I absolutely love it here!

November 28, 2014

Hola!!!!!

 I absolutely love it here! My companion is Elder Critchlow. He’s a funny kid! He is a super hard worker which is good for me! He reminds me a lot of Riley! President Dyer and Hermana Dyer are really nice people. President Dyer’s devotionals are always the best! In my room, it’s me and my companion with two latin guys. Elder Abello is from Venezuela and Elder Chinchey is from Peru. We are able to talk to them now. They are so funny especially Elder Abello he has us cracking up every night! The food here is home cooked Bolivian food! Everyone jokes about the meat sometimes being cat “haha” but we did have bear meat with noodles and this fruit called something like “granadion". It’s this fruit that you crack open kind of like an egg shell and the inside looks like alien eggs. It looks nasty. You have to suck it and swallow without chewing or they say you can get sick. The texture is like a giant loogey, “haha” but its super sweet. I like it.

We were introduced to our first investigator our third day here! We didn’t know enough to teach in Spanish, but we did alright I think. The second time we met with him went really well. We taught about repentance because he said he had lots of problems and mistakes in his life. We were able to get the words out with the Holy Ghost helping us. All the meetings here are in Spanish “haha” but we are understanding more and more. Our classes are with our districts so we only have 8 people in our class. The teachers are great! I've learned more Spanish in 2 days than in 2 years of high school! Every week for church we have to prepare a talk in Spanish and they call one person from 5 of the 8 districts to talk. I didn't get called on but I felt like my talk was pretty solid for the first one. It was on how God reveals his gospel in every dispensation. We have a service day every week here and we do chores around the ccm(Spanish for mtc). We cleaned all the outside tables this week. And volleyball is so much fun! I've found an Elder to workout with too! Elder Johnson! He is awesome and he's showing me all kinds of missionary workouts. The pull up bars here are our best friends. Elder Torrez from the quorum of the seventy came to talk to us! We had a translator for the Americans! Our translator was new at it so it was kind of rough but I got the message. We get to go to the temple every week here, its awesome. We went on Wednesday and it was beautiful! You guys should watch “meet the mormon” it’s a great movie, we got to watch it last night. It was like all the emotions we had from leaving on our mission all came out. It’s a touching movie.

We were given a Thanksgiving dinner here because the cooks know how much it means to us! It was so good. We also listened in on the Thanksgiving devotional given by Elder Bednar at the provo mtc. It was so cool. He gave every missionary there a phone and put an email on the screen and had all the missionaries around the world send in questions and he answered as many as he could. It was awesome.

Elder Abello and Chinchey are leaving Tuesday to go to their missions. I’m going to miss them. They are really cool guys. 

Love you all,

Elder Harding