Congratulations to the newest member in Ascutney, VT!

Sister Helen Stockwell was baptized by her husband, Jason.

     This past week actually went by really fast. I am surprised at how fast this week went compared to my first week in the mission field. (First week felt like a month). We had a super busy week this week which is good and we have an even busier week planned this upcoming week! We have member meals every single day this week and almost all full schedules with appointments. This area is really starting to pick up for some reason. This week we found out on Tuesday that Helen Stockwell wanted to be baptized and since she had already investigated the church for 5+ years and pretty much could teach us the lessons we set up a date for her to be baptized and it was this past Sunday. It was really quick but it needed to be quick. Because of her cancer and all the drugs she is on. Her husband Jason baptized her and confirmed her. It was a really awesome baptism because practically the whole ward was there in support of Helen.  I think we had as many people as sacrament meeting did. It was a very great service and I'm glad i was there to be a part of it. Although i never taught her anything, i still got to see the fruits of all the other missionaries that have worked with her.

     This week we also were able to find a new investigator. She is a single mom of 2 kids ages 9 and 6. She is into the classic video games like pac man and things like that and she is looking for something good to raise her kids in. We have a lesson set up for her on Tuesday and we are going to try and get her to come to church this next Sunday. Another awesome thing happened this week for Anthony H**** our 12 year old investigator. His mom okayed for him to be baptized and we have a date set for him on the 17th of August. His older brother Mike will probably be the one to baptize him. His older brother served in Buenos Aires South mission in Argentina which is the same place my mom went, (I think). (This is correct!)

     This past week some service we did was on the farm with Bob Porter. He is the man who is paralyzed on his whole left side. But what i got to do was herd some cows!!!! It was so cool. We needed to move them to a different pasture because they ate all the grass in their current one. So i got to be the backer and herd all the cows to the new pasture. Also on the farm he is growing raspberries and black berries and blueberries and i got to eat freshly picked berries from right off the vine. He let me take some home and i had some on yogurt which was just as good! I also split and stacked wood for 2 and a half hours on Saturday for a man who is actually an investigator named Brother Dube. he is very sick and has those oxygen tubes running up his nose and he cant do anything. So we helped him out with his wood and have plans to help him out some more this coming week.

This coming week is full of plans, here is a short list
Mon- Dinner with a member family, Companion Exchange, i will be with Elder Martineu till wed.
Tuesday- Lesson with Glen (Inv) also a lesson with Rebecca (New Inv) then dinner with a member. then going on Hometeaching splits with members
Wed- District meeting then service at simply comfort, then dinner with a member, then pick weeds at the church with young men
Thurs- Bob Porter service, Give blessing to a member, Dinner with member, home teaching splits again
Fri- Dinner with member family, Lesson with a recent convert named Ashley W****
Sat- Spread mulch at the church, Split wood for Bro Dube, than go to the boons and help a member family with house work, dinner with them
Sun- Church @10 am- then lesson with Anthony H****.-After they will feed us.

That's all for the week so far. I'm excited!!! Also thanks for the letters, i really appreciate them and it really brightens my day. Hopefully i didn't leave you all dumbfounded and that this letter was clear and easy to read. My English is fading because I've been in New England for so long.  Next thing I'll start calling pizza "peetzer." (Mainer talk)

Pictures for the week:

 From his hike on P-day last week.   Arrowhead hill

We did this for a good 2 and a half hours. My jeans were literally soaked and i could have rung it out and gotten some sweat drops..... Yeah hard work 

From their hike this week...

So the members really like me haha which is good!

Elders Dahlberg and Lervold

     So this week actually went by pretty fast. We stayed pretty busy and taught a good amount of lessons. The weather was also nice this week. The only day it rained was Sunday night and that was at 9PM when we were driving home from a lesson. Funny story: While we were driving home we kept seeing these jumping green things in the road and we were like what are those? It was hard to tell because of all the rain hitting the windshield but turned out they were frogs. So we were on the highway going 55+ and there are all these jumping green things in the road as were driving and we cant just swerve around them because we would crash so... every time we saw one in our path we just braced for impact and wished the frog good riddance... Biggest one we hit was probably softball size... hahahaha gross but funny.

     Just for your information my current area called Ascutney Vermont covers towns in both New Hampshire and Vermont. Some towns we cover are Windsor, Charlestown, Wapole, Springfield, Newport, and a little town called Drewsville! We haven't made it to that town yet but we will someday! Windsor is actually the birthplace of Vermont, it was founded in 1777. Usually everyday we cross over the Connecticut river which is the border of New Hampshire and Vermont to go to our appointments.

     This week we received a media referral from Salt Lake Utah that told us to go see a guy named Andrew P**** because he wants a Book of Mormon. So we called him up and met with him. He is in his late 50's and is an Army retiree who is looking for a church where he and his wife can be comfortable and be supported by its members. So we invited him to church and gave him his own personal copy and he told us "I'm going to read this entire thing!" and that was the first time i had ever really heard enthusiasm and excitement coming from someone that wanted to learn. I'm excited to see what happens next, we hope to see him at church this Sunday.

     Some types of service that we do in this area is helping out in a mom and pop restaurant called Simply Comfort, and on a farm. We are hoping to do more service for the community and we are looking for ways we can do that, We applied at the local hospital to see if anyone needed visitors and we are going to try the local food pantry/ soup kitchen this week. On Thursdays we do service on a farm. The owners name is Bob P****** and he is in his late 50's and was investigating the church but now just needs our help. He is paralyzed on his left side so his left arm and leg don't work at all. He is a really nice guy and he gets around the farm just as well as we do; he just can't really lift anything. So we helped him clean his chicken coop, his horse stall, mow the lawn, and stack firewood. We also ate wild black berries that were growing on his property. Its awesome because he grows blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries and they are starting to show up so we will be able to eat freshly grown berries in these next couple of weeks.

      Something funny that is going on is that I am hearing all sorts of good things about me and how much more they like me than the last missionary that was in this area. I hear all the gossip and all the true feelings of the members start to come out when the last missionary left and I came in. So the members really like me haha which is good!

     This week we also helped a lady in our ward move out of her house and we got it all packed up in the U-haul and all ready to go and than the lady can't remember where she put the keys... So she is frantically running around trying to find the keys and we are looking everywhere, I even looked in the toilet! It got to the point where we needed to leave to go to another appointment and after we left she gave up and decided to call a locksmith to make her another key. Haha so they got one made and as far as i know all went well after that.

     That's all I have for now! Thanks for the letters and pictures they are much appreciated!

Stay Classy San Diego!

Elder Drew Dahlberg

The license plates are LDS 1 and LDS 2!

This lady is from Finland and talks just like Sister Wetherald!

The cleaner apartment..

Such a nicely made bed!!


Well, the couch has seen better days!!

Living on the Border... of New Hampshire and Vermont...

My 4th of July outfit got me a lot of stares.

Notice the date on the pictures... See below for explanation.

       So i got transferred out of stinky Old Town Maine and im not living in Maine anymore. I am living in Claremont, New Hampshire. A cool thing about this area im in now is that i go to church in a different state than im living in. I live in New Hampshire, but i go to church in Ascutney, Vermont. So with this area i cover a little bit of both states. The dividing line between NH and VT is the Connecticut river. Its a big river and sadly its really brown... Its not clean at all. Another thing about this are is that i no longer feel enclosed/ surrounded by trees! Although there are lots of trees around me there are hills here, unlike Maine which is flat as can be. There are so called mountains around us but they are hills, none of them are taller than black mountain back in San Diego.

     When i arrived in this area on Tuesday the first thing we did was drop off my bags at the apartment. When we opened the door to the apartment i got blasted by this stench of stinky armpits and mold. It was terrible. The apartment was trashed too. Boxes everywhere, dirty carpets, mold in the shower, dirty dishes stacked on dirty dishes, and there was just junk all over the place. I was disgusted at how the apartment was and when i went to the vacuum cleaner to attempt cleaning, i was surprised with a dirty vacuum full of dirt and hair. So i came to the conclusion that when you have to clean the tools to clean the apartment, that means it was one heck of a mess. So right now i cleaned up a whole lot and now its at least semi-clean.  My new Companions name is Elder Lervald, he lives in Brea, California and is 22 years old. My companion has been out for 16 months. so he is about 2/3rds done.

My new mailing address is:
Elder Drew Dahlberg
2 Winter St Apt T17
Claremont, NH, 03743

https://www.google.com/maps/place/2+Winter+St/@43.3763516,-72.3335001,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x89e1c1e1b023b7f5:0xcf0f5bdab8188536

     I am in a giant apartment building complex. Its called Claremont Arms and there are like 5 separate buildings and they each have different names like 'Camelot' or 'Arthur". Ours is called Tudor. I find it ironic because im the biggest tooter in Tudor! haha get it?

     As for our teaching in this area, we don't have a whole lot of people to teach :/. no real investigators atm and no real less actives that want to learn. So we are going to be finding this week and trying to get our teaching pool up.

     Some cool things that happened this week were a lightning storm that came out of no where. It was sunny and than boom, in come these black clouds and lightning just starts hitting the earth everywhere. None of the bolts came close to us but it took out a power line to our apartments and we were without power for a good hour. I thought the storm was awesome! It rained so hard we couldn't see while driving even with the wipers going as fast as they could.

     Also because of the storm, the July 4th fireworks were canceled and were postponed for the 5th. So we got to see the 5th of July fireworks! A cool little fact of the day is that this area, (called Ascutney) is where Elder Beck got trained! Pretty cool. I like this area and i hope to get to know everything a little better. I hope all of you had a wonderful 4th of July and that you all had fun. Thanks for the letters and the prayers, both are great and i appreciate all the support.

I asked him about who made the big mess in the apartment...


Elder Lervald was in the apartment before but it was his older companion that was such a mess maker. He didn't mind me cleaning.  He didn't join me but he didn't think i was crazy or anything. Honestly its really hard to find people to teach, i don't talk about all the negative comments and stuff i get because it doesn't feel good to get them so i just brush it off. I found that im pretty gifted in being patient. Almost all the missionaries out here are impatient and its a wake up call to me to show how blessed i am for being able to step back and look at the bigger picture. Thanks for you support mom. :)

Last P-day with Elder Beck

Hard to say good-bye..

This family is the Nuttals. They are awesome. He served his mission in this mission and is now a Mainer haha.

Look who i got to see??? 

ELDER JENSEN!!! and ELDER DEAN!!!!!!!!!!!!

Elder Dahlberg's Study Desk.  Love the pictures!!  

A Vermont Covered Bridge

More Service Opportunities...  Drew will Go and Do!!

This is Mount Weathersfield.  We are going to hike it next Monday.

Transfer Time! (From June 30, 2014)

Good bye Brad & Zack

       So, im getting transferred. The way transfers work in our mission is on the last saturday of the transfer, you get a call from the Assistants to the President or the mission president if you are getting transferred out of the area. So if you dont get a call from them you arent getting transferred. Elder Beck and I got a call from President Stoker telling us both of us are being transferred and that sister missionaries are taking over our area and our apartment. Thats all the info we are given. Then on Sunday morning you get a call from the Zone leaders telling you your 'Travel Plans'. Elder Beck and I's Travel plans are to get picked up from our apartment at 4:30AM on Tuesday the 1st of July and Elder Beck will be dropped off in Dover Fox-Croft Maine and i continue in the car all the way to transfer meeting. So on tuesday i am going to do the 5 hour drive to Manchester New Hampshire to transfer meeting. Transfer meeting is where most of the missionaries who are being transferred go and are told who their new companion is and where they are going. This whole process is kind of like opening Birthday presents and the excitement level is really high. Im excited but also nervous and sad because Elder Beck and I got along so well and now DAHLBECK is getting split up :( But hey i knew it was bound to happen so i just gotta move on. #Tomoveonistogrow Anyways. 

     This past week we did lots of service for this area. A 15 year old in our ward named Casey Strong is doing his eagle scout project and its building a bridge at a pond. So we helped mix, haul, and place the cement for the posts and also helped build the bridge. I got really good at using a drill and drilling screws into wood. I calculated how much cement Elder Beck and I did and it was around 3800 lbs of dry cement not including water. So id say its about 5000 lbs total. It was really fun and tiring but we got most of the job done.

I'm assuming that there is a bit more work to be done...

     This week we also helped the Sargent Family cleanup their backyard of all the metal/wood junk. We hauled all the scrap/ junk metal to a recycling center and they paid us 125$ for all the junky metal. Id say that was great! We used that money to help pay for the removal of all the other junk in their backyard. Also this week we helped a member of our ward split wood and go out into the wilderness to find left over scraps from loggers.
  On a teaching side of things, K*** never came to church and he hasn't met with us recently which stinks. None of our other investigators really showed a whole lot of interest this week.... I think this area will enjoy having sisters. Maybe all the perfume they wear will help make Old Town smell better! hahaha i wont miss that part of Old Town. Well this is all i got this week. Just remember that on Tuesday at 4:30 AM ill be sitting in a car driving........ for a long time......  Anyways. thanks for your emails everyone!

The Sargent Family

 

The Louis'? (Sorry, not sure)

The District Missionaries

 The pond you see is callled Pickerell pond at the youth fish and game society out in the boonies of Maine.

Until next week!

I saw fireflies! From June 23, 2014

     Yes i got your card with writing on it. To be honest i could barely read it because of the hand writing. I don't want to sound like a mom or something, but YOU NEED TO WRITE NEATER! haha. I had a tough time reading it. But funny thing is that when i opened up the mailbox i saw a letter from you and..... your mom! She sent me one too and it was just like amazing having 2 letters at once. Also this week i got a letter from Claire Impey, and Brad Nolte. So i am really happy with the letters im getting! Yikes... your getting into more action than i am with dogs. Dogs bark at me all the time but they never come close to biting me. Although there have been some close calls haha but i can save those stories for another day.

     This week was pretty nice. It only rained 2 times over the whole week and the sun was shining all day everyday. Here the sun comes up around 4:30AM and goes down at around 9PM. So we literally get the whole day of sun. Its much better than the winter where the sun comes up at 8AM and goes down at 4PM. I am actually soaking up the sun and getting tan! Its awesome!

     This week we learned a new way to teach the restoration to people. To do it you need a restoration pamphlet and 7 minutes. We have to teach the restoration in 7 minutes using the pictures and testimony. We taught it to K***, and it went really well. He has lots of questions and they aren't ones to just pry and make us look bad, they are honest heartfelt questions and that is a sign of someone who wants to learn. So that is definitely a highlight of my week. Also this week we had interview with the Mission President. What i talked about with him was how he notices my upbeat and positive attitude and he really admires it and tells me to keep it up! I will keep it up :)

     This week we also helped the Sargent Family clean up their backyard. We are coordinating a ward activity of cleaning up the Sargents home and for us to prepare for that, Cleaning up their yard involved: Picking up trash, starting a fire and burning the trash, sorting metal and wood to take it to the dump, cleaning out a 15ftx15ft shed FULL of junk, building a garden box so she can plant her cukes (cucumbers, that's how the Mainers say it), Fixing their car battery because its not running well, getting all the dirt off their sidewalk so that you can actually see the sidewalk rather than dirt and weeds, picked weeds. There were a lot of activities that were done there.

     This week has had a lot of service in it and there was one activity that we did called a Community Dinner that went well. We were invited to the Old Town Community Dinner at the local catholic church and we arrived late because our interviews lasted longer than we expected. But we arrived and all the dinner was already done and people were leaving so i decided to do all the dishes for 100+ people (almost every single one was above the age of 70.) While we were doing the dishes people kept coming up to us and thanking us for being there and that we were such nice young men! One lady said "There is no better way to share your love of God than to walk in another church and do their dishes." I thought that was really cool. We even got sent home with left overs!

     Another cool thing that happened this week was when we were riding our bikes home from a dinner appointment, and it was on the bike path going from U Maine to Old Town. And the bike ride looks like  the picture i attached. It was dark and we see these random light flashes as we were riding. and So we stopped after seeing them over and over and turns out they were fireflies! That was so cool! I saw fireflies! I did not expect to ever see them, to be honest i thought they were a myth!
   

This upcoming week we are helping a young man in our ward with his eagle scout project and we are also helping with the Sargent family ward clean up. I want to thank all those who wrote a letter to me this week. They really helped.  If you have questions or anything that you are wondering about me let me know. I will tell you :) Thats all i have for now.

We went to a lake house last Monday. And as you can see in the picture we didn't touch the water for tooo long..... Okay i only got my ankles wet. Nothing bad happened. 

On the path to U. of Maine

The scenery one was taken as we were biking to a members house to help him put up insulation. We were biking along and i looked to my right and i saw this. I slammed on those brakes and said i NEED to get a picture of this because its so nice. This picture kind of reminds me of when we would go to the place where camino ruiz park is now and we would explore around there before the park was there. 

Here is Elder beck using his "Red-Beck" Ingenuity and getting the job done. haha if you want the job done quick let him do it. We were doing insulation for Brother Gilmartin again. 

Here is a rainbow that popped up yesterday.

Until next week!