Today has been a interesting day, one where a single incident changes the entire day. We had on our scheduled this morning our District Development Meeting (DDM). We arrived at the church early so Sister Gowans could practice the piano for a while. While she did so Elder Gowans received a phone call from the mission office asking him to call a concerned mother out in Idaho. He did so and found her to be the mother of one of the soldiers who he had been trying to find. Apparently, this soldier had hurt his knee and while mending he came down with pneumonia. He had been admitted to the hospital on Sunday and was doing better and was due to be released that day. After our DDM, we drove up to the hospital, taking two other missionaries with us. We found our troop still in his room and immediately struck up a conversation with him to help us all get to know each other a little bit. After a few minutes of conversation we administered to him and then left him. We told him we would hope to see him on Saturday when we came up to the barracks for our weekly visit time.

After our visit with him we dashed up to the Doctor's Hospital to visit our new friend who had the flesh eating virus in his arm. We found him to be in great spirits; his operation to place the cadaver skin on his arm had been successful; now he was waiting for the operation to actually graft his own skin in place of the cadaver skin.

Next we took our two Elders to the Waffle House for some lunch after which we went back to our apartment to continue our preparations for Institute. We left the apartment for our first appointment, but found no one at home! Our second missed appointment in the week. We decided to go by the home who had forgotten us on Sunday, but once again, no one was home; only the dog. We decided to go by another home where the dad had recently had a back and neck operation and whose family we had helped while he was TDY. We found him in good spirits and had a nice visit with them. We next drove up to Martinez and visited our new Ward Mission Leader and his wife. We had a real nice visit with them and talked about his calling and gave him some thoughts, ideas and scriptures that would be of help to him. We will probably be going up to his home every Friday for a correlation meeting.  It has been a very nice day. We finally got the Institute lesson all planned out.