Week 18

Hi Everyone!

Well transfers were this past week and both me and my companion are staying here, which is good because we have two baptisms coming up this Saturday! One is a ten year old boy who his whole family is active now, but when he was 8 his family wasn´t active so he was never baptized. I gave him one of those CTR rings you sent me and every time I see him he sticks out his fist and says haz lo justo(Do the right)! He really liked that gift so… way to go mommy!

 The other one is a lady named Alba. She is really timid and at first it was hard to teach her but the lesson after we taught her about the book of Mormon (and to pray to see if it’s true) she said she felt really happy and peaceful when she read the book! So I quickly broke out the scripture in Gal. 5:22 about the fruits of the spirit and ever since then she has been super interested and she has progressed really well! Both of them are very ready for their baptisms!! This week we had the baptismal interviews with Alba, and during the interview it was just me sitting with a member away from the interview. I thought it was going to be awkward just sitting there but he started talking to me and before I knew it 30 minutes had gone by and the interview was over! I had a one on one conversation with no help for almost 30 minutes !!!  It was a great realization afterwards!

We also have an activity coming up this Thursday where we will show a part of the Christmas devotional and have food. On Sunday we gave book of Mormons to members and made them promise to highlight a few of their favorite scriptures and bring them on Thursday, along with a friend and so if all goes right it will be a really good finding activity for us!

 Also this week this crazy guy runs up to me and he thought because I was white and dressed up that I was Jesus. I tried to explain that I´m just a missionary, but when I showed him my missionary badge, the second biggest name on there is Jesus Christ, so that didn´t help. I wasn´t getting anywhere with him so I just told him I have people to teach and lives to bless and he grabbed my hand, bowed down and started kissing it over and over again. I don´t know why Jesus is ok with that because I thought it was really weird! I kinda walked off and he kept shouting different prayers and stuff. It was very entertaining. Anyways I´ll be sure to fill you in on how the Baptisms go this week! Hopefully we can get more water in the font!

Love,

Elder Harsh

Week 17

Hi Everyone!

This week I had my baptisms!! It was such a good experience to see how the choice of being baptized has influenced both the families! The inactive mom has attended 4 Sundays in a row now, and the other parents have a new sense of urgency to get married so they can be baptized and eventually sealed as a family!

 It was such a neat experience but the situation was kind of funny. First off,  the font takes 3 hours to fill, and since we have to travel 45 mins to the stake center to use the font, we had to sit around for three hours and after all this time of always doing something, it was really weird to have nothing to do! Luckily I brought a Liahona to read or else I probably would have died. Also, we couldn´t find the plug for the font, so we had to shove a plastic bag down the drain to try and stop the water. It kinda worked, but Juan Miguel is really tall and so his knees popped out of the water so I had to redo his baptism. Somehow I remembered all the names and we ended with the youngest kid Dioveni. He is 8 years old, and after they shut the doors to the font we were walking up the stairs, he noticed that nobody could see him because the doors to see into the font were shut so he jumped from the top stair and started swimming around in the font. It probably wasn´t exactly appropriate but I was laughing so hard there was nothing I could do about it!

                The next day they were confirmed and again, there isn´t any way to describe the feeling of joy I had! It kinda gave me a new view of Moses 1:39.

I´ve seen the video “Share the gift” in Spanish and it’s really good! We encourage investigators to go watch it, but nobody here has computers so I don´t know how many actually go to an internet place and watch it.

 I´m literally always hot, but this week it rained and the temperature might have dropped below 80, so you could say its winter here too! The mosquito’s aren´t too bad, but I always have at least one bite somewhere on me.

Quick story, I saw my fist voodoo thingy the other day! Haitians were playing bongos and doing this weird creole chant around this fire with candles around it and they were throwing sawdust in it to make it flash and this one guy was like having a seizure and the spirit was gone and it was super sketch. When we walked by an hour later after the lesson everyone was gone but there was a wooden cross dressed up like a person with three candles in front of it. Crap is weird here!! I love it!

We do service projects about once a transfer with the zone and whenever the ward organizes one or someone needs our help.

I got your package and I really enjoyed decorating for Christmas and my companion enjoyed taking a nap before weekly planning haha. We have the little train set up and we wear our Santa hats during planning every night haha. I really liked reading the notes from everyone, so thanks for that! I hope everything is good back in Utah!

                Things are going good and if everything works out we should be having at least two more baptisms in the next month! I’ll tell you more about them next week when we firm up the details!

 It was such a good week!

 Love,

Elder Harsh

Week 16

Hi Everyone!

Well its T minus 5 days to my first 4 baptisms and I couldn´t be more excited! It’s the 3 kids of the investigators who are waiting to get married, and the other one is the son of the less active lady, who is now active in the church! During the interviews, Elder Zetina asked who they wanted to baptize them and they chose me! I am really excited but now I have to learn how to baptize in Spanish, and memorize all their full names. People have like 7 names here! But I am really excited and am really looking forward to that!

 We didn´t have any kind of thanksgiving here. I didn´t even know it was thanksgiving until one of the sisters told me at the zone meeting. I have the conference report magazine so you don´t need to worry about sending me any conference talks. Do you know what zone Schlyer is in? We walk everywhere, but when we have our zone meetings we take a cab to get there. The taxis here are really really scary to ride in. Picture my Demolition derby car with windows, and you have one of the better looking taxis. Also the streets here are straight nuts.  Luckliy most of my area is in the boonies so I don´t have to deal with that too much. I can´t wait for my baptism and I will be sure to tell you all about it next week!

Also if you haven´t already sent the other package –could you put a few baseballs in there that would be great. Kids here don´t have baseballs and I would like to have a few to give away over the course of my mission. For example there is this six year old member that every p day comes and we play catch for a few minutes while he walks to school. He has a mitt but no ball and I would love to give him one for Christmas!

Love,

Elder Harsh

Week 15

Hi Everyone!

Well it happened!  I finally found a woman who can grow more facial hair than I can. That was a blow to my self esteem.

                Anyways… this week was very good. My companion is from Mexico and this week he cooked a bunch of Mexican food! It is a well known fact that if you cook me yummy food I will literally do ANYTHING, so I’ve been on kitchen duty all week and because the food was so yummy I didn´t even mind! Also we don’t have cupboards so after you wash the plates all I have to do is put them in the basket thingy haha.

Also it’s so hot here that I didn´t have ski fever at all until last week when Hayden told me Solitude is opening, and I unpacked my olympic ski tie and daydreamed about skiing all last week.  I´m not saying it’s a problem, but I have been having some serious adrenaline withdrawls! haha.

 Last week on P day we went and explored the jungle, and it was SO COOL! I forgot my camera, but no worries, we are going back to take pictures today after I play baseball with an investigator! But let’s just say I can now cross off ¨swing from a vine in the jungle like Tarzan¨ off my bucket list. I love it here.

 President Corbit has a rule that he only allows us to listen to music appropriate for sacrament meeting, so I don’t think you need to bother sending me any music.

 As for my investigators, this week was so good! Elder Zetina has been making me lead all of the lessons and extend all the commitment invitations and it is really helping my Spanish! Rarely do I have to ask for his help when explaining a concept! Also we have been really pushing to get investigators to come to church, because people here are lazy. Usually we would just have Alejandro y Jubelis and their family, and maybe one other investigator, but we really worked hard on explaining why church attendance is important and last week we had 8 investigators attend, and this week we had 13!! We have 4 baptisms coming up on the 6th of December. The kids of Alejandro y Jubelis, and one other that I don´t think I have told you about. He is 14, and the son of a less active lady. We re-taught the lady the restoration one day, and left a little booklet for her to study, but honestly I didn´t feel like she had much desire to return to church. The next lesson we show up and her son read the booklet, prayed about it, and he wanted to learn more and be baptized. He is very ready for baptism on the 6th, and he and his mom are attending church now!  We have a few others that have a goal for the 12th and 20th of December as well, so we will have to see how it goes! Well that’s about everything that’s going on with me!

Until next week!

Elder Harsh

Week 14

Hi Everyone!

Well it finally happened. It was last Monday night, I was still with the zone leader who speaks English and we were just chillin in our room talking when A SPIDER THE SIZE OF A MID-SIZED SEDAN RUNS INTO THE ROOM. This sucker was bigger than my hand!! My comp saw it first and he said ¨Wow that’s a big cockroach¨ I was pumped to see a massive cockroach and I peek over the side of my bed and it was a SPIDER! So I calmly squished it and went on with my night. PSHYCH!!!  I freaking lost my mind and it crawled under my comp´s bed! My comp moved the bed and it climbed up into the corner against the ceiling. I was a little distracted at the time, but my comp grabbed my camera and filmed us taking care of it, so I’ll send that home to you soon. It was not a good day.

 Anyways I got my new companion and his name is Elder Zetina. He is a really nice guy from Mexico and yeah, you guessed it, He doesn´t speak English. In this week I think he has said 2 words in English haha He speaks really really fast too. It’s really difficult to understand him, but it’s also helping me understand the Dominicans so it’s all good! This week I started actually understanding a lot of what was being said. I am teaching a lot better and I even led a few lessons this week!

 I haven´t used my mitt yet because if the kids have a ball, it’s just the stringy insides and its usually mildewy and gross, so I just borrow their mitt for a few minutes in between lessons. But today I am going to use my mitt when we play baseball with a less active and his buddies, so I´m pumped for that! We go to this internet place to email that has 3 computers that work (on a good day) and usually the power lasts long enough for me to write everyone! 

We are in the same apartment and I don’t really know where to get the ingredients to cook any treats, but Elder Zetina knows how to cook Mexican food and he really wants to cook it this week. HECK YEAH! If all goes well this will be the first week in 3 months I haven´t had rice! Elder Zetina really likes to cook, so while he cooks lunch I read out loud from the Book of Mormon in Spanish and he corrects my errors. It works out really well.  I’ve read the Book of Mormon twice since I’ve been out here, and each time I feel like it’s brand new. I am studying Jesus the Christ right now to help me understand the life and ministry of Christ because the people here are mostly Catholic so I figure it will help me. But that’s about everything for this week!

Love you!

Elder Harsh

Week 13

Hi everyone!

This week has been different but very good! The first part of the week I was in a trio in a city called Yamasa. It´s about an hour away from my old area, and the houses are nicer. We had power a lot more often but we only had running water on the back porch. On the bright side I am now a champion at bucket showers! So we served in that area and most of it was more city- like but part of it was out in the boonies. We had to hop across rocks to cross a river to get to one of our investigators houses. It was awesome. Also coming back from that house at night I saw fireflies! So that was dope.

The plan was to serve with them and work in Punta with our progressing investigators once a week, but that got changed and now I am with one of the Zone Leaders in Punta until tomorrow, when I get my new companion and work permanently in Punta. The Zone Leader is from Utah, and it has been the best three days of my life with him, because I finally have someone I can have conversation with! It also helps because my Spanish is getting to a point where I have very specific grammar questions or need to know how to say a phrase where a direct translation doesn´t work, so it’s nice being able to ask him.  I really hope that my new companion speaks English, because none of my other companions have and it’s difficult!

 We have 4 people with a baptism date for December 6th! The kids of Alejandro and Jubelis are going to be baptized while they wait for their parent´s to get married, and then after they are married the parents will be baptized too! The 4th one is the son of a less active lady. We taught her twice and on the second lesson we gave a very powerful lesson about keeping the Sabbath day holy and I committed her to come to church and she did! After sacrament meeting she came up to me and told me she wanted me to baptize her son.  So we went to teach him and he is very interested and wants to be baptized!

Today since I had an English comp I figured he could help me find a place to get a good haircut. We searched all over town to find someone that sort of knows how to cut white people hair, and the entire time he was bragging to his buddies that he gets to cut ¨perfect hair¨. That’s what they call white person hair haha. It wasn´t that bad of a haircut but I hated every second of it!  haha, as for me, I´m doing good. It has really helped having an English comp these past few days.  He has helped my teaching a ton. I really hope that my next companion speaks English. But I’m doing good and I´ll try and take some pictures to send home to you.

Elder Harsh

Week 12

Elder Harsh was transferred this week and didn't write a letter.