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