Dropping BOMs like Bombs

Hola Everyone!

This week was amazing! We gave out so many Book of Mormons this week it was crazy! Hence the title "Dropping BOMs like Bombs" haha.

First, a little bit more about what it's like here. Everyone lives in super tiny crowded apartments, but the apartment that Hermana Galvan and I live in is really nice. The mission gives us a prepaid card with a certain amount of money on it each month, and we use that to buy food and other living expenses. We don't have a car because we are in a walking area, but our zone leaders have a car and they give us rides for things like going shopping or to district meetings. We have a cell phone that the two of us share and we use it to call and text people to set up appointments and stuff like that.

Okay so now we are teaching this 11 year old kid named Daniel. He is good friends with Eddy and he is at his house all the time and he has seen us teach Eddy and his cousins a couple times, but we never really thought he was interested. But then a week ago he comes up to us and says "I talked to my mom and she said I can get the lessons from you and I can get baptized! How soon can I get baptized!?!" We were in total shock haha. So we taught him almost every day this week and now he has a baptismal date for September 14th!!

On my third day here, we were walking around town and I was holding a Book of Mormon, and a lady walks past us and we hear her kinda mumble under her breath "El Libro de Mormon" because she must have seen me holding it. So we chase her down the street (it was a pretty funny sight) until we catch up to her and ask her if she knew about the Book of Mormon. She told us her name is Marta and she was baptized when she was a teenager in Ecuador but she hasn't been to church in like 30 years. We got her info, and this week was the first time we were able to go to her apartment and actually teach her. Hermana Galvan asked her to read the sacrament prayer in Moroni 4:3. Marta read it for about 3 seconds and then she couldn't finish reading it because she suddenly started crying. She said she remembers those words from when she used to go to church and that she misses them. She told us that she feels ready to start over again and she really wants to return to church after all those years. She is awesome and we are so glad we found her!

And then there's Pablo. Oh my goodness. This guy is the type of investigator every missionary dreams of getting. We contacted him on the street about a week ago and started talking to him and we could instantly tell he was awesome. He seemed genuinely interested in what we had to say. So we got his phone number and a few days later we called him to schedule our first appointment. During that phone call he said stuff like "I am so grateful that God put these two beautiful angels in my path and I know that they are going to change my life for the better." It was amazing how much he liked us and we hadn't even taught him yet!! Then when we met up for our first lesson with him, he brought us roses! How often does a potential investigator buy missionaries roses when they haven't even taught him yet?? And he took us to get dinner at Noches de Colombia and kept insisting on buying us a ton of food. He talks really fast (he's from the Dominican Republic and people from there always speak in super fast Spanish and it's impossible for me to understand) but Hermana Galvan always translates what he's saying, and he is so receptive it is amazing. After dinner we took him to the church building and gave him a tour. He listened so intently to everything we said. When we showed him the chapel he got goosebumps and said that he had a really warm feeling and we explained to him that that is the Spirit. We have really high hopes for this guy and we are so excited to keep teaching him.

I love you all!

-Hermana Harris

Ellis Island and Other Adventures

 

The view of New York City from the edge of my area in Union City. Pretty sweet!

 Hello everyone! I have officially been in Jersey for 2 weeks!

Union City is so awesome. This week I learned that it is the most densely populated city in America! I can definitely believe that! Everyone here lives in tiny little apartments. And every building has SUPER steep stairs because there's not much room because there are so many people crammed into one building. Union City High School is in my area and guess what! This city is so densely populated that the high school has its football field on the roof. Pretty crazy.

Almost everyone in my area speaks Spanish. It is so fun to talk to people on the street because the first thing you ask is "De donde es?" (Where are you from?) and you never know what the answer is going to be because the people here are from so many different countries.

I've already had quite a bit of foreign food. There is a restaurant here called "Noches de Colombia" that has really good Colombian food and we eat there sometimes. Also this week two different Dominican families had us over to dinner and fed us some Dominican food called Mangu. It's like mashed up plantains with spices and salami. It's different than what I'm used to but I like it!

I'm getting lots of good ol' American food too. Every Pday we go to Walmart and get whatever groceries we need. Also last Pday we went to the mall and got lunch at Panda Express and Jamba Juice. Haha perks of serving stateside!

We don't knock on doors here. We really don't need to because we already have so many people we are teaching, and because we do a lot of street contacting. There are so many people walking down the sidewalk and we will just go up to them and start talking to them about who we are. We have found some really great people that way.

So here's a little about some of the people we are working with right now:

Emilio is a recent convert who is from Ecuador. He was baptized two days before I got here. We are working with him to get him to the temple so he can do the work for his father who died a while ago. He's really excited about the Gospel. He also really wants to have an eternal marriage and he is looking for a wife right now. He's so great.

Evelyn is an 8 year old girl. Her parents are from Guatemala and they are inactive. But Evelyn really loves church and really wants to get baptized. We are at her house teaching her almost every day. She has a baptismal date for September 7th. But her mom says she will only let her get baptized if she starts behaving better, because she doesn't always behave well. So we made her a cute little calendar where her mom puts a sticker on at the end of each day if she behaved well, and she gets to get baptized if she gets a certain number of stickers. So far it seems to be helping!

Eddy is a 13 year old boy and is Evelyn's cousin. He was baptized a couple years ago but then went inactive. We are working with him to get him to go t church more. He totally loves us. When I first got here he was really rude to us and wouldn't even talk to us, but now he's always asking us to come and teach him. It's so cute. He admitted that part of why he likes us so much is because he thinks we're pretty, but we're getting him to focus more on what we have to say than what we look like. Haha he's so funny. He's started going to church more often now that we're working with him.

The sisters in my mission who are serving in the areas close to New York City get to go to Ellis Island once in a while and volunteer. And I got to go on Saturday! It was so cool. I'm such a US History nerd so it was really exciting for me to be in a place that is so important in American history. When we volunteer there, we go into the family history center. It basically is a big room with a bunch of computers where the visitors and tourists can sit down and go through the Ellis Island database and look for the records of their ancestors who came into America through Ellis Island. We walk around and help people who are having trouble finding the name they are looking for. Sometimes when people from Europe entered America, they changed the spelling of their name to make it seem more "American" so they would "fit in better" in America. Because of this, a lot of people only have the American name of their ancestor, when in the database the person is in there with the European spelling. We help them with things like that. For example there was an old man there looking for the record of his father who came to America from Poland in 1909. He was looking under the name "Jacob" and couldn't find it. We helped him and told him to use the Polish spelling which is "Yakob" and then he found his father's record! It is so cool to see how happy people get when they find an ancestor they've been looking so hard for. During our lunch break we got to walk around Ellis Island and take pictures. From one side of the island there is a fantastic view of New York City. It is like right there! And from the other side of the island, we can see the Statue of Liberty pretty well! Of course I got super excited because it was my first time seeing the Statue of Liberty.

I love New Jersey!

xoxo Hermana Harris

Selfie with Lady Liberty (it was really windy as you can tell from my hair)

 

Colombian food that a member of the ward fed me. It's got chicken, rice, corn, potatoes, and plantains. It was really good!

The part of Ellis Island where we got to volunteer

 

The Statue of Liberty as seen from Ellis Island

 

First Week in Jersey

Where to start, where to start!? So much has happened since the last time I emailed.

 

My last few days in the MTC were great. It was really hard saying goodbye to my teachers and the people in my district. But 7 out of the 11 missionaries in my MTC district are here in Jersey with me so at least I didn't have to say goodbye to them!

 

My last full day in the MTC was Sunday the 3rd. We had all our regular Sunday meetings and devotionals and we also spent a lot of time packing. Sunday night we didn't go to sleep at all. We had to leave the MTC at 2:30am the next morning, so all the girls in my casa decided it would be easier to just not even bother going to bed. Personally I would have preferred to sleep a little, but even if I had tried I wouldn't have been able to, since everyone was awake and loud all night. We finished packing and got on buses at 2:30am and arrived at the Mexico City airport at 3:30am. We went through security pretty quickly and then just sat around and waited for our flight because our flight didn't leave until 7am.I managed to go in and out of sleep while on the flight but I never slept much. We landed for our layover in Atlanta and had to spend a while going through customs and immigration. There were 12 of us missionaries there on our way to Jersey and we got a lot of questions from the immigration officers. They kept asking us why we were in Mexico for 6 weeks and we tried to explain that we were learning Spanish for our missions and that now we were heading to Jersey. People thought it was so strange haha.

 

My best friend Mykelin lives 20 minutes from the Atlanta airport, and since her dad is a pilot, she can get through security easily. I had told her that my layover was going to be in Atlanta and that she might be able to find me. She got a free ticket to Minneapolis (because she can get airline tickets for free) and used that to get through security so she could be there waiting for me when I got to my gate. I told her the number for my flight to Jersey so she would know which gate to find me at. She was there waiting for me when I got there. It felt SO GOOD to see her and talk to her. I only got to talk to her for about an hour before I had to board my flight to Jersey, but it was seriously so great to see her. She's the best <3

 

My flight from Atlanta to New Jersey was about 3 hours. When the plane was landing we could see New York City from above and it was so cool looking. Of course I was super excited because I haven't traveled very much in my life so seeing NYC from above was pretty cool for me haha. When we got off the plane we were greeted by the mission president, President Taggart, and his wife and two of his daughters. First thing they did was take us to downtown Newark which is unlike anything I've ever seen. Then they had us do this thing called a "fearbuster" where we team up with a more experienced missionary (there were a bunch of them there waiting for us) and have to go find someone walking down the street and give them a Book of Mormon. I ended up talking to a really cool guy from Ghana and gave him a Book of Mormon.

 

After we were done with that, we were taken to the mission president's house and had a really nice dinner. By this time I was SO TIRED because I hadn't gone to bed at all the night before, and I had only gotten like one hour of sleep on the plane. It felt so good to finally go to sleep.

 

Tuesday I got to find out who my trainer (that's what they call your first companion, the person who teaches you and trains you) is and where my first area is. My companion is Hermana Galvan. She is from Argentina! She is fluent in both English and Spanish so that will really help me as I progress with my Spanish. She is awesome. We are in Union City. It is really close to New York City and we can see the skyline really well. Some missionaries in some areas of Jersey get cars but we don't have one in Union City because we don't need one. The part of the city that we are assigned to is relatively small and it all is within walking distance so we really wouldn't need a car in a place like this. This place is so cool. The people here are from EVERYWHERE. I've hardly met a single person who was born in the US. So far I've met people from Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Honduras, and Colombia. It's awesome.

 

Yesterday was my first Sunday in the ward here. There is only one ward in the whole city and there are four pairs of missionaries in that ward. The ward members are great and they were all super welcoming to me.

 

Thanks for all the love and support! I really do love it here. I am still getting used to it but I am sure by next Monday I will have a lot more to tell you about my area and the people in it!

 

xoxo Hermana Harris

 

 

My MTC district with our teacher, Hermana Molina.
 

 

With our teacher Hermano Murillo

 

​The five missionaries in the Mexico MTC who are from Temecula. We really wanted to take a picture together.  From right to left: Hermana Annelise Eddy (Iowa Des Moines Mission), Hermana Ellen Logan (Chile Vina del Mar Mission), Elder Brennen Eisenhut (Texas McAllen MIssion), me, and Hermana Madison Baugh (Florida Tampa Mission).

 

​My MTC branch on my last day in Mexico

 

 

​Me and Mykelin at the Atlanta airport during my layover​

 

Me and Sophie, my mission president's adorable 10-year-old daughter, right after getting off the plane