This week flew by so fast! Elder Hansen and I have been able to work hard in our area and have found a lot of people that we are now teaching. We met a man named drake and he is now on date for baptism! He has kept the commitments we have given him and he is progressing steadily. 

The branch president's daughter here in Sanders just got back from her mission and gave her returning talk. A lot of people came, maybe 110 or so. The church was super packed! There was a potluck afterwards, too. 

Well, my email time is up. Thanks for reading my email.

 We visited a member who owns a pet camel. It smells weird but is friendly to visitors and likes to be petted.

(Snippets from our Facebook chatting)

Well, I got elder Hansen into playing Magic and we have been playing that a lot.

Food's pretty normal here. I had homemade Chinese food from Elder Hansen that was really good.

It was the delicious kind. I thought I told you that I like Chinese food now! Panda Express is really good stuff. Did I ever tell you about eating sheep stomach? It was baked on a pan and kinda tasted like weirdly textured sausage. They warned me and I ate it anyway.

We just gave the truck a major washing. Hoping to win the truck competition.

 CTR ring in Navajo

Mom sends him Chick-fil-A sauce packets in most of his packages.

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I still don't know too much about the sand. I was told from a member here that they don't only mine sand, but they mine some special kind of clay too. It is used for some beauty products. The clay rests above the sand in the underground areas where they mine it. The same member told me that they have found some dinosaur fossils while mining, and more recently they found a batch fossilized dinosaur eggs. I thought that was pretty neat.

I still chop some wood, yes. Now that the warmer weather is coming along, the wood chopping season will probably be done and over with for a while.

Service is definitely a great teaching opportunity. I have been in more than a few situations where I got to do service for someone and they let us start coming over and teach them.

It is a gift from God to be happy, and it is our choice to take that gift of happiness or set it aside to be miserable. In spite of challenges, an important life lesson to learn is to make the choice to be happy, which is something that I have been practicing just about my whole mission. It helps to see the good in every situation.

Enjoy the snow while you can, I have been missing it basically my whole mission!

I talked with the mission president about phone calls, and he said that I should call every other week, so I decided to take his advice and do so. On occasion I might switch it up a bit, but this is my plan.

This week flew by like none other! The work has been progressing wonderfully and my new companion is the best. 

We have met three people that we started teaching. One of them, Drake, shows a lot of promise. His mother is a member who hasn't been to church in a while, and we were able to help her understand the importance of the gospel and commit her to attend church. We will see if she comes next week with Drake.

We had a great stake conference over the weekend! Elder Robert C. Gay of the 70 and Elder Douglas of the 70 were there. They announced the new stake presidency, and I was very surprised to hear that President Pearce was called as the 2nd counselor in the stake presidency! He is a member here in Sanders that we work with very often. He shared his testimony along with the new presidency and then we got to hear from the two members of the 70. They were very good talks.

I'm all out of email time, but thanks for reading my email!

View of Sanders

Rainy day crossing a bridge

A semi truck full of Tesla cars

Walking in the mud

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Elder Hansen is a very good missionary who likes to work hard and have fun at the same time!

The teaching is really good. Elder Hansen really knows how to speak boldly and effectively in lessons! He is the driver.

I can't wait to get home and play dad at ping-pong. While I was in Steamboat, I learned how to put spin on the ball and I really practiced that a lot.

One of my favorite scriptures now is Alma 26:27. It says in it that we should "bear with patience [our] afflictions, and I [The Lord] will give unto you success." Patience is a great quality. To me, this scripture is saying that the more patient we are when we face trials, the more success we will have in life.

 I don't do much in church anymore, but I have played the piano once, blessed the sacrament once and gave a talk. 

We don't do splits anymore, it's against mission policy. Instead, we just take someone with us to go and teach. We haven't done it too much, but there's a lot more potential of it happening while we are in a normal companionship instead of a trio. women that live alone tends to happen a lot where we are.

With Elder White, wearing t-shirts made from a member.

Transfer are here and I'm staying! But my two companions will be leaving me. Elder Linney is going to Pinon and Elder Viola is going to Crownpoint. I am getting Elder Hansen. 

Not too much happened this week. One exciting thing though, there's a man here who just randomly started attending church and has been coming for 2 weeks in a row so far! He wants to start taking lessons and go with us to visit some people.

Other than that, this week was pretty boring. I'm excited to see my new companion, though! I am going to be working in Gallup tomorrow for a few hours with two of my old companions, Elder Stead and Elder Adams. The reason I'll be working in Gallup is that Elder Hansen will not be arriving until later in the day, so to keep me busy I have been assigned to work in Gallup for about 2 1/2 hours. It should be fun!

Thanks for reading my email, sorry to those of you who were waiting for one last week and nothing came. It's a little harder to keep up with emails now that the new policy is in place about talking with families. Hagoónee!

-Elder Dittmer 

Pictures!

-This is Elder Curtis. We met when he was serving in Window Rock and I was in Steamboat!

-One of the (famous?) Sand plants in Sanders

-I hung up my tiny axe on the wall. 

I gave it to Elder Linney, but I am going to miss that thing!

-my companions while waiting for transfer news

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We did some Facebook chatting on Pday...

Yesterday I was reading in Alma 33 ish and I came across Zenos. It talks about his life a little while he is praising God and Jesus Christ. We don't have his book, but we can discern a little bit about what his life was like and what might have happened to him from some of the passages in the Book of Mormon. It talks about Zenos being in the wilderness at one point, and it also talks about how he had enemies but the Lord "turned them to me [Zenos]." It also talks about how he "did turn to [his] house". So maybe he had some beef with his household or something. It also says he was cast out and despised by his enemies, but the Lord heard Zenos's cries and visited his enemies "with speedy destruction." On top of these few details in his life, I also found out that Zenos was the one who prophesied of 3 days of darkness and also is the one who wrote the olive tree parable in Jacob 5.

Why are you wearing a tie on P day?

We have to wear proselyting clothes in public in most cases, and I'm at the point where my pros clothes are just as comfortable as my other clothes. A year and a half of missionary service kinda makes you feel meh about changing back and forth into different clothes.

Photos from the Petrified Forest on his birthday.