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
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