Elizabeth

 

Well here I am in my third and final area. Driving up to transfer conference was so suspenseful. I hated not knowing where I was going. My three possibilities were Morristown, Elizabeth, and Jersey City. People kept asking me which of the three I thought I was going to, and I really had no idea. At last it was announced that I would be serving in Elizabeth! And my new companion is... Hermana Ivie! My MTC companion!!! We were put back together just over a year after we left the MTC.

I am so excited. I've been here 6 days and I already love it. This place is so fun! Very different than my last area. It's the fourth largest city in New Jersey and it has a ton of diversity and a ton of Hispanics. In my last area the vast majority of the Hispanics were from Mexico, but here they are from all over the place. It seems like most of them are from South America, especially Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

 

This is such a great place for missionary work. The members are great and love to come to lessons with us and give us referrals. We contact so many people on the street and in front of their homes and so many of them are so prepared to receive the Gospel! One of the things that I am most excited about is that the people here actually keep appointments. We got a lot of return appointments with the people we contacted this week, and they were actually at home waiting for us when it was time for us to come over. I'm used to maybe 20% of planned lessons actually happening, so I was very impressed with the people of Elizabeth this week.

 

We have some awesome people we are teaching. There is this Uruguayan lady named Rosa who is on date to be baptized in a couple weeks. She has smoked every day for 40 years, and she just stopped smoking two days before I got here. She is amazing and is so excited to be baptized. There are also two other people who should be getting baptized in the next month or so.

 

A common stereotype about Elizabeth is that some of the people here are a little... odd. I learned the truth of it for myself on my third day in this area. It was one of the strangest experiences I've ever had. Hermana Ivie and I were walking and a lady in a colorful decorated van pulls over and starts talking to us. She told us that God had been communicating with her for the past seven years and that she needed to warn the world. She went on and on for probably about half an hour. Here are some of the highlights:

 

• "I'm planning on moving to Peru and dying there by starving myself in the desert."
• "Eating meat is an abomination. So is feeding animals to other animals. You need to buy the mice that they feed to snakes and let them go in the forest. Whenever you see dead animals on the side of the road you need to take them to the first and bury them with a blanket."
• "There are evil spirits lurking everywhere. I can see them. I also saw the devil. He tried to eat me."
• "I'm a kitty cat bunny bird"
• "The evil spirits possessed the maggots and the maggots ate my hermit crabs."
• "Every physical object is a device of the devil. Your shoes are a device of the devil."
• "You have to wear a little plastic poncho when you shower because God doesn't want to see you naked."

She also mentioned that she had been in a mental hospital 55 times, which didn't exactly add to her credibility. I was trying so hard not to laugh the whole time.

 

Hermana Ivie and I were so excited to be put back together after a year in the field. We are having a ton of fun together and are laughing a lot. She has grown so much in the past year and I am already learning a lot from her. I am so happy to be with her again!

We are working hard and we are excited to continue to see miracles here! I love being a missionary!

 

<3 Hermana Harris

 
I spent a week packing up my stuff. I've definitely accumulated a lot during my time here. A lot of it is random clothes that sister missionaries going home gave me, as well as gifts that members and investigators have given me. I'm definitely going to have to get rid of a lot of my stuff before I go home because this won't all fit on the plane home.

On the way to transfer conference Hermana Bentley and I stopped at a graveyard in Freehold because she has an ancestor there and wanted to see the grave. It was built on the site of a Revolutionary War battle.