It is raining pretty hard tonight so we are home planning our next Resiliency Training lesson. Keith is printing out our handouts as I type.  We have 7 sisters that we are teaching.  They are learning the skills they need to carry on while their husbands are deployed and helping themselves and their children stay focused on the gospel and sharing gospel topics their husbands when then can with. Most of them are pretty strong but they enjoy meeting with each other and learning the things others are doing to cope with their husbands being gone and taking care of their children all alone etc.  They have been enjoying the lessons and say they appreciate them.

We hung up a map of the Fort Bragg base on our kitchen wall so that we can find the houses of those who need our help and also those that are less active.  The base is huge so we need a map to find everyone.  The tan colored spots on the map represent different housing areas. Each area has hundreds of apartments.  It is a job finding everyone. That is just the base, not the town of Fayetteville where we also need to find people or the Cameron Ward area where we are going on Sunday : )

Today was Stake Conference and Elders Quentin L. Cook and Seventy Alvin Meredith were here.  They sustained a new Stake Presidency and gave wonderful, amazing talks that we loved.  The saints stared arriving by 7:00 AM and it didn't start until 10:00.  Since we were ready we went at 7:45 and barely got a seat in the Chapel.  We are still trying to learn everything... way around the town and Fort Bragg...it is the biggest military fort in the world if what Keith saw on google is correct. I think someone said over 10,000 people work or on the base.  Most or our direction came at the MTC Military Relations Training.  There really isn't a lot of guidance when we get here.  They expect that we have enough church and life experience under our belts to just get going.  Luckily the couple we are replacing were still here and have helped us this past week.  But we will be on our own as of Wednesday.  Of course we go to Ward Councils and other meetings but we just choose what, where and how to serve. The first several days felt strange because we didn't do much but go to meetings and YSA FHE, one Night RS Meeting and YSA Institute, and one Resiliency class training.  Well I guess that sounds busy and it was, but it wasn't like finding someone new to work with.  Yesterday we did do some phone calling and texting trying to find someone or to invite to Stake Conference.  We got one response. Which made us feel good but we don't know if the Sister showed or not because we didn't even know what she looked like and it was too crowded.  Another mother called to say her daughter had been transferred to a base in Hawaii.  So I guess we found out a few things we can report to our Bishop. 

We have had some fun using lots of name associations to try to remember street names and people.  It is helping and making us laugh. There are street names of a couple of g

randkids, people with same name of rhyming names to our ward at home, and a song or two that we use to remember someone's name. Tomorrow we will be trying to find about 8 people on the ward list who no one knows.  Since they didn't answer their phones or texts we will try their addresses. That's 8 in one ward but another ward has about 50 names that the RS pres doesn't know.  And that is just 2 wards. There's 4 wards and 3 branches and the area of the Stake is HUGE.  So far we have only met the 2 Bishops and one Branch President.  Now two of the bishops in the stake were sustained into the new Stake Presidency and the Branch President we met is moving.  LOTS TO DO