times, but they don’t seem to know what the process is, so we’ll meet with him Thursday too. It’s a three-hour drive to Skagway, but we’re ready for a road-trip. There is still quite a bit of snow, but the weather has warmed up into the high 30’s and lower 40s, so it’s starting to melt and we’re beginning to see some bare ground here and there. It is going to be just beautiful when the snow melts and all of the deciduous trees begin to leaf out and the wildflowers bloom. It’s staying light until after 9:00 p.m. now, so will drive back Thursday night.
It’s fun to be here in the spring (late winter?). The ice on the Yukon is beginning to break up and there are starting to be huge chunks of ice beginning to form ice dams on the river. Mom took some pictures this morning, but I don’t have them downloaded yet. Some of the ice is a foot thick, slabs 15’ across sticking up out of the water with whirlpools swirling around them. Last Friday on the way home from Seminary (I got to teach Friday and Monday while the regular teacher was out of town) we saw a bald eagle fishing from the ice at the edge of the river right here in town. It was as big as a large turkey! We watched it for awhile from just across the river and it didn’t seem to care. We mentioned it to someone after conference on Saturday and people said, “Yeah, we see them all the time.” Well, we thought it was cool! :-} It is really nice to be able to go outside without long-johns on and two pairs of socks. When we’re going to be out for awhile we still dress warmer, because it’s pretty windy most of the time and even though it’s in the 30s it doesn’t take long to cool off with the wind chill. We are liking the extra sunlight, though. It gets light about 6:00 a.m., and stays late longer every day. The day stays lighter for about 10 minutes more each day, and you can see the difference from the beginning of the week to the end of the week. I guess it has to do that if it’s going to stay light all night within another month or two.
I think the local townspeople are enjoying the warmer weather and extra light too. When we go to town there are lots of people out walking and moving about, and a lot more traffic on the streets. Whitehorse is a fairly large town of about 30,000 people, but feels like a small town until people get out and start moving about. There is a lot of dust in the air from all of the dirt they put on the icy roads all winter, and that doesn’t help my allergies much. We’ve had to wash our car every two or three days because it gets so dirty from the mud and the water running down the roads we can hardly tell what color it’s supposed to be! They have a car wash here like the ones we used to use years ago, where you put in a quarter for 5 minutes spray. Except here they charge a dollar for one minute. Usually takes about $4 just to wash off the main layer of mud and dirt. We’ll do the extra special zippy waxie wash when the water stops running across all of the roads and the dust has time to settle. We wouldn’t mind a good rainstorm to wash everything off, but guess that doesn’t come for awhile yet. Still comes down as snow when it storms, though it doesn’t stay as long as it used to.
It was really great to watch conference! We got to watch it all except for Pres. Eyring’s talk on Saturday morning. We had made arrangements to watch one of our contacts play in his little-league hockey tournament, and the Saturday morning game is the only one that wasn’t during a full session of conference. It’s the first time Mom has seen a real ice hockey game, and it was pretty exciting, even though our team lost 12 to 1. Hockey is really a fast-moving game, and it’s really rough and physical. They won their game on Saturday night, lost Sunday morning, and played again yesterday afternoon. I don’t know how they did in that one yet, but they were behind by one point in the second period. Last year in October we missed most of conference because we were on the road to Troys in Texas and couldn’t get it on the radio. We read it in the Ensign, but somehow it’s just not the same! I can hardly wait for next month’s Ensign to come, as I want to read each of the talks again after having heard them. There is so much wonderful information that I just couldn’t absorb it that fast! How blessed we are to be able to listen to modern-day prophets and apostles! Maybe it’s just that we’re more in tune by the nature of where we are and what we’re doing. If so, I hope to be more in tune for the rest of my life. We watched it at the church, since it’s not televised on any station here, but it was much easier to stay awake, and we had a “linger-longer” luncheon between sessions on both Saturday and Sunday, which gave us a great chance to visit and talk about the talks. After the priesthood session we guys had apple pie and ice cream. Since there were only about 10 who showed up, there was plenty to go around!
Well, I guess there isn’t much more to report, except that we are enjoying our experience. We are making a lot of great new friends, and it’s fun to be in a small branch with all of its struggles and challenges. We just studied section 121 of the Doctrine and Covenants where it says, “…These things shall give the experience, and shall be for thy good.” We’re getting lots of really good experience! It’s fun to be able to teach the gospel, but hard when people choose not to live it because it’s difficult, and we can see the joys and blessings in their lives that they are forfeiting because of those decisions. I’m sure our Father in Heaven feels the same way as he sees us make unwise decisions that rob us of the blessings associated with those laws upon which those blessings are predicated.
I hope you are all well, and that you had the opportunity to participate in conference. We love you, and miss you, and think of you often. We love to hear from you, and pray that you will feel the blessings of our Father in Heaven in your lives daily.
Love, Elder and Sister Powell (Mom and Dad).