This afternoon, we went out and visited 2 of our lonely sisters and one lonely sister to be. We had nice visits with them. Sister Voyles, Sister Sinh and Sister Mack. All these young ladies are wonderful. We are so sorry that their husbands had to deploy. We keep them in our prayers. Tonight Sister Gowans is at the Relief Society birthday celebration. So Elder Gowans is reading Jacob's book, "Flight from Blithmore".

We have had quite a day today. After lunch, we headed out to the Post to check with many of our members to make sure they knew about the ward boundary change and the time change for our meetings. Several of them had been told, but there were many who had not been told. He had several nice visits with many of the sisters who we found home; some of them had misunderstandings of the meeting times and so forth, so it was good that we had gone out to make sure everyone was informed.

In the middle of all our visits we went to AIT graduation; two of our soldiers graduated today, Brother Child and Brother Hart. Here are some photos:

Brother Child

                                                          Brother Hart and his mom

After the graduation, we took Brother Child and went to a farwell dinner for Micah Kent at the Harbor Inn seafood restaurant. Here are some photos of that event.

 The Marzolfs, he is a councilor to President Estep

 Steve Estep on the left and Micah Kent on the right; he is now out of the Army and waiting to to go to Texas.

 Brother Child and young Steve Estep

The Group.

After dinner we went to visit with Sister Murray and her family. Her husband is deployed,even though she has a great support system in family and friends, it is good to visit with her every couple of weeks.

This evening we went out to visit two of our brethren; the first was Brother Dereoun. We took to him an article from the Church News about Family History Research and gave it to him, then we all got on his computer while he tried to look up all his deceased loved ones. He really got excited about it. He also mentioned that he wanted to get started Home Teaching. After we left, we called the Elders Quorum President and left a voice mail telling him the news.

After visiting George, we went to Brother Delong's apartment. He has a big dog who really gets excited about people coming to visit. He was so excited that while chasing around the living room, he ran right in between Sister Gowans legs; needless to say, she was quite taking by surprise, as was Brother Delong. We had a real nice visit with him; we will probably go back quite regularly to visit and teach him so that his knowledge and testimony of the Gospel will grow and increase.

This afternoon, after our Red Cross service ended, we went apartment hunting to help President Holm and his office staff find a suitable apartment for new sister missionaries who will be working the Grovetown area beginning in May. We found two real nice complexes, we phoned them into the office staff and now it is in their hands.

This evening, we held our Relief Society Birthday party. The Relief Society Presidency put on a real nice evening for all members of the Branch. We were treated to Spaghetti and Meat Balls, garlic bread, salad and two kinds of deserts. It was a nice evening. Also, this was Brother Child's final event with us before returning home. We will certainly miss him.

The big news for the day is that we had a change of boundaries for several wards here in Augusta. It affected Grovetown, Augusta, Harlem and Martinez. Until today nearly half of the LDS military population attended the Grovetown ward; now with the change every family who lives on Post will attend the Augusta ward. So the population of soldiers who live off base and on base will be well divided between 5 wards. We will no longer attend the Grovetown ward. From now on, they will be meeting in the Harlem building and they will meet at 1300. We will attend the Augusta ward, they will continue to meet at 1300 until April 21st at which time they will meet at 1000 since they will be the only ward meeting in that building. So we will meet with them beginning April 21st and will only be able to meet for two hours, after which we will need to leave to get up to the Branch on Post.

This has been a great day. We began this morning meeting our Branch Presidency and Relief Society President at the Friendship Chapel at 0815. Sister Gowans and Sister Estep left to go visit the Sister Soldiers  who are attending AIT. We had a new female soldier just come in yesterday.Two weeks ago we thought we were going to have, but only one or two here, but then suddenly we have had several come in. Brothers Halford and Marzolf went to visit the soldiers that Elder Gowans assigned to them and the Elder Gowans and President Estep went to find those that he thought would be best for President Estep to visit. We have been trying to minister to those who need to be ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood, and to those who desire to be advanced to the Melchizedek Priesthood; we also are helping those who desire to obtain temple recommends and those who desire Patriarchal blessings.

There is a lot of work to be done, but we have several major stumbling blocks. One is that often the students are assigned duty during church hours. We have asked them to inform their Cadre of their church meeting times so that this scheduling conflict can be avoided. Second, often they do not have a Battle Buddy to escort them to church. We have asked them to text us if this occurs so that we can act as their Battle Buddy. Sometimes the Platoon Sgts. will not allow this to happen. So our soldiers are stuck. If this happens the Platoon Sgt is supposed to take him personally to church, so usually they will allow us to escort them. It is a difficult environment. All of our students need Spiritual nourishment. Often they do not seek it through their own scripture study and personal prayer, because they are not disciplined enough to do it on their own. So they find that they are left vulnerable to temptation and a lot of peer pressure.

This morning and this afternoon we were able to meet with and talk and visit with many of our students. We actually left the Post around 1000 and went home, ate lunch and then left for North Augusta where we attended a baptism of a young lady who is in the Navy. We wanted to be there to support her in this wonderful event. She will deploy in June, so we will meet with her soon and help her learn what she can do to stay Spiritually strong.

After the baptism we went back up to the Post to meet with a couple more soldiers, which we were able to do. They had not been available to meet this morning, so we arranged to meet this afternoon.

Afterwards we headed to the church for our Missionary correlation meeting and to set up for this evening's FRG. After the meeting and after set up we went out to eat with the Brother and Sister Tenny, the ward mission leader. We had a nice evening with them and with the Barrett family out of the Steven's Creek ward. We played a game called, "Ticket to Ride". It was a lot of fun.

So after the evening finished, we returned home and made two "Death by Chocolate Peanut Butter Pies".

We had a great Institute class this evening. Taking D&C 25 as our text we discussed the divine role of women in God's plan for our exaltation  We examined the 25th section of the doctrine and covenants to find those teachings that show us how truly divine women are. Afterward we read through Proverbs 31 to learn how women can take on their important role, and bless the lives of their families and others and by doing so bring honor upon their husbands, children and themselves. Then we examined the great article of Valerie Cassler, titled, "The Two Trees", which sheds great light on how Church and the gospel of Jesus Christ exalts women.