Four months.

Hey there! Guess what? I've officially been on a mission for four months. Crazy, huh? I don't even know where the time has gone, it's going by so quick. Anyways, this week was good! We started off the week with Family Home Evening which is held at the Senior Couple's house. I cannot even begin to explain to you how important senior couples are to a mission. They are complete life savers and I am so grateful for them. They make the biggest difference to the young missionaries. Anyways, we had two people from English Group who came to Family Night! It was so great. What wasn't as great is that we played Bingo but it was like Church Bingo so it had like, "Word of Wisdom" and "Resurrection" on it. The girls from English club were like, "....the what? What is this place?" Hahah. It was the awkwardest. But luckily, a girl from the ward, Nastia was here and she is preparing to go on a mission herself so she was able to kind of take over and really explain what we believed. Ward members are so crucial to missionary work. Here, we are really pushing for more member involvement because we just cannot do it alone. So I encourage all of you at home to get as involved with the missionaries as possible. Find people for them to teach, feed them dinner, offer them rides. Being a missionary is such a blessing but it is a challenge too and the ward members can make all the difference. Anyways, we are getting more and more support from the ward which is so great. We even had a ward council meeting which hasn't happened for so long, definitely a step in the right direction. Speaking of church, guess who had to speak in Sacrament meeting yesterday? Yup, this girl. I spoke about friendship, it was actually perfect because I got to talk about all my friends on missions and at home. And how I miss them but I'm excited to make friends with the ward too. I was way nervous because we have a new zone leader and he's actually Russian but speaks fluent English too. I'm always afraid to speak Russian in front of him, but before I spoke he went over my talk with me and helped me fix a few grammatical errors, so it was actually nice to have him there. Now, to my favorite part of the week... English! Haha. We've been working on making a more effective program this week. The one we have is based off of the Novosibirsk mission's program but the thing is they are out in the middle of Siberia where no one speaks English, here so many do. So we've been adapting it to make it more applicable here. That's really what a mission is all about I think, adaptation. Anyways, this week we had the word, "admiration" and so I had everyone go around and say someone or something they admired. One of my favorite people in my class is named Sergei. He's this huge, muscley guy but he's so kind and sweet. When we got to him he said, "I admire, uh, small kittens." Hahahaha. I died. I laughed so hard even though I tried to keep it in. He was completely serious. It was so funny. They also got the words, "incest" and "ancestors" confused. Haha. In other news, we went to the city Bor this week. And guess how we got there? By a chairlift. Cool, huh? It's just across the river from us and there's this way cool chairlift that's faster than a bus so we took it. We love adventure. Anyways, that's pretty much been my week! I'm grateful to be here. I love my mission more everyday. It's definitely different than I thought but it's exactly what I need. Heavenly Father always knows much better than we do. That's a big lesson I'm learning on my mission. I love you all! Have the best of weeks! Love, Cectpa Harris 

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Hi, there.

Hi, everyone! I miss you all dearly. This week went by so fast and a lot of things happened. It's kind of easier to put it into list form so that's what I'm going to do:

 

1. Our hot water turned off. Every summer in Russia they turn off the hot water so they can clean out the pipes because the pipes are 3847 years old and filled with who knows what. Sometimes it's only for a few days, sometimes it's for a week, sometimes it for the whole summer. We have been so lucky because it hasn't been off while we are here. But, alas, we have now experienced the joys of taking freezing showers. Adventure. Luckily, it was just off for four days and we now have hot water again.

 

2. English Group. I cannot sing English Group's praises enough. I love it so much. I love teaching. In my class I like to run it a little bit different because I think learning should be fun. So we play a lot of games. I also like making Russians say semi-ridiculous things because it's so funny. So before class starts I make everyone go around the room and introduce themselves. And then after I make the class pretend we are at an AA meeting and say, "Hi, Sasha." or whatever the name is. Except every time I change it so sometimes it's ,"hi" and sometimes it's "holler" and sometimes it's "howdy." Hahaha. It's so funny. There's also this guy in my class that's a total punk. So I taught them all the word punk and we all call him that. I love it. Oh, also we do a story every week and we say it in English and then a Russian translates that way they're getting more understanding. So I decided to tell my most embarrassing story. Hahah. I don't know why, but I did and told 50 Russians about the time in 6th grade when I had underwear in the hood of my coat. They loved it.

 

3. We had Zone Conference this week so we got to go to Moscow. It was way cool because we got to take a night train. Night trains are legit. It's like the Hogwart's Express. So we left Nizhny at like 10:30 on the train and then got into Moscow at 6:30 in the morning. You could sleep during that time, which we did a little but it's way more fun to stay up and talk to all the missionaries because we're all on the same train. And then we had Zone Conference and were back on another train the next day. It was exhausting but so fun.

 

4. Good news!! We now have the first mission ward leader the branch has ever had. It's way cool because hopefully the ward will start to make more of an effort in helping the missionaries now. Currently, it's way difficult because they rely so much on the missionaries for everything and we just can't be super effective without their support and their own missionary work.

 

5. So I watched a video on LDS.org about what it's like to be a sister missionary. Hahaha. You can watch it. But that's not what it's like being a sister missionary. At least not in a foreign country and especially in Eastern Europe. I was reading Sister Mecham's email from last week and at the end she talks about how her mission president sent them a letter that talks about how their missions are hard and how they might not be their favorite things but that they will become their favorite things when they look back on them. That's way more accurate. I will make no bones about it, this is the hardest thing I have ever done. Without a doubt. People are not always nice. We don't have a lot of people to teach. We are a finding mission. Does that mean I don't want to be here? Not at all. I want to be here. I'm grateful for the opportunity to do something hard, to become better than I am, to grow closer to my Heavenly Father. I am honored to serve these people even though I don't understand them sometimes, in language and in culture. I'm grateful to be a missionary at this time and I know I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, even when I'm missing all of you so much. I'm learning so much and hopefully becoming so much. The biggest thing I have learned so far on my mission is that Heavenly Father loves us and He wants us to be happy. Men are that they might have joy. And part of that joy comes from knowing we have a Father in Heaven who listens and answers our prayers.

 

I love you! I hope you are having wonderful weeks and that everything is going so good. You're always in my prayers!

 

Love, Cectpa Harris 

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More pictures! There's one with my favorite baby in the branch, Vika, one with the Ecuadorians (they make us feel like we are serving in South America. They're so nice. We love them so much.) The creepy bunker I was talking about, Elder Weinheimer who I went to high school with, my companion, and our branch building.

Sorry, I haven't sent pictures in forever. Here they are! There are some of my apartment, P-Day at the zoo, Nizhniy, and the view from my apartment

This crazy week.

Hi. This week has been crazy! I can't believe I'm already writing home again. It went by so fast. Mainly what I want to talk about is English Group. You will not believe it. So, we have English Group as one of our tools for missionary work. And I'm a huge believer in it because it helps us to get to know people and become friends with them first before we jump into the Gospel. It's missionary work without the words because they see our example and get to have fun with us and then want to know why we are the way we are. It's just the greatest. So it's an 8 week program with a 4 week break so we can advertise and get ready for it. And this week was the first week it started back up again. We have spent so much time contacting and handing out flyers and this week we got to see it all pay off. We had 50 people there. That's huge. I wish I could better explain how huge that is, but that's huge. Moscow usually gets less than that and we are in a city 1/16 of it's size. It's such a big deal. I taught the Intermediate class. It was so fun. I love the classroom setting. I made the Russians play all sorts of crazy games and anytime someone would speak in Russian I would yell, "ENGLISH ONLY ZONE. YOU'LL ONLY GET BETTER IF YOU PRACTICE." Hahaha. They think I'm crazy. But they love it. I get to boss them and I get to speak English. It's a party. And out of the 50 people that were there, there are 19 who said they would like to know more about the Church. AH. It's seriously the coolest. We were so happy. In other news, we had a Book of Mormon Fireside on Saturday. We've been preparing for it for about 6 weeks and it happened on Saturday. It was pretty cool because our Mission President and his wife plus a Russian area 70 came. We had youth speakers and members and video clips all about the Book of Mormon. It was way cool. We also got to take the Mission President's wife around earlier that day and she contacted with us. It was a really cool opportunity because she got to see how ineffective contacting is. That sounds weird but really, gospel contacting isn't effective. And my companion and I have been looking for ways to change missionary work here because whatever we're doing really isn't working. So we've been thinking of all sorts of new ideas and we got to talk the President's wife's ear off all about our new ideas for the mission. It was so good. Hopefully we'll get to talk with them more about it. I've been praying so hard to know why I'm here and how I can help the Mission. And I feel like this is an answer to my prayers. I feel like we have a lot of good ideas that could really be effective and I'm way excited about their potential. That's about it for me this week! We have Zone Conference this week so we'll be going into Moscow. I'm way excited because I'll get to see some of my MTC district! I love you all. I hope you have the best of weeks! Love, Cectpa Harris

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Transfers Week.

This week is transfers week. WHAT THE HECK. I'm done with my first transfer! I will be staying with my same companion in my same area because I'm still in training. I'm stoked about that because I love my area and my companion so much. It's been so rainy this week which is hard because Russians are scared of the rain and then they fig us. But we still met with Tanya and were able to give her a Book of Mormon! We're so excited about it. She's leaving for a trip to Germany for two weeks on Tuesday though so we're just praying way hard that she'll read it while she's gone. On Friday it was Paratroopers day. I looked around all day for people dressed in Star Wars costumes but that's Storm Troopers not Paratroopers. I hope someone laughs at that joke. Anyways, we had to go in early for safety reasons because Russians love to be drunk on holidays. But we're fine and got to work in the area book which was kind of nice. Okay. Miracle time. So I met this man contacting on the street. His name is Victor and he's so nice. Anyways, he said he would come to church and then he didn't. Which is typical. So I just kind of forgot about him. Then we were walking to church yesterday and got a call from a random number. We answered and it was Victor asking where the church building was! VICTOR CAME TO CHURCH. GAHHHHH. We were so excited. Still are. I love it so much. I'm so happy. He came and he sat by me and I was able to give him Book of Mormon and tell him why I was here. It was honestly the biggest miracle and tender mercy. It reminded me that I am so excited to share the gospel and that the work is moving forward here even when it seems kind of slow. The blessing comes after the trial of your faith. That's real. Anyways. All is well in Russia.  I love you all so much. I hope you have the best of weeks. Love, Cectpa Harris

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