Week 100

WOOOOOOO SEE YA SOOOOOONNN!!!!!

Love,

Elder Harsh

Elder Harsh is returning on Thursday July 14th and he will be speaking Sunday July 17th at 1pm at the Vine street Chapel 363 East Vine street in Murray.

There will be a gathering at the house afterwards.

We are so excited to get our missionary home.  He has loved the DR and the Caribbean islands so much!

Thank you for all of your support these last 2 years!

~The Harsh's~

Week 99

Well I guess this is it! My last full week as a full time missionary..... It feels really weird but I am LOVING Curacao. Back to the 4 language craziness that I love so much! Also the Islands made so much progress while I was gone! I want to tell you a story that I just barely heard the end of. It was back when I was in San Nicolaas almost a year ago, E. Carrillo and I were looking through our area book and noticed that there were no teaching records for this certain part of our area that is literally the bottom tip of Aruba. So we decided to take one afternoon and go contact the heck out of the area. It ended up being just a bunch of retired mean Dutch people but the Hansens live down there and saw us and told us to come back to their house when we were finished. So we went down the last few streets with very little success and we were about to head back towards the Hansen's house when we saw a shortcut through some bushes and we took it. We ended up walking by a house that was still being built and there was a guy working on it. (he was black so we figured he wasn't dutch :)) Anyways so we went up to him and he was a Jamaican so we contacted him and he gave us his address and told us to come by the next week. We then went to the Hansen's house and they gave us dinner because they knew that they lived in a tough area. So the next week we went searching for his house but couldn't find it. We figured it was a fake address, and while we were searching for it we accidentally knocked on the door of a different person who had heard a lot about the church and believed it was true, but didn't know it was on the Island. So we started teaching her and I kind of forgot about the Jamaican guy until the next time I was in Aruba, a few months later. I was in the other area, but right before I left to go to Guyana I called the Elders and told them to go try and find the address one more time, just to check, and they ended up finding it. When I came back I learned that not only him, but his entire family ended up taking the lessons and were baptized 3 weeks ago. There are so many things like that that happen while you are on a mission, and I have seen so many smaller miracles like that happen especially this week! It makes me never want to stop being a missionary. I know that everybody says you never have to stop being a missionary because member missionary work but that is not the same. Its such a great feeling to be so focused on others and the Savior for such an extended period of time and I can honestly say that this time I have spent out here really has been a blessing.

See yall soon!

Elder Harsh

Week 98

So let’s play a game called where in the world is Elder Harsh....Hint It’s not Guyana!!!! You got that right I am in Curacao!!!! I am the happiest elder in the world right now to be back in my beloved islands!  I swapped out an elder who ran out of time and I am so happy to be back here for the last few weeks! I feel like a greenie again because I am so excited to speak Papiamento I want to talk to everyone!!! I have been going since 3 am this morning so I am pretty tired, and I am not sure when I am going to unpack. I think I won’t, because I have to pack in like a week anyways haha . That was the best random phone call I have ever gotten is the call that I was coming back to the islands!! So the Elder that is serving in Curacao ran out of time for immigration and so Pres. decided to swap us out! The only sad thing is that I will be missing Zianni's baptism. I am going to miss all my new friends from Guyana but I can't explain how happy I am to be here! I am not sure how much of Papiamento and Spanish I have forgotten so that will be fun this week finding that one out. But I could not be happier right now to be finishing in the islands!!

Love,

 Elder Harsh 

Week 97

Hi Everyone,

Well another great week has flown by! But no worries, if I ever forget that my time is slowly dwindling down, EVERYBODY feels like they need to let me know that I am going home soon. AS IF I DON'T ALREADY KNOW IT. haha anyways it’s gonna be weird and sad to leave. E. Birch and I are having so much fun together. There is never a dull moment with us.

These last few weeks we have been focusing on less actives and strengthening the leadership of the branch. We got a relief society president called, and an elder's quorum president is on his way! Also we have been seeing the attendance slowly going up as more and more families start coming back and the branch is starting to get excited about the gospel again! It was really cool to see the difference these past few weeks, and we had a really really good branch council! It was the second one ever, but we had literally pounded the red handbook into our branch president's head and we had a very productive meeting!

Also we met a new family that we are teaching and one of the daughters looks like Nikki Manaj only with less....features...... Anyways fun fact Nikki Manaj is from Trinidad. Once you visit Trinidad all her craziness kind of starts to make sense haha. Well I have to wrap it up because I need to send in this big long speech thingy to the mission office and I am not looking forward to that. Have a good week!

Elder Harsh

Week 96

Hi Everyone!

So I was going to send some pictures because I need to send some to Trinidad but I forgot my camera.....so sorry about that...

Buuuut this week was great! First of all apparently my paperwork for an extension didn't go through and so I became illegal so I got to head out to Trinidad this past Friday! That was a lot of fun! I spent some time in the office, saw E. Hunt, and ate a lot of free food because I am tight with the mission financial secretary :) So I had a good time in Trinidad this week, as well as helping out the Branch.

 Our branch is really struggling because the leadership is um...interesting. But our Branch president is at least willing to do something if we tell him exactly how to do it and he loves to delegate his responsibility onto us but hey, that’s why we are here haha so we finally got a Relief Society president so this week we are going to hopefully set up some sort of visiting teaching and not to far down the road they should call an Elders quorum president.

As for our investigators, it was a really rough week. Our two progressing investigators kinda stopped progressing. Derek relapsed and started drinking again after almost two months of being sober, and Zianni is having personal problems and says she can't focus on this until that kind of resolves. What she doesn't understand is that she is cutting herself off from the one thing that could solve her problems! So hopefully this week will be better.

Also this Sunday we are taking another road trip down to Berbice to teach the Spanish people again, so I am looking forward to that! Should be a good week this week!

Love,

Elder Harsh

Week 95

Hi Everyone,

Well this week was great! We had a lot of bike problems and other things that kinda made it tough to work but it was still a good week. I am staying with E. Birch and I think that President is coming to the country one more time before I leave.

This week we had a really cool suprise! Out of nowhere one night pres. Egbert called me and said that in the other zone, (about 2 hours away) the missionaries contacted a Spanish couple and he wanted me to call them and see if they are interested. So I called them and they were and so Pres. gave us permission to head way out to Berbice to go teach them. It was so much fun! E. Birch and I on a road trip was great, the lesson went phenomenal, and I got to speak Spanish! It was great the people were very prepared to hear about the Gospel and they were begging me to come back so we could explain more. I will be talking to Pres. to see if he will let me go. haha. But it was tons of fun! We ended up staying with the Elders down there and then came back up early this morning. It was a blast.

There is always something crazy like that going on and I love it so much! Mission life is pretty good :)

Love,

Elder Harsh

Week 94

Hi Everyone!

Well we got transfer calls and its official, I am dying here in Guyana! It is so weird to think this is my last transfer! It doesn't feel like it, except for the fact that EVERYBODY reminds me about it.

 But in other news, Arifa's sister named Zianni has been taking the lessons from us and came to church yesterday! She has seen a big change in Arifa since her baptism and that example has influenced her a lot. She has a baptismal date coming up about mid June, so we will see how that goes! So far so good with that! This past week was Guyana's 50th anniversary of Independence and they had a big celebration that kind of made it hard to work, but I guess it was cool. I wasn't sure what it was going to be like, and I told the members they should have a BBQ and talk about freedom but then I realized this isn't America so they  basically just sat in the streets and drank. I'm glad I'm American.

Also a member had a wedding on Saturday and we went to go help serve drinks and stuff, and we got TONS of free food and drinks. It was great. Also the theme of the wedding was Indian and African so everybody had on really cool dresses and stuff. The groom had a giant stuffed lion on his shoulder. It was weird haha but way cool. Nothing we won't do for free food :)

Love,

Elder Harsh