To our dear Sister Harris family,

I just wanted to let you know your daughter arrived safely today in Moscow and we love her already!  What a fine missionary she is.  Thank you for letting us have her for the next 15 months and we will watch over and care for her.  I have attached a picture of her that was taken this afternoon shortly after she arrived.  She will be here in the mission home with us tonight and tomorrow night and on Thursday she will meet her trainer.  My husband has given her one of our very best sisters as her trainer, Sister Wright from Fort Collins, Colorado, and they will serve in our Upper Nizhni Novgorod Branch.  Nizhni Novgorod is about a four hour express train ride northeast of Moscow with about a million people.  We have two branches in Nizhni and both are very strong.

Our P-Days are on Mondays and that is when they can email home, do their laundry, shopping, etc.  Our address for all letters, packages, etc.  is:

        Russia Moscow Mission

        Muravskaya St., Building 1, Floor 3

         Moscow  125310

         Russia

We are excited to have our Sister Harris here in our Russia Moscow Mission.  If you ever have any questions or concerns please feel free to email me.

Love,

Sister Sorenson

The companion! We've been together for over 1000 hours straight. Holy Hannah. You could say we know each other well. Anyways, I love you all! Have a great week.

The first one is of Sister Jennings and me. She's going to Vladivistok but she also has an Elder going to Hungary. So cool. She's probably one of the world's sweetest human beings. I love her. The second is of our district with our favorite teacher, Brother Hale and his girlfriend.

The first one is of Sister Ladd and Sister Nabatnikova. I went to high school and EFY with Sister Ladd and her companion, Sister Nabatinokova is from Moscow! Crazy, huh? She's the cutest. She gave us the name of her branch so that we could make sure to say hi to her family. The second is of me and and elder in my district. We matched so obviously we're going to Preference together. His name is Elder Hepworth and he's from Colorado. We are going to the same mission.

People from home!

Sister Cierra Lesuer   

Elder Mark

Pictures

These ones are from my birthday.

Last Email from the MTC!!!!

I had to use that subject line because about a month ago I walked by a Sister's computer and saw her type that. I remember wishing so badly it was my last week and now it finally is! Praises be. I'm so excited. I love the MTC. Really and truly, I do. It's a great place. But I've been here for 56 days. We're offically the oldest ones here. Oldest being longest ones here. And I'm out of my mind excited to be in the field. This week has flown by (as every week seems to) but a lot of big things have happened too. We got our travel plans!!!! We will be leaving Monday morning at 4:30 am. We go to the Salt Lake Airport and have a direct flight from there to Moscow. Yeah, it is insanity. Apparently there is no scheduled flight that does that so the church arranged it special for us. Which is cool. I do wish we had a layover though because it will be around a 16 hour flight. We leave the Salt Lake Airport at 8:30 am on the 24th and get to Moscow at 9:30 on the 25th. CRAZY TOWN. I'm going to Russia. Wow. Anyways, we also got our new nametags with the Russian spelling of our last names. It looks sweet. Oh, we also got moved to the new Russian Branch that was created. There are now three Russian Branches at the MTC. We have 110 new Russians coming in tomorrow, the majority of which will go to our branch. Included will be the first ever all sisters branch. Crazy, right? I would not want to deal with that much estrogen. Haha. Also, my companion and I are now the Sister Training Leaders. Which is kind of the female counterpart to the Zone Leaders. We will take the new sisters on a tour and conduct interviews with the senior sister companions in our branch. We're leaving in 6 days so it won't be for very long but we're excited to be able to help out.

 

In other news, I got to go on a field trip yesterday. It was so great. I had to go to the dentist and so we go to leave the MTC for the first time in 55 days. I had totally forgotten the outside world even existed. It was so good to see that life goes on outside the MTC and there's more to the world than skirts and nametags. It made me excited all over again to go to Russia and start talking to people even though I probably won't be able to understand them and they probably won't be able to understand me. It'll be a party. Things inside the MTC are alive and well. I feel like since the age change the normality of sister missionaries have leveled out but no worries, there are still some very... unique Sisters here. I don't know if this is an appropriate story but I'll tell it anyways. Cool. One night I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth and two Sisters come in. They go into stalls next to each other and start talking. Not that weird... yet. So I'm finishing washing my face and I hear one of the sisters start to coach the other sister on going to the bathroom. She's like, "You can do it!!! Keep trying! You've got this!" And then the other sister replies and she's like, "Oh my gosh, thank you. I don't know if I can. Nothing is happening. I just don't know." And I was honestly so confused. I was just like, who are these people? It continued for like the next 5 minutes. I couldn't even get a grip because it was unreal that had just happened. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for companionship unity but I legitmately treasure the time I have in the bathroom by myself. Is that weird? I hope so. Maybe it's just our hall. We have a room right next to the Hermanas (the sisters going to Spanish speaking countries) and for some reason they like to have a fiesta right before we go to sleep. I have no idea what they do in there or why but all I know is they have a good time doing it. It continues to be a Snow Canyon High School reunion in here which is super cool, I love seeing familiar faces.

 

We have so much to do before we leave! They want us all packed before Thursday. Thursday we have in-field training all day long and then Saturday we get to meet our mission presidents. And Sunday we get to sing for the Prophet! We are all so excited. It's going to be a really cool broadcast. The Choir alone will be 2200 people, 1300 missionaries and 900 members from throughout Utah Valley. We have another devotional tonight at the Marriot Center as well. Basically, I'm going to Russia so soon and it's the coolest thing of my life. A week from today I will be in Moscow. Probably asleep. So that will be nice. I plan to spend the majority of the flight sleeping because that's become a foreign concept to me these days. Everyday it becomes more and more clear to me that Heavenly Father is very mindful of every one of us. We got to go to the temple today for the last time for probably our whole missions. I love the Temple. And it hit me again why I'm going on mission today while we were there. The Gospel is all about families, all about love, all about the opportunity to be with the people we love forever. And that is possible through the Temple. I'm so grateful for the Temple and for the blessing it has been in my life and I know that I want other people to experience the joy the Temple brings. I want them to see their family in the Celestial Room and have that feeling of, "Yeah, this is what heaven will be like." And that's why I'm going on a mission. That's what keeps me going even when I'm so tired I don't know left from right, (who am I kidding, I don't know left from right on a good day), when I have no idea what English is being spoken to me, let alone Russian. That's what makes me excited to be a missionary and to spend this time serving my Heavenly Father and my Savior. I love you all so much it hurts. I hope you are doing so, so, so well. Have a wonderful week! The next time I talk to you I'll officially be in Russia!

 

Love, Cectpa Harris

 

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The Days are Marching On!

Guess what? I'm 20! Thank you, thank you, thank you for making my birthday so great. I cannot even tell you all how much I loved my presents, packages, and letters. They made me so happy and definitely made my day so special. I started off the day to waking up to a loud knock on the door. I went and opened it to find my door covered in sticky notes from Sister Mecham and the sisters in her room. I'm going to attach a picture. It was so sweet. They had all written things they loved about me and made a sign that said, "Happy Birthday! We love Sister Harris because...." and then the sticky notes were all nice things. Then another sign that said, "Love, the Sisters in 321." Like, what the heck? Could they get any more darling? It was the cutest. Definitely a fabulous start to the day. Then, we went to class. The Elders wouldn't let me come in the room for a second but when I did, all the lights were off. They yelled, "Surprise!" and turned on the lights. They had made me this fantastic card (which I also am sending a picture of.) that used candy to replace some of the words and it was on this cut up box. It was so funny and so nice of them to take the time to make it for me. They had also bought me a normal card and all wrote nice things to me. I'm thorougly convinced we have the best Elders in the entire world. Then, they all went out in the hall and told me to sit down. They come in and start singing this Russian folk song and doing this dance formation. Hahahaha. It was unreal. I'm going to try to send the video of it so hopefully that works. When my teacher got to class she had me come up and sit in a chair at the front of the class. Apparently in Russia it's a tradition to pull on the birthday person's ears as many times as they are old. So she like tugged on my ears 20 times. It was not enjoyable. Haha. And then my other teacher sang the Russian Birthday song to me. I advise you all to look it up on youtube because it's great. I got a package from Jill and Scott which was seriously the greatest and then I got a package from Micki and Tiffany and my grandparents. Holy cow. Why do I have the best family in the entire world? I cannot even begin to tell you how much all of that meant to me. The present from Micki and Tiff is probably the greatest thing of my entire life. Oh my gosh. I couldn't even look at it without crying and I spent personal study reading it. I couldn't keep from laughing and crying and smiling the whole time. I am so blessed. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the 20 Things Book. I love it more than air. It's the greatest thing. Oh, and the skirt and shirt and picture were great too! Thank you so much! Anyways, guess who I ran into on my birthday as well? Elder Neely! Cool, huh? He had to come up to this MTC for this teaching thing he was helping and I happened to run into him so we got to talk for a minute. That was a pretty cool birthday present too! Overall, it was a super fantastic birthday. I cannot say this enough, THANK YOU. (yes, please read that as if I'm yelling.) Because you're all the best. It was so good.

 

Other than that this week has flown by! I have 13 days left in the MTC. I cannot wait! Send me on that plane to Russia, please. We are all so excited. We get our travel plans on Thursday and it's almost all I can think about. I have been so grateful for my time at the MTC but I'm soooo ready to be in Russia. I do have a couple of stories of cool things that happened this week though. So one of our teachers, Sister Brewer is just the coolest. She's a native from Russia and she joined the Church when she was 15. Then she went on a mission to Temple Square. There, she would sometimes give tours in Russian. One of the ones she gave was to a pretty high profile Russian Ambassador. During this time was when there were very few missionaries being let into Russia, it was about a year or two ago. So she gave this tour and she felt that it went horrible. She just didn't feel like it was very good at all and that the ambassador seemed totally disinterested but she kept going anyways. The Ambassador met with one of the 70 later that night and talked about how impressed he was with his tour guide and asked where they found such exceptional young people. He then went on to say he was going to do everything in his power to get more missionaries into Russia. How cool is that? We're all here, going to Russia because of cute little Sister Brewer's tour. The power of one person is pretty dang cool.

 

Also, I had my exit interview on Sunday. I cannot believe that. It feels like a week ago I had just got here and didn't know one word of Russian. I still don't know a ton but I can have a conversation in Russian. Granted, it has to be about the gospel but since that's my purpose I'm pretty happy about that. Also, right now there are currently two Russian Branches. We are getting 100 more Russians in one week so this week they are creating a third Russian branch. Crazy, huh? The work is really moving forward in Russia and I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am to be a part of it. Oh, and tonight we are going to the first ever MTC Devotional to be held at the Marriot Center. We've exceeded numbers that can fit here! That's a pretty legit problem to have. Both MTC campuses will be bussed or walking to the BYU Marriot Center tonight and rumor has it that someone pretty big is going to be speaking. So cool. In Relief Society this week they said we have 1297 sisters at this MTC plus more at the other campus. That's insanity. They had over 850 missionaries come in last week. So cool.

 

Oh, and of course, how can I forget one of my most embarassing moments thus far. So we are teaching our "investigator", her name is Gala and shes' actually our teacher. Anyways, she's playing herself before she was converted so she's really fun to teach. So we taught her yesterday and she asked how we were doing. I said we were doing very good, or "ochen horashow." Then she asked why. I told her because she was our favorite person to see. I did an exact translation from English to Russian which is, "loobeemie chelovyek." But in Russian that's what they call their boyfriends. So I told her we were doing good because she was our boyfriend and we got to see her. Perfect. It was so awkward. She laughed and I couldn't even pull it together because I was laughing to hard. Hahah. So great.

 

I don't really have much else to say! The days are marching on. I basically sit in a classroom and study the Gospel and Russian for 16 hours a day. OH! I saw Sister LeSeueur. That's not spelled right. I didn't get to be her host but I ran into her a couple of days later. She's doing so good and it's so fun to see her around the MTC. I also ran into Elder Mark and I get to see Sister Mecham everday so that's the greatest thing. I love you all so much. Thank you for all the things you do for me and for the letters and packages and the best birthday ever. I couldn't ask for anything more. I love you! Have a fantastic week.

 

Love, Cectpa Harris

 

Oh, also, several people have asked me this. You say Cectpa: see es tra. It's not super different from Sister. Love you!

 

 

It's not easy but it's worth us!

I honestly cannot even remember what happened this last week. Time is just the weirdest. You'll probably hear me say that (or read me say that? I don't know.) at least 5969 more times. Because truly, it's bizarre. I'm doing well though! I had a pretty tough day on Wednesday, I don't even know why. It was just really hard and I felt really down. But I got a blessing and that helped a ton. I also found this article, "The Fourth Missionary" which legit changed my mission. Everyone should read it. Maybe you can google it or something because it is out of this world fantastic. We continued teaching our investigator's, Sasha and Anton. We comitted Anton to baptism and it was THE coolest thing. Seriously. So we committed him to baptism on Friday and we say everything and extend the commitment and then he says, "What is baptism?" And we're like, ".........." Hahaha. Oh dear. It was bad. And we tried our best to explain it but we ran out of time. So we told him we would talk about it more in the next lesson. So our next lesson we focused only on baptism and what the covenant means. It was really cool because we had to super simplify it because, hello, Russian. However, I'm always amazed at how simple the Gospel really is. It's so easy to understand, we just overcomplicate it. Thanks to Russian, I won't have that problem anymore. Haha. So after our lesson about baptism we asked him if he would be baptized when he's ready. And he said, "When I recieve an answer of the truth I will be baptized." AH. It was the coolest. The Spirit was so strong and we were so happy. Pretty sure Sister Parker and I had the biggest idiot grins on our faces and we were trying so hard to express our enthusiasm in Russian. Basically I just said, "MbI ochen chastye!" which means we are very happy. We definitely did a happy dance in the hall afterwards. Even though these are pretend investigators, I'm learning so much and I can tell how cool it will be to teach an actual investigator and get to know them and love them.

 

One of our teachers, Brother Doroshkin left this week. He and his family are moving to Idaho. We were all super sad because we spend so much time with our teachers and they become our best friends. We have all learned so much from him, about the Gospel and Russian. It was so cool because during our last class with him we got to walk up to the Temple and take a picture as a district. He's actually not very much older than us, I think he's 25. So he has a wife and this darling baby we get to see pictures of all the time but he surprised us on the way to the temple and we got to meet his wife and baby. They were so, so darling. He speaks Russian to his baby and she just doesn't even put up with it. Haha. It's great. Sister Mecham and I get to have little chats every night because we live on the same floor. It's seriously the biggest blessing. We always get ready for bed together and then give a little review of our day. The MTC is so busy and so full. It makes it so exciting though. You can hear so many different languages and discussions going on all the time. The work is moving forward.

 

 Sunday was Misison Conference because it was Fast Sunday so that was cool because everyone in the MTC meets together for a two hour block. For the musical number a sister sang, "I Believe in Christ." It was so pretty. The line that really stuck out to me was, "From Him I'll gain my fondest dream." And I sat there thinking, what is my fondest dream? And then I realized: my fondest dream is to be a mom and a wife; to raise a family, nurture my children, and be able to spend eternity with them. I can think of nothing better. And when I started thinking about that then I connected that to my purpose as a missionary. I want the people of Russia to be able to attain their fondest dreams. I want them to know they can be with their families forever. It's just so cool. I love being a missionary. Even if I do have to wear a skirt all the time and shave my legs like everyday which is quickly becoming one of my least favorite things to do.

 

 Anyways, we had Fast and Testimony too which is so good. This Sister stood up and was talking about when she was taking notes how she meant to write, "It's not easy, but it's worth it." But instead she wrote, "It's not easy but it's worth us." And then she talked about how that was so real, the work we have been called to isn't easy and sometimes we'll have hard days. But the joy we feel from the Atonement is worth our effort. Sharing eternal life with our fellow men is worth us. It was so cool. I've been here for 41 days. Craaaazzzyyy town. Seriously, that's nuts. I only have 20 more days to go. PRAISES BE. Do not get me wrong, I love the MTC but I'm so ready to be in Russia already. OH. Also, I'm in the choir. On June 23rd there will be this broadcast about missionary work. It's from the Marriot Center at BYU. The First Presidency and many of the 12 will be there and the MTC Choir will be singing at it! It will be so cool. So if for some reason you see it, look for me! It's open to the public and I'm pretty sure it will be broadcast at Stake Centers. There's more info on LDS.org under Upcoming Events. We're all so excited. And there couldn't be a better way to spend my last day at the MTC. I actually should be getting my travel plans next week so I'll be sure to let everyone know about that! Pretty much my brain goes like this, "Russia Russia Russia. Mail." And that's about it. I love you all so much and am so grateful for you! Thank you for writing me and making my day. I couldn't be more happy to know you and to love you. I hope you have a most splendid week!

 

Love,

 

Cectpa Harris

Pictures

The first one is of all of us cute sisters with only one more month to go! I seriously love these Sisters. They are some quality human beings.

The second is of three fourths of the Unit reunited at the MTC. We missed Tanner so much in this moment it was unreal.