I had a conversation yesterday with a friend of mine who was a recently returned missionary. It was a lot of fun to reminisce about our experience serving as a missionary. We told crazy stories about mission rumors and urban legends, missionaries finding creative ways to bend mission rules, stories of being sick, etc. At the end of our conversation, I concluded that we need to get some team of anthropologists to do an in-depth ethnography about the LDS mission experience. Seriously, my mission was a wonderful experience, but it was also totally and completely weird. I don’t necessarily blame the Dominican people, or the country, or the church for this. I just think the experience itself, the sending of young people from all over to proselyte, will inevitably be an unusual one. I forget sometimes how strange it is to the rest of the world that we, as a church, send tens of thousands of over eager 20-somethings off to foreign lands to wander around in dress clothes and name tags. If I were to review my life, some of the strangest experiences (good and bad) of my life happened on my mission. I could write a hundred posts about how odd missions actually are and can be.
But instead, I want to hear from all of you readers. I have learned as a web denizen that there are tons of wonderfully ridiculous stories out there that are not often shared. Because many of my stories involve diarrhea or vomiting, I don’t really get to share them, either.March, at least in the world of college basketball, is a month of fierce competition. In the spirit of the month, I have decided to put on an internet-wide contest. To all who have ever served missions: In narrative form, share your craziest, most absurd, most ridiculous mission story in the comment section. Lessons gone awry, crazy investigators… I want to hear it all. You can be as brief or as verbose as you would like. A panel of judges will review the stories. They will be evaluated based on 1.) how crazy they are, 2.) how awesome they are, and 3.) how hilarious they are. The winner of the Missionary March Madness challenge will receive a super awesome digital drawing of your story, done by an artist who will be revealed at a later date.
I can’t wait to read your awesome stories.
Note: I will include my story in the comment section as well. It will not be included in the contest
Thomas Hatton
Thomas has lived all over the place, but calls Kentucky his home. He served as a missionary in the Dominican Republic West Mission. He is father to a beautiful boy and a precious girl. In his free time, Thomas loves to read, draw pictures in MS Paint, and sing heavy metal from the 80's.
All posts by Thomas Hatton
I was on splits with two of the other sisters. We were tracting in a neighborhood that was full of older houses with screened front porches. It was my habit that, if it wasn’t my turn to give the door approach, I would hang back at the porch door so as not to crowd whoever answered the door.
It wasn’t long after night-fall that we knocked on a particular door. The woman who answered declined our invitation to hear our message, but then said “You girls should have come last night. There was a UFO circling the neighborhood. It followed my son home from school!”
The woman then shouldered her way past my companions, and came to the door of the porch, effectivly trapping them on the porch. She pointed up at the sky “It was just there,” she said. I turned to look, and she screamed “IT’S BACK!” She looked at me. “Are you freaked out yet?” She asked.
“Um,” I said “I think that’s just a spotlight”.
“Oh, no. OH NO! That’s a UFO!” She then spotted her son a few houses away. “Jeffery, Jeffery! Get in here, quick! The UFO is back!”
Poor Jeffery slunk up the walkway, and into the house. “It’s just a spotlight,”he muttered as he passed his mother.
By this time, my companions were able to free themselves from the porch, and we continued on our way.
We showed up to deliver a BOM from a TV referral. A tiny little old man answered the door, buck naked. As he explained to us that he couldn’t possibly read it because it was too small, his ancient Dalmatian hobbled over and started gnawing toothlessly on my comps leg. We ordered a large print BOM and brought it back a couple weeks later. He was delighted (and fully clothed) but the Dalmation had gone to his eternal reward.
I had a companion that was terribly afraid of dogs. A member gave him a small keychain size can of self defense pepper spray. One day as we were tracting in a suburban area of middle Tennessee, we had a small terrier dog follow us from house to house annoyingly barking and yapping. This went on down the street for 2 or 3 homes when I suggested he test out his pepper spray on it. Seeing no one was around, he sprayed the dog right in the eyes with a long stream. Rather than detering the creature it turned into a raging attacking hell hound and went right after my companions leg, biting and chasing him. I of course couldn’t assist due to the shock of the absurd hilarity occurring before me.
A different companion rebuked an attacking husky in the name of Jesus with the right arm to the square. To my amazement, it worked!
Oh, missionaries and arm to the square thing. I remember hearing about some missionaries thinking that there was a demon in their apartment, so they tried to make up some prayer for casting out a demon.
Paris, located outside the Belgium-Brussels mission, is off limits unless specifically authorized by the mission president. I received a transfer order from Amiens, where I was serving as Branch President, to Troyes to finish my mission as DL. Since going around Paris by train would be terribly difficult, I was given express permission to travel outside the mission and pass through Paris.
I mentioned this to my first counselor and his family during the week before my transfer. I arranged for an early train from Amiens to Paris, and a late train from Paris to Troyes so I could do some sightseeing. After all, it might be my only chance to see the sights in Paris.
I arrived at the train station bright and early, and was surprised to find the very eligible daughter of my first counselor at the train station with a round trip ticket to Paris. She volunteered to be my guide, so I had my first and last date on my mission. And this was an all-day date! We had a blast tripping all around Paris, even visiting Pigalle, the X-rated section of the city.
As we said our goodbyes at the train station, she presented me with a gift: a tie. OK, two gifts. I was expecting the innocent kiss on the cheek and instead got an open mouth kiss with tongue. It was easily the best day of my mission.
Needless to say, I did not see any value in including this narrative in my weekly letter/report to President Arrigona.
Out tracting one day we came across this ancient JW woman. We got through “Hi, we’re missionaries…” and she took over the conversation. When she started talking there were maybe 3-5 teeth poking out of her gums at odd angles. As she spoke her teeth began to disappear :o. Occasionally we could see pieces of them (I guess the teeth were breaking up?) bouncing around inside her mouth. On more than one occasion a piece would get stuck on her lip and she would quickly lick it back into her mouth. By the time we left I think she only had two teeth left in her head.
I was serving in a border town between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The only activate make adult was mentally unstable, his name was Nicandro. One day my companion and I were at his home and he was making a smoothie. The electricity went out, which happened frequently in the area. Nicandro calmly walked back into the front room and said “Hermana Allred, could you ask the electricity to come back on?”.
I replied, “You know I can’t do that.”
“If you ask the lights to come back on they will come back on, Hermana Allred”, he replied. We went back and forth like this for a few minutes until finally I said “Fine! Lights turn back one”. The electricity instantly came back on. Nicandro calmly said thank you and walked back into the kitchen to finish making his smoothie.
Was it…Elias Piña?
I was with a group of missionaries walking to a p-day activity in an area that was not my own. Before reaching our destination, a lady called to us from across the street. She told us she was a less active member, and really needed a priesthood blessing.
The whole group of us crammed into her little house. When we asked what was wrong, she told us that her dog was sick and needed a blessing. All of us turned to our zone leader in the room and asked for some guidance about blessing sick dogs. Then ensued a ridiculous debate about whether you needed to anoint the dog with oil, and whether the dogs full name (including the owner’s last name) was required for a proper blessing. After resolving these issues, we picked up the dog (the sort of yappy little creature that old ladies carry around in their purse) and placed our multiple hands on its head and blessed the dog. I don’t know what ever became of the dog or its owner, but I will never forget that experience of exercising the priesthood.
Dude, I don´t know how the people I´ve asked to vote will vote, but this made me laugh out loud, which doesn´t happen too often. So awesome. Such a MORMON story. 🙂
While procelyting in Anna Germany, we were invited into a home by two very attractive young women. They were very excited to meet to Americans. And better, could speak German. On the return visit, the girls,partially clad, answered and invited us in. We declined and made a return appointment. They soon learned we were there to only speak about the LDS faith. On the next visit, it was only the father, who was there. And this was his response, that touched me and made me appreciate who we were and how blessed and fortunate I was.
The father spent the war on the Eastern Front. That part of the war was especially brutal, assume that fighting the Americans was any more humane than fighting the Russians. He was captured by the Russians and experienced death on a scale that came close to comparing with the treatment of the Jewish people.
He blatantly told us that there was no God. He was happy to be alive. And he wanted his daughters to be happy. Morality was not a concern. His only concern was that they would never live through what he experienced.
Though other contacts, I learned that the small town of Anna went from several thousand Jewish people to 3 in just less than a year. Did the research for a Man, who escaped at 8 to England, then immigrated to the States after the war. This man’s faith was even stronger, even though he was the only surviver of his family.
How different the responses. I still ponder about their lives and question how I would have responded. I am also very thankful that I lived at a time, where I have not experienced the horrors of war. I have also come to respect the German people in how they have come to grips with their past. I have heard the whole gambit. From total denial to when I became aware, it was too late. And yet they are carrying the Euro, and this after taking on a bankrupt nation, East Germany.
When I feel abused or picked on, I think of these two men. Then I question myself, what virtues I want to guide my life by and raise my children with. Knowledge may be vague at best. But my faith, that if I keep my mind open and accept responsibility of my actions, that the right path will be opened to me. To allow others to dictate my actions, is let them control my life.
While procelyting in Unna Germany, we were invited into a home by two very attractive young women. They were very excited to meet to Americans. And better, could speak German. On the return visit, the girls,partially clad, answered and invited us in. We declined and made a return appointment. They soon learned we were there to only speak about the LDS faith. On the next visit, it was only the father, who was there. And this was his response, that touched me and made me appreciate who we were and how blessed and fortunate I was.
The father spent the war on the Eastern Front. That part of the war was especially brutal, assume that fighting the Americans was any more humane than fighting the Russians. He was captured by the Russians and experienced death on a scale that came close to comparing with the treatment of the Jewish people.
He blatantly told us that there was no God. He was happy to be alive. And he wanted his daughters to be happy. Morality was not a concern. His only concern was that they would never live through what he experienced.
Though other contacts, I learned that the small town of Anna went from several thousand Jewish people to 3 in just less than a year. Did the research for a Man, who escaped at 8 to England, then immigrated to the States after the war. This man’s faith was even stronger, even though he was the only surviver of his family.
How different the responses. I still ponder about their lives and question how I would have responded. I am also very thankful that I lived at a time, where I have not experienced the horrors of war. I have also come to respect the German people in how they have come to grips with their past. I have heard the whole gambit. From total denial to when I became aware, it was too late. And yet they are carrying the Euro, and this after taking on a bankrupt nation, East Germany.
When I feel abused or picked on, I think of these two men. Then I question myself, what virtues I want to guide my life by and raise my children with. Knowledge may be vague at best. But my faith, that if I keep my mind open and accept responsibility of my actions, that the right path will be opened to me. To allow others to dictate my actions, is let them control my life.
When I was in the mission office a district leader somehow found out that two missionaries had a “playstation” in their apartment. When the district leader gave report to the mission president (now general authority), he just said that they should put it away. A little bit later I found out that he thought that a Playstation was a board game. I kept my mouth shut!
Serving as a ZL, I received a panicked call from a veteran trainer in the zone. He was working with a particularly odd greenie (from Idaho of course), and so these calls were becoming somewhat routine. I recorded the transcript of the call in my journal as best I was able, and share it here:
Me: Elder Brown! Whats going on?
EB: My greenie bought a bag of potatoes and named them all after people he knows.
Me: Do I have a potato?
EB: No.
Me: Why not?
EB: I don’t know. Why do you care?
Me: No idea.
EB: Look, he plays with the potatoes during his morning study. They are like action figures, he has them talk to each other and go on trips and stuff like that.
Me: That is not as bad as the holy spatula incident.
EB: This is worse.
ME: I can’t see how.
EB: This morning I noticed that my potato was missing.
ME: He named a potato after you, but not me?
EB: This is serious.
ME: What happened to your potato?
EB: That is what I asked him. He said that my potato was not getting along well with him so he ate it.
Me:…(laughing so hard I had to set the phone down).
EB: Hello?…Hello? Dude, you are such an asshole sometimes.
Needless to say, we did some 24-hour splits and recommended some counseling to the president.
In addition to the potato fiasco, this greenie:
1. Was almost arrested for riding around his apartment complex in his pajamas and a cape waiving a spatula and shouting, “Satan! Get Thee Hence!” (the holy spatula incident)
2. Got crabs from spooning with an investigator’s dogs.
3. Decided he had been blessed with the gift of tongues and now spoke fluent Creole (we were serving in Orlando, there were no Creole-speaking missionaries or members in our zone).
4. Tried to walk home without telling anyone. After 8 hours of searching, we found him walking barefoot on the shoulder of a highway. When I asked him why he was carrying his shoes, he said that Idaho was a long ways and he didn’t want to wear out his soles.
And that was just the first two months of his mission.
This is hilarious. At the same time, I hate to laugh at mental illness. I hope the elder is doing better.
In one of Chicago’s suburbs, my companion and I lived with a member family: a young couple and their infant son. Our bedroom and bathroom were in the basement (it was a nice, large room), but we shared the kitchen with the family, and that felt weird the entire time I was in the area. We didn’t have a separate entrance or anything, so we really lived with the family; it wasn’t a separate apartment or anything. They didn’t come downstairs much, though, except to do laundry. However, they had a Nintendo in the family room (next to our bedroom), and I confess I really enjoyed playing Super Mario on p-days.
This couple we lived with were having marriage problems and argued a lot. Awkward! On Thanksgiving day, they had a huge fight and the wife moved out. Since we were now technically living with a single guy, we mentioned it to our district leader and said he should probably pass the info up the chain. The husband would regularly come downstairs crying and tell us his woes. Again, awkward!
We never heard back from our district leader or anyone else, so we just shrugged and continued on – if the mission president didn’t care, then so be it. A couple weeks later, the wife moved back in, so we mentioned it to our district leader: we were no longer living with a single guy. Turns out he completely forgot to mention it up the chain. Thanks, Elder!
In that same area, we had problems getting a key to the church for weekly district meetings, so we started having it in the family room of that house. The wife would come down after half an hour or so to tell us our meeting was running too long.
In another area, in a different suburb of Chicago, we had a dinner appointment at the bishop’s house. I met his parrot, a cute bird (not sure what kind of parrot, but he was friendly) with one upturned toe. Apparently the bishop had found him outside his house the previous winter. He said he put up signs (since the bird had obviously been someone’s pet), but no one claimed him.
Fast forward a few weeks. We were at an investigators house, only a couple blocks from the bishop’s house, finishing up a discussion. We were just chatting, and she was telling about the pets each of her young daughters had. She told us that her middle daughter didn’t have a pet right now because it had been a parrot that flew out the door the previous winter. She told us a long tale of trying to find the bird, and then when spring came and the snow melted, she was terrified her daughter would stumble across the bird’s body somewhere, but the bird was never seen again. She then mentioned the bird’s upturned toe, and it clicked in the minds of my companion and I that the bishop’s bird was the same as this investigator’s bird. (We naively thought, “Hey, maybe they’ll become friends over the bird and that will help bring her into the church fold!” Ah, what fools we were.)
We gave her the bishop’s contact info and then high-tailed it home in hopes of calling him before she did so we could give him a heads up. (Pre-cell phone days.) No luck. The bishop’s wife answered the phone and started screaming at us that this crazy woman called and claimed the bird was hers. She screamed that the woman was clearly trying to scam them out of the bird since obviously we’d the investigator about the bird and then the woman obviously decided that she wanted the bird after that. I can’t remember what else. Lots of screaming. She said the bishop had been in the depths of depression and the bird brought him out of it, and now he was going to plunge back into depression and it was all our fault.
Meanwhile, the investigator was pissed off that the bishop refused to turn over the bird. She tried to go over the bishop’s head so hit the phone book. Since “stake president” doesn’t exactly show up in the phone book, and she wouldn’t have known the term anyway, she ended up calling the temple, all angry and yelling. Passing from number to number (she passed through the mission office at some point), somehow she ended up calling Salt Lake City and ultimately spoke to President Hinckley’s secretary. Not kidding. (She, of course, had no idea who that was, so when we visited with her a few days later we explained – since she was a lapsed Catholic – that that was the equivalent of speaking to the Pope’s secretary. She was totally shocked – as were we when she told us.)
President Hinckley’s secretary talked her down of the ledge of anger and told her he would give her the stake president’s phone number as long as should remained calm and civil. She did. The stake president was out of town, and his wife gave her the first counselor’s number.
Eventually – it took a few days – the stake president somehow convinced the bishop to give up the bird.
Church was a bit chilly the next Sunday. We were supposed to pass the dinner appointment calendar around Relief Society each week, but we were afraid the bishop’s wife would sign up and then poison us, so we passed it around YW and Primary for a few weeks.
That ward was a crazy ward anyway. When I was transferred in, my mission president actually warned me about the ward. (My companion at the time had come from that area before she joined me, so I’d already had a month of stories from her all about the madness: power struggles in the bishopric; half the ward had alienated the other half, and when someone tried to come back to church, arguments would break out.) The bird incident did not help. Oh my heck, the drama! About 40% of the active members were on our side and another 40% on the bishop’s side.
We lived in a house owned by members (the lower floor was their place of business and we lived on the upper floor), and that couple liked us and looked out for us. They told us members were watching us. We sort of nodded our heads. “No,” they said. “They’re WATCHING you. They follow you as you go about your day. They’re reporting to your mission president if you come home for lunch or if you leave later than 9:30 in the morning.”
To absolutely no one’s surprise, we were double transferred out at the next transfer. Sisters had been in that area for ages anyway, so it was a good time for them to get elders. I’d given the mission president the details of the drama from my perspective in every weekly letter, and he already knew the ward was crazy, so he knew it really wasn’t our fault. (He gave me another greenie at that transfer, so clearly he didn’t think I was a horrible missionary.)
We shared the house with a set of Spanish-speaking sisters in that area. A few weeks after elders had been moved into the area, the Spanish-speaking sisters were at a grocery store, and a member from our ward – the English-speaking ward – came up to them and started yelling at them. “What are you doing here?! You aren’t supposed to be here! We have elders! Sisters are not welcome in this ward! We are going to tell the mission president you are here!” The poor sisters were all, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Spanish ward! We’re in the Spanish ward!”
Ah, mission memories.
I thought I’d share one of my husband’s many crazy stories. Bryan served in Siberia and very early in his mission, barely knew a word of Russian. On one of his first nights in Russia (it happened to be his birthday!) he and his companion decided to get a taxi. There, taxis are just anyone who decides to pull over and give you a price to take you where you want to go. That night, the driver and Bryan’s companion worked out a price and they got in the car. As they were driving, a policeman flagged them down. The driver of the car took off and sped through streets until he pulled into a dark alley. There they sat for several minutes until the driver thought the coast was clear and continued to their destination. Bryan had no idea what was happening and still doesn’t know why the driver fled from the police.
Dothan, Alabama. Fall 1997. It was a typical day in hot, humid southern Alabama, part of the Florida Tallahassee Mission. The work day started out typically, too. We made plans for follow-up appointments, some light tracting, and the delivery of a Bible to a media referral. I hardly remember the family we delivered that Bible to except that they lived in a slightly rundown neighborhood. However, I will never forget their next-door neighbor, an old white guy, who would look wildly out of place anywhere. Many things happened in the multiple encounters I had with Arthur Hobbes, but I will not take the time to describe his heavily ulcerated legs; neither will I share the time he had us in his home on no-pants Friday (or whatever day that was *shiver*); nor will I talk about the time that I, as a fulltime missionary, actually walked into a drug store and bought the man some alcohol. No, there is only one Arthur Hobbes story worth telling, full of sounds, sights, and smells I will never forget.
After we delivered the Bible to that media referral next door, my companion and I had started to pedal away when we heard a strained, “Hey.” We looked up the terrace stairs to a large white, Victorian-style home that had fallen into some disrepair. Sitting on the porch was a crazy-haired, bearded man in his forties (though he looked much older). He looked strung out. He had his feet propped up, and we could see severely swollen feet bulging out of the slits he had cut into the top of his Vans slip-ons.
“Y’all sellin’ books.” He still strained to speak, as if he had trouble summoning enough air to breathe the words.
“No,” I said, “we’re missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.” He gave no clear indication of recognizing the church, but when we explained we had just delivered a Bible, he expressed desire in our giving him one, but we only had a Book of Mormon, which he gladly accepted, with the promise he would begin reading it.
Mr. Hobbes went on to explain his woes, mostly his leg pain (did I say ulcers yet?), which included what he thought was a broken leg from a recent fall. This effected a very slow, careful walk that kept Mr. Hobbes completely confined to his home (he owned no car that we were aware of).
After several attempts to meet up and teach Mr. Hobbes a first discussion, we finally sat down in his musty smelling front room and began to teach him. It had taken him several minutes to walk to the door to let us in when we had arrived, but he had a good set up for making his way around the room. Just inside the front door, to the right, was an end table followed by a long sofa, its back to the wall on our left. This created a nice corridor that allowed Mr. Hobbes to use either the wall or the sofa to support his weight, depending on which leg hurt the worst that day. Just after the sofa was an open space, which allowed us to walk into the open front room. Just on the other side of that walk-through space sat an arm chair. We turned right, passed between the front of the long sofa and a coffee table and took a seat on another sofa facing back toward the arm chair.
Mr. Hobbes sat in the arm chair and propped his legs up, feet still swollen. He face looked flushed. My companion and I began teaching. What happened next will forever be seared into my mind. Just after I began to teach the second principle of the first discussion (I had just shared John 3:16), Mr. Hobbes raised a hand, signaling me to stop. He proceeded, through his strained, almost breathless speech, to explain the need to go to the bathroom, and because his legs hurt so bad, he usually took a while to get there.
Mr. Hobbes struggled to his feet and turned to walk through the gap between his chair and the sofa (remember, this is our only way out). I immediately noticed a wet spot on the front of his pants. My first thought: “he better hurry.”
He stepped into the gap and supported his weight with one arm on the sofa and one on the arm chair. He then stopped walking and continued to talk, but by now, his speech was almost completely unintelligible until I heard the following words …
“Lord knows I hate to do this.”
Dude just whipped it out, right there, and I suddenly heard what can only be described as a fire hose drenching a shag carpet. There I sat with my companion in one of those awkward moments where one doesn’t know where to look. I seriously started thumbing through a phone book sitting on the coffee table. The sound of urine pounding into the floor continued for what seemed like minutes.
When Mr. Hobbes finally closed up shop and flopped back into his arm chair, my companion and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. The problem? Negotiating the huge puddle of foam, melting into the carpet beneath our feet.
The saga did not end there, but this story probably should. I decided to take my next companion to see Arthur Hobbes, but I had to provide full disclosure. Elder Fish was the first of many to hear the full story. And, I kid you not, when we walked into that house, to the smell that I then knew was old urine, Arthur Hobbes said, “Don’t sit on the couch; it’s wet.” No, we did not sit on the couch.
Okay, one more, NSFW: When I was a ZL, one of the Elders in my zone called early one morning, barely able to contain himself and said “I think my companion broke his dick!” He said he woke up with an incredibly swollen “member” hovering above his head and his companion howling in pain. Apparently when his comp woke up with morning wood, he would thump it a couple times so that he could pee. On this particular occasion, he must have broken something because it had swollen to the size of a soft ball. We told him to call the President which he did and after the Pres stopped laughing, he said “put him on the phone…Elder there’s only one way I can think of that you could do this to yourself…” He spent a couple days in the hospital with a “soccer ball” under the sheets with him.
Climbing on a bus in Torino, Italy, a dirty and shabbily dressed man was sitting in the first seat, just behind the door, facing forward. He had a long, full, curly beard that was kind of dirt colored. He wore a kind of dirt colored trench coat over other layers of clothes, and he had a very large candle–maybe 10 inches across–lit in his lap. My companion and I found standing room across from and a few feet behind the man, but he had noticed our suits and name tags.
He asked, “How is my prophet? What’s his name?”
“Gordon B. Hinckley,” my companion answered.
“Oh yes, Hinckley. How is he?”
“He’s fine,” said my companion.
The man then proceeded to tell us about himself. He said, “You know, I wasn’t born God. Like President Clinton wasn’t born President. He became President. I’m just God as my vocation. You’ve seen candles lit to the saints in the churches? I light candles to myself because no one else does.”
I hadn’t thought of it, before, but I guess I can say I really did find God on my mission.
Okay, two of these stories involve my two favorite mission buddies. I still keep in contact with both of them.
In my first area of Dallas, Tx, my DL and his greenie went to the local flee market. I can’t remember if it was Russ (my friend, the DL) or if it was his greenie that bought the blow dart. Well, I was over their apartment and decided to give the blow dart a go. I sat it on a bar stool and blew. The dart flew out of the bedroom, across the living/kitchen area, into the other bedroom….and I hear a yell form Russ, “OWWWWW!!!” I had buried the dart into his thigh.
Second to last are: I was training a nice white companion from Utah. I was sure he had never seen a women’s breast being used to breast feed and so I was sure it would be a shock the first time he would see it happen.(I know, I know, but we were between the ages of 19 and 21). We tracted into a family where the mother had just had a new born. Now, among breast feeding latinas, there are the ones that well breast feed uncovered and it doesn’t bother them and there are others that will cover when breast feeding and there is the third group, that won’t breast feed around strangers at all. You kind of get a sense of who fits into which group after a while. I told my greenie, as we were leaving that this particular woman is the type that would breast feed in front of a total stranger with no problem. I soon got transferred.
I called my greenie back a few weeks later to check in on him. He had been paired up with another greenie that came out at the same exact time. Here is our conversation:
Greenie (G): Do you remember Maria Rodriquez?
Me: No.
G: the one we tracted into that you said would breast feed in front of us?
Me: Oh ya.
G: Well, she did
Me: Oh!
G: Ya, her kids then ran into the house and started running around.
Me: Ya
G: She started shooting her breast milk at them
Me: Oh crap!
G: Ya. Then she turned it on us
Me: What? What did you do?
G: We left.
My last area. This was with my favorite companion, Elder Justin Esplin.
We had been given a really good referral from a newly baptized family. At the end of the discussion, Justin was bright red. Now, Justin was a very fair skinned man who was balding so, not only did was his face red, but his entire head. He had one of those, “I’m really embarrassed” smiles too.
Me: What?
J: Um, you saw how Maria was sitting across from me “Indian style?”
Me: Ya?
J: Well, she had those really short and really loose blue short on.
Me: Ya….
J: Dude, she didn’t have any underwear on.
Me: Holy crap.
For at least an hour Justin was sitting across from this women with a straight shot view at her lady parts.
I had been in my first area in Mexico for a couple of weeks when my first companion was transferred. I still had a lot of trouble navigating through an enormous area with a new companion when I got sick for the first time. Really sick. I spent the first half of the day sitting on the toilet, but once I believed my system was empty, I felt brave enough to head out and do some work.
With a light head and a loudly groaning stomach, I sat through a couple of appointments without trouble. When we hit the streets to find some more work, I realized that I had find a bathroom–immediately–only, I didn’t quite know where we were, and neither did my companion. I held back wave after wave of diarrhea as we walked the cobblestone streets of Colima, Mexico looking for the house of a family we knew. I broke out in cold sweats before I finally recognized the house of a family from the branch. We knocked, and they let us in.
They lived in a nice, clean home that they were constructing while they lived in it. The walls were bare cement. It was lightly furnished, and sheets and shower curtains divided this space from that. Although my companion was a native Spanish speaker and 9 years my senior, he was an unsympathetic bastard who engaged in some completely unnecessary small talk as we walked into the living room. The entire family was there–mother, father, kids– and each was asked after. He didn’t indicate to anyone my need to use the toilet but instead chatted as if we were there on official Church business. We were seated on the couch, and I, in my fevered state, fought madly for the right words to politely interrupt the conversation and ask for the bathroom.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, I interrupted the discussion with something loud and semi-intelligible, walking all over the on-going conversation. Everyone turned to stare. The lady of the house, politely answered my request,
“Of course, Elder. You can use our bathroom.” And she drew back the shower curtain adjacent to the couch to reveal a toilet and sink.
For a moment only, I didn’t have to go anymore, but then I stood up, dropped my backpack on the couch, took two steps to the toilet, and closed the curtain.
There was no hiding my condition behind that thin sheet of vinyl. Time passed slowly, and the good people on the other side did their best to start the conversation up again but were frequently interrupted by the splashes and booms on my side. The bare cement walls of the house enhanced the sounds with an echo, and I sat there holding my stomach, gritting my teeth, sweating profusely, and wishing I were dead.
When I was sure I could poop no more, I finished up, flushed, and washed. I drew the curtain aside once again and was greeted by many concerned faces.
“Elder, are you sick?” asked the mother.
Inside my head, I could answer in quick and witty English.
“What makes you say that?”
But in Spanish I couldn’t quibble. “Si, tal vez un poco” (Yes, perhaps a little).
I was sent to my place of birth. No lie. We moved away when I was six months old, and I went back every summer to my place of birth to spend the summer with my grandparents.
While on my mission, inevitably someone would ask where I was born. After I told them where they would look at me for a few seconds with a questioning look on their face. Then they would say yeah, right, you sure fooled us, and laughing would say “seriously, where were you born”. And again would tell them, then they would say aomething like “that is messed up” and I would agree.
(Also my mission experience was awful. So was the MTC.)
As a missionary couple we served in Australia in a place called Bridge town we decided to cover the main street giving out pamphlets ,I took one side of the street my wife the other all was going well unroll I noticed my good wife talking to a bunch of very tough looking motor bikers . In faineeds she seemed to be winning the conversation as they all took off with church leaflets stuck to the front of their bikes. Good news they all joined the church and are now bishops (only kidding)