The missionaries in Chile in the 1970’s live in “pensions”. This was a room rented from a family, usually in their house, that most of the time include meals and sometime laundry.
For my 22 months in Chile, I lived in eight pensions. They included living with very humble families, with no hot water, were the “mamita” would boil water several times a week on a wood stove so we could have warm baths. Other times we lived with very wealthy families where we had a room that opened to a large courtyard, and we had our own private bathroom. This was not the norm, and usually we shared the bathroom with the family.
There were no specific rules on what we could rent, and normally we would just stay in the same place the previous Elders had rented. Some towns had pensions that had been rented for years and years by missionaries. Only one of mine was with church members, all the rest were non-member families. Some were young families with little kids we’d grow close to, and play with. Others were older couples with teenage or older kids. Several of the families had teenage girls, which was not against any rules we had.
Some arraignments had us eating with the family for the lunch or evening meal, and other times we’d be served separately. Three times we lived with a single mother, and our rent money pretty much paid to run the household. Once we found a new pension with a family, and they then hired a maid just to take care of us.
We got to know some of the families quite well, and would call the lady of the house “mamita”. We rarely talked politics with the families, but one family in Concepcion (Lorenzo Arenas barrio if anybody is familiar with the area) told us their oldest child was living in Germany, because the Pinochet Government had an arrest warrant out for him., labeling him a communist.
A wealthy family we with lived with in Talca had several maids, and on our P-day when we were not at breakfast at 7:30 (because we were sleeping in), they would bring us breakfast in bed about 8 am on trays. This only happened a few times, but is a joy to re-tell to visiting missionaries when we have them for dinner!
Overall my living arrangements were mostly equal to what I left at home in California. I just wish I had taken some photos of my rooms. I don’t have a single photo of inside any of my pensions.
What were your living arraignments like on your mission? Can anybody beat getting breakfast in bed on P-day?
Wheat & Tares 
You’re gloating. My first missionary bed in France was held together with bungee cords. The meals with French families were delightful, but they were relatively rare events. Generally it was missionary cooking: spaghetti or some strange amalgamation of pasta, sauce, and something out of a can. Instead of chasing out Communists, the French elected them. LDS missions are all alike in some ways but so different in others.
In Guatemala we had similar arrangements in the 1990s but we didn’t call them pensions, I think we called them cuartos. Rules about women in the households were inconsistent and not entirely logical. The rule was that we couldn’t live with an single woman unless she were sort of old, presumably old enough to not tempt the elders. But single daughters and nieces seemed to be ok. One house we lived in the married couple was in their early 20s and the mamita was an attractive 24 year old married woman, and a bit flirty. I think all the elders had a crush on her and of course her husband was gone working most of the time.
Most of the time they prepared all three meals often black beans and fried platanos, sometimes for both breakfast and dinner. Often they weren’t members of the church and sometimes a zealous Elder would teach them the discussions, and they would patiently listen to us, sort of like it was another housekeeping chore that came with our rent money. One room that we rented was in the back of a tienda the family ran so not only did we live with them and they fed us but whenever we needed a snack or a soda we’d simply walk 20 feet into the store to buy cheap Guatemalan snacks. I gained a lot of weight in that area.
We often felt like members of the family and developed close relationships with them. I remember most of the families I lived with better than the people I baptized.
Although I’m pretty sure I’m older than Dave B, my experience in southern France in the mid-1970s seems to parallel his. We stayed mostly in apartments–usually studios–though my first was in part of a house. To keep costs down, the owner couple wouldn’t turn on hot water for the shower until winter, which wasn’t too bad, except for a cold snap in September. This also applied to the apartment heating. I can remember waking up mornings and seeing my breath in the air. Meals with French families were invariably high points of the week. In my last apartment, we made arrangements with a local boulangerie to deliver pains au chocolat to our apartment in the mornings for breakfast. That was about as luxurious as it got.
Paraguay, 1985-1986. We had “pensions,” too. My first was in a suburb outside the capital. We had a large bedroom (with its own plumbed bathroom) situated atop a flight of ladder like stairs of death. My trainer, also an American, insisted we do the “embrazo” (ritual missionary hug) after morning prayer. One time the landlady’s son saw us two “Mormones” hugging in front of the open window, launching suspicions, but our rent money must have remained a higher priority to the landlady. We shared the landlady’s twenty-something maid for a while… nice while it lasted. But we should have known something was going off the rails when we returned to our room one siesta to find the maid’s panties hanging from our shower rod. Hmmm. That was flirty, we thought. Nope. A few days later, she vanished, split, left town… with my Minolta SLR my dad had bought me for graduation. The maid had gotten herself pregnant, probably on one of our pension beds, and took my camera to sell or pawn since she split with no money.
Three times I had one-story houses for my “pension,” one of which did double-duty as the branch meeting house. It was once invaded by 1/2″ black ants who turned our kitchen into “Naked Jungle.” We bought some mysterious white powder from the “dispensa” on the corner and shook it onto the kitchen ceiling rafters like talcum powder. The ants began dropping dead immediately. When we came home from tracting, we had to sweep as if someone had spilled buckets of Folgers Crystals all over. This lasted two weeks.
We had to chase cows out of the yard routinely at another one of my full house pensions. At another one, bedbugs lived in the 4″ foam rubber we called mattresses. And at another, my Uruguayan companion dried his showered privates every morning on the one oscillating fan we shared sitting about a foot from my head. I have more stories. I’m sure we all do. But that’s my Paraguayan pension sampler.
In Taiwan, we rented apartments, which were very often rat-infested. It is funny to talk about it now, but there are vivid memories of using brooms to hunt rat, and trying to corner them, so we could kill them. We learned that rats are very elastic, and can squeeze between the bottom of a closed door and the floor. One night, several rats came out after the six of us (in three bunk beds) had gone to bed, and danced up and down all on top of us as they were chasing each other. The rats were totally fearless. (We were cowering under our covers, that were pulled up over our heads).
One morning, my companion got up, and still undressed (wearing only his temple garments), staggered into the kitchen, still not awake, and opened the cupboard to get his box of cereal for breakfast. A rat jumped out and ran down his entire undressed front. He was quite a capable guy, but was not worth much, that day.
Ireland 68-70. We generally stayed in homes where we had a bedroom and meals were provided. My first area we stayed in a boarding house which was empty because it was a seaside resort in the winter. The landlady cooked us 4 meals a day, and they all contained fried potato bread. I put on 20 pound in 6 weeks. One place to get to our room we had to go through another bedroom with 2 young women, and we shared a bathroom beyond their bedroom.
In dublin we lived in a bedroom of a council house. The council had upgraded all the houses from coal fires to gas, but the hot water was heated by the coal fire, so no hot water. Once a week we went into the city to the public baths. It had segregated swimming pools with baths on a balcony. Except the women had to go through the mens pool (with us in our bath on the balcony) to get to their pool, and we went through the womens pool (with ladies in baths, or getting out to dry On their balcony).
The other notables were that we had a mission president who had reportedly been called on a mission to reactivate him.
We regularly took people from the slums on tours of the mission home, which was a mansion.
At one stage my DL who was from California, had his girlfriend come to visit, they went off for a week, then all went back to normal.