"He isn't the best fisherman"

December 15, 2014

Hey!

The funeral looked amazing! It looks so cool!! 

Cole is a man now! Haha! But he isn’t the best fisherman!

Anyway, nothing much has happened since Friday except I am no longer with my companion! As of right now I am waiting for my companion to get here from Argentina!! I'm super excited to meet him! So tonight, we get to watch a movie and stay up late waiting for everyone! We will also get more North Americans.

Today we got to go on tour! It was a lot of fun! We went to this Catholic church on top of this mountain! It was cool! We also got to go to a gold museum and see a lot of the city. Man, I can’t get over how they drive here. No one stops until its absolutely necessary. Its nuts! I am having a great time in the ccm and learning a lot. President Dyer has talks with us and goes into extreme depth about the plan of salvation and it is absolutely mind blowing. He is a really neat and spiritual guy, I have learned so much from him! 

Sorry the letter is short. 

Love 

Elder Harding

"Go for it!"

December 12, 2014

Hola!!

First off I want to say happy birthday mom!!!! I cant believe luna got your cake!! hahaha! It’s funny though! It’s been raining a lot here this week. We got to watch the Christmas devotional live this week, it was awesome! I've also became friends with the cook. he's a cool guy and my companion and I talk with him every time we walk by. The most exciting thing that happened this week was that we went proselyting! So, they took us on a bus to this poor ghetto part of town and pretty much said go for it! haha! so my companion and I start walking looking for people to teach and for the first 30 minutes absolutely no one wanted to talk to us! We were getting down but we said a prayer and we found this lady that we started talking to and at first she was terrified of us but we smiled and got to know her and told her about the book of mormon and she accepted it and said she would read it! So the next lady we talked to was a super cool and nice lady and she was very interested. She felt lonely because she didn't have family in Bogota and she wanted all the information about the church so she can go to church! It was awesome! And she accepted a book of mormon also! The last lady we had success with had us walk and talk with her for 2 blocks! She was almost impossible to understand but with the spirit to guide us we were able to pick out some stuff and say the right things. She also wanted to read the book of mormon! After we got done talking to her we realized we had no idea where we were! haha! We kept trying to talk to people and we eventually found our way back. As we were walking we saw this dude drop his pants and drop a duce in the road and use the dirty rain water on the road to clean up!! It was nasty but funny at the same time. We were running out of time so we were looking for the church bus to pick us up and this guy wanted to talk to us and we were like, oh cool he's probably interested in the church! Ah, nope. He just starts chewing us out about how our church is wrong and so is every other church ever established! He just kept going on and on and we could not even understand him! We were late at this point and I tried to give him hand outs and leave but he wouldn't touch them. He just kept chewing us out and wouldn't let us leave! So finally he stopped for a second and we were able to end it and go back. haha! It was awesome!

Love,

Elder Harding

Mom,

When president told me about grandpa it hit me hard. I was having trouble finishing the day, but then after I talked with president for a while and he reminded me of the beauty of the plan of salvation, I felt a little better. My district was very supportive and wrote me letters and that helped me a lot. Now I see the beautiful side of it. I cant stop picturing him, with grandma Dianne smiling and being beyond happy. I know you’re okay but i cant help but to worry about you and pray for you. 

Uhhhh...what now?

December 3, 2014

Hola!

I had a cool little experience about prayers being answered even the small ones! So I lost my cord to plug in my camera to send pictures and my companion and I looked everywhere! We went through all my drawers and it was not there. We were praying throughout the day and after a long day of being frustrated I opened my drawer and it was sitting right on top of everything!

Here in Colombia it pretty funny because every 5 minutes there is a car alarm going off. This isn’t the best neighborhood. The flies here are giant! They are like the size of a quarter and they just sit on the outside walls! Not much has happened since I last emailed. We had our tour early because the teachers were having a Christmas party or something. After we went to the temple we changed and the bus driver took us to the spot where we do the tours and dropped us off and left. So we were sitting there like uhhhh what now? There was supposed to be a teacher to come get us but they never came! So we were wandering the streets of Bogota not knowing very little Spanish! Haha! It was fun though. We were just like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Everyone was just staring at us. Then around 4:00, the bus driver came to get us again and then we went to a jersey shop and bought some jerseys and stuff. Oh, the hype here in the ccm is a chocolate bar called “jet bars”. In each package there are these stickers of animals and stuff. There are 300 stickers and everyone here collects them and trades them. Some people even found a way to smuggle them through the fence. It’s so funny to me. 

Our latin roommates left for their missions. It was really sad because I got really close to them. But I know they will be great missionaries.

My new roommate is Elder Nichols and his latin roommate, whom we are still waiting to arrive. We got some more Latins from Chile, Argentina and Venezuela. All the Latins are super cool. We also got 4 North American missionaries!

My Spanish is slowly improving I still struggle to understand it when people speak it but if I read it, I can pick out more words and understand it. 

Love,

Elder Harding

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