Maria Fowler

 This cute little girl wore this dress to church.  She wanted to have her picture taken.  We were impressed that she was wearing what we have determined is the "native dress".  What a cute little girl.  He family are all members of the church.  The conflict comes from her grandmother on her father's side.  Her grandmother is a traditional Navajo.  She pulls the father that direction.  The traditional Navajo are the ones that have the ritual using Payote.  On worthiness questions the members cannot be affiliated with a group that is contrary to the teachings of the church.  We have to be very careful in asking that question.
I got a new assignment last Sunday.  I am now the Branch Executive Secretary.  This is a great assignment because we have more contact with the members than the President.  We are working on building the Priesthood Quorums,  The following pictures of the Benally family is a case that we discovered.  Brother Benally is a member but we had to request his records.  When we found them we determined that he did not hold any Priesthood.  We are going to ordain him a Priest sunday.  He then got a call from the Welders Union in California so he has to leave to go to California and take a welding test.  If he passes then he will go to Las Vegas to help assemble a plant.   This is very common as these people are mostly unemployed and to get work they need to tracel

Benally family.  Mckinzie, Ashley, Lucy, Shania (also
known as "Pocahantis) and Delannie

Defiance weave

 This is a handwoven Navajo Rug.  It is beautiful.  The aunt that lives with the Benally family wove this rug by hand.  It is incredible what they do with colors.  Her loom is the blue frame behind Shania.  She offered the rug to us for $500.  A rug similar to this one can be purchased in the shops for $1000.
 We have a couple of the ladies of the older generation that do this.  I forgot to take a picture of the way she spins this material   It is a  unit with two small wagon wheels (Radio Flyer type) that are attached to a long dowel and she pumps this unit and weves the heavy wool.  This is an art that many of the younger generation do not do. We have two that we are aware of that do this weaving. 
They get the various colors and thread the strands throuhout the rug to form the pattern.  This rug took over a month to weave. 
Any body that has the money and inclination to own an authentic hand woven rug just let us know.  We could probably get  a picture of the person that wove the rug.
The weaving and selling of jewelry is the only means these people have for support.  This is why the garden projects are so important.

The closest Bishop's storehouse to help these people is either in St. George, about 3.5 hours away or in Farmington which is 4 hours in the opposite direction or they can go to Phoenix to the south about 5 hours.  We have created a mini storehouse in our building that allows us to give immediate help to those we find.  We have one family that has 8 children.  He oldest is 15.  They live in two small trailers accross the road from the church.  They have no water.  The truck it to their trailer.  The have no electricity.  That is provided by two small generators that are powered by gas on the outside of the trailers. We have taken some of the zuchinni from our garden to them but they are reluctant to have us bring them food.  They need to trust us first. It is sad.  I still do not understand how they get the booze.  They barely have enough money to live on but some of them are always drunk.  We found that someone has done research on the Native American Indians and have found that they have a common gene that makes them more suseptible to alcohol.  All it takes to make one dependent on alcohol is one drink.