It has been almost a month since I posted. I was travelling. Here are three things I will talk about: (1) Iceland. (2) Travel writing. (3) Mormon travel writing, which essentially means books about missions.
Iceland in One Paragraph
Shady rental car outfits. Inscrutable European road signs. Sneaky camera speeding tickets (beware of Selfoss). Waterfalls. More waterfalls. Awe-inspiring waterfalls. Sheep wandering on roads. More sheep. Highly volcanic. Sweet chili pepper Doritos. RIB boat out of Husavik for a kickass whale watching trip. Nothing is open until ten o’clock. One lane roads. One lane bridges. One lane tunnels. Puffins. Everything is expensive. The only ice in Iceland is at Costco. Extreme and thrilling gravel roads (Oxi Pass). Lots of Germans, mostly older, all nice. Great fish and chips. You can buy almost anything at an Icelandic gas station. Free car wash. Everyone speaks English and they’re all nice. There is only one Iceland.
Travel Writing
Travel writing is a well-defined genre that doesn’t generally become interesting until you hit the second half of your life. I think that’s because you need to have travelled a bit yourself to find the genre interesting. It’s fun to read a book about a place you have visited. And by the second half you realize you can’t go everywhere, but you can always read a book about those places you wish you could go but can’t manage to get to.
What travel writing isn’t: an objective, broad, and detailed account of the history, culture, and language of a particular country. What it is: a series of encounters between the writer and various interesting individuals of the country visited. These aren’t generally politicians or celebrities but often just regular folks: a taxi driver, a waitress or bartender, a student, a writer, a mother with children, a police officer, a homeless person. Like essays, travel writing gets to the general (observations on a country, a land, and a people) through the specific (the small collection of people profiled in the book). There are, of course, accounts of visits to museums or landmarks and the like. People, places, and things, but mostly people. Here are some examples, some of which you have probably read yourself:
The Sea and the Jungle, by H. M. Tomlinson. A classic. Fatu Hiva, by Thor Heyerdahl, about his pre-Kon Tiki adventures in French Polynesia. Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It, by Mark Twain, with the second featuring some pleasantly hilarious Mormon encounters. (Twain, a humorist, obviously exaggerated his accounts in some places, not the general method for travel writing.) Burmese Days by George Orwell is a novel but reads like a travel book. Here’s one I read just last month as preparation for the trip to Iceland: Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland, by Sarah Moss, a university English lit instructor who took her husband and two young kids to Iceland for a one-year teaching contract. From it I learned that I did not want to brave the busy roads and crazy roundabouts in Reykjavik, the capitol. These are books that I have read. There are many other books in the genre and several fine movie adaptations, such as Under the Tuscan Sun. Got any favorites of your own that you want to add to the list?
Here’s the thing. Travel writing isn’t just a collection of vignettes and encounters. The writer has something to say, something worth writing about. There is something to say about the country and people visited, but also of course something about the home country and one’s own people. The things you like and the things you dislike about the visited country reflect back on things you like and don’t like, and maybe now understand better, about your own country. It’s nice you can wash your car for free at most N1 stations in Iceland. It’s annoying you have to pay two dollars to use the restroom at some landmarks and attractions. The fish and chips are outstanding, everywhere. But you won’t get enough ketchup for your fries unless you flash a handgun. And so forth. (Sorry, I didn’t stay long enough to have any bold, insightful observations to share, just the little stuff.) There are three LDS branches in Iceland, each in a different town with its own building. They all meet at 11 am, which is just so Iceland. We didn’t manage to visit a branch on Sunday or else my post would have been something about the pleasure of attending church in foreign countries. Maybe next time.
Here’s the other thing about travel writing. You have to be honest. If you bias your account to favor your home country and home people, that won’t be honest travel writing. It won’t be good travel writing. That holds for all writing, of course. Remember the advice Lester Bangs gave to young rock journalist William Miller: “Be honest and unmerciful.” You will lob both praise and criticism at the visited country and, by reflection and through commentary, back at the home country. If you can’t be an honest and unmerciful critic when it is called for … don’t write. Which brings us to Mormon writing.
Mormon Writing
Mormons are nice. Maybe too nice. I’ll bet you’ve said to someone at church “nice talk” or “nice lesson” when that wasn’t the case at all. But that’s just being polite and encouraging, knowing the speaker didn’t volunteer and the teacher was doing her best, with little help from the curriculum materials. Writing is a different matter. Writing is serious business. (I sometimes reflect on the fact that the many blog posts I have authored will continue to circulate on the Internet for decades and possibly centuries after I am dead and buried.) Official LDS curriculum materials and official histories don’t even score well on simple candor and honesty: lots of questionable or plainly wrong interpretations are offered and summaries of sources are often askew, sometimes wildly so. The Gospel Topics Essays, the various historical topics and essays posted online the last few years, and the new four-volume history Saints are better, but hardly the gold standard. Even some very good LDS historians “pull their punches” as I call it, meaning they might be good at telling the nice episodes of LDS history, but they can’t quite give a full and honest account when recounting a more difficult LDS episode. The Mormon habit of making every story a morality tale and every narrative a didactic exercise (with the Church always right) plays into this, no doubt. To be fair, there are a few historians who do LDS history who are at the other end of the spectrum, fine at criticism but unable to give praise when it is due. It can be tough to find and hold the middle ground.
So … the narrower field of Mormon travel writing. There just isn’t much of that. The closest we come is the missionary account that some people write, generally a few years or a few decades after returning. All the weaknesses of LDS writing (too didactic, unable or unwilling to say anything negative about the Church or even see anything negative about the Church) carry over way too easily to the mission memoir. Add to this that the young missionary lives in the country and learns the language to a certain degree of fluency, but doesn’t really engage deeply with the culture or the country. Add to this the young age of LDS missionaries. Add to this the know-it-all mentality that comes so easily to missionaries who are reminded they go forth to teach, not to learn. Who doesn’t look back at their two years and say about many persons, events, and encounters, “Wow, now I understand ….”
Consider the short talk that all missionaries give to the ward upon their return. Think of it as a very brief verbal travel account. It’s always sugar coated. What is reported is selective to the point of being dishonest (because it would just be wrong to say something negative about missions or the Church, right?). It is the very opposite of “be honest and unmerciful.” Which is not to say that sacrament meeting is the right place to give an unvarnished account of the mission experience. But, you know, if you can’t write an honest book, don’t write. If you can’t give an honest talk, don’t speak.
Caveat: I hang my head in shame for not having read (yet) The Legend of Hermana Plunge, a missionary memoir authored by one of W&T’s own. I am fairly confident that the book avoids the characteristic weaknesses of the LDS missionary memoir genre as I presented them above. Those of you who have read it are welcome to confirm that in the comments.
So here is a challenge for readers: Say something honest about your mission. Something you didn’t put in your letters home and you wouldn’t mention in your homecoming talk. I’ll go first. I had two companions who became mentally ill while serving. One was close to being a sociopath and a real handful. After a couple of months I got him over to the Mission President and he was set to go home early (as we say so casually) … but the MP decided to give him one more chance and sent him back to me. Thanks, Prez. He was gone two weeks later. Last I heard he was an Evangelical minister in Utah. Go figure. A second missionary was a good guy, a convert who was a bit older than the average missionary, bright and engaged, but he spiraled into a state of paranoia bordering on being psychotic (people were after him, plots to kill the LDS leaders, etc.). He went home early and hopefully got some help. Another mission casualty.
The “something to say” from these episodes is this: Missionary life is challenging, mentally challenging. It’s tough, it’s stressful, and there are very few resources available to help young missionaries deal with those challenges. Discouragement and depression are common, and more serious conditions such as I encountered in these fellow missionaries are known to emerge under the stress of missionary service. Treatment in the field, even recognition of the nature of the problem, is almost unheard of. If you break a leg, they’ll get you to a doctor, but early recognition and proper response to serious psychological difficulties manifest by particular missionaries is simply not part of the program. That’s just one aspect of the overall mismanagement of the program and the missionaries. There is just a bit of improvement now compared to say forty years ago. Missionaries are allowed more frequent contact with family back home. New missionaries are screened for psych conditions and, if mild and treatable, they can still serve, probably in the States where there are resources to help them if needed. But once out in the field I think it’s sink or swim, the same old story.
So here’s your chance to shine in the comments. Pick one or more:
- Say something interesting about Iceland if you’ve ever been.
- Say something about your favorite travel book or movie, if you have one.
- Say something about The Legend of Hermana Plunge if you have read it.
- Say something honest about your mission.
Wheat & Tares 
I will share 2 experiences from 2 missions.
Spiritual Tracting – I was perhaps one of the least prepared missionaries in my mission. I graduated from HS with a 1.8 GPA mostly because I was a ski racer and skied 60+ times my senior year. I served mostly out of tradition and obligation. I read the BOM for the first time in the LTM. I served in New York City (Spanish). My trainer was superman, star athlete, spoke Spanish like a native, charismatic, and just an all around great guy. I had heard rumors of something called “spiritual tracting”. It consisted of a companionship fasting and praying over their area map to find the exact street the Lord wanted them to go to find that “golden” investigator. I asked my trainer if we could do it. He put me off and avoided the topic. I persisted and he relented. We spent over an hour one evening praying over the map in an exercise of elimination to find that “special street.” The impression came and we went to bed. I was so excited I could hardly sleep. The next morning I could hardly wait to get out the door and go find the person waiting for us. We walked fast the 40 minutes to the street. I was crestfallen when we arrived and their wasn’t a building on the street. It was several blocks of urban blight with demolished and burned out buildings and cars. My comp laughed. I never pursued spiritual tracting again. From then on it was “Lord were headed to this area tomorrow, please prepare the way.” It was a great lesson that has impacted my approach to prayer and religion the rest of my life.
“President there are dogs everywhere . . . .” – We had many missionaries from the US that had an awfully hard time adjusting to the Latino culture of Chile. One wonderful and humble young man could not accept the conditions in the ghetto area where he was assigned. Within about a week of arriving he was on the phone with me wanting to go home. He had waited to go on his mission because his father was dying of cancer. His best friend from home was and AP in our mission. When I asked what was troubling him, I got a litany of environmental and cultural conditions that he did not like. “President, there are dogs everywhere, there is garbage in the streets, I can’t understand the people and they are rude.” This went on for several weeks. I even released my AP and assigned as a companion. Not much changed and I thought that we would lose him. Then one day we got a call that he had been injured. That evening he walked into piece of steel extending from a truck. It practically split his face in two. We got him to the best plastic surgeon in Santiago to repair the wound. I was convinced that this would be the end. But it was not. It was the catalyst to a change. He saw good Chileno doctors, nurses, and companions caring for him and loving him. It was the selfless service of others to him that changed his outlook, and he never looked back. He became a powerful disciple of the Master.
My favorite travel writer is Paul Theroux. Most famous for “Riding the Iron Rooster” (or something similar). His novel “The Mosquito Coast” is about obsession in an exotic locale. The protagonist drags his family along. His experience closely mirrors my own. I like to install playgrounds in the most remote locations I can find. And invite family and friends to join me.
I have read “Plunge” and enjoyed it. The author is a pistol. I’m glad she stirred things up. She roasts the male ego of the missionaries. But I wonder what she held back on?
I spent my mission in France and Belgium. 55+ years ago. It was 2-1/2 yrs mission. Missionary work was pretty much a waste of time. But I did enjoy the culture and history. Even though it was technically against rules, I traveled a lot. And had no problem finding fellow travelers. My time would have been better spent participating in the Civil Rights movement. You know that thing that ETB called a communist conspiracy.
Technically not a “travel” experience, but: William B., a young Elder from rural Arizona arrived in Argentina in 1960, two weeks before I did, and was having a terrible time with the language when I got there (those were the days when you started learning the language upon arrival; there was no LTM then). There were 4 of us in the Floresta Branch; he was the other junior companion. For six months I watched him sweat trying to master Castellano (they don’t call it “Spanish” in that country). He really seemed miserable with it, and even considered going home because of his difficulty. Then we were all transferred in different directions, and I lost touch with him. Forty years later, I had occasion to visit the Church headquarters building in Salt Lake City, to ask a question about the travel itinerary for my son, who was also serving in Argentina as a missionary. I was directed to the South American Affairs Office, which was manned – to my surprise – by the same Arizona ex-missionary. While I waited for him to talk to me, I heard him discussing a point with some good man in Central America, using fluent but often gramatically incorrect Spanish. So, the language experience did not end in his destruction, but the opposite, giving him a career.
Heaven Up Here
by John K. Williams
I can’t recommend this mission memoir highly enough. Beautifully written, descriptive account of his mission in Bolivia.
Not sure it counts as a travel movie, but the BBC series “The Durrells” (billed as the “The Durrells in Corfu” on Amazon Prime) definitely makes me want to sell everything, move to a Mediterranean island, and spend the rest of my days learning Greek and swimming in the ocean.
Something honest about my mission: I got sick way less often than I had any right to given the amount of Filipino street food I ate (local members told us to be careful, and we really didn’t listen). Also, I discovered there is a big difference between homesickness and missing the comforts of home. I never had the former, but I certainly experienced the latter.
Sadly I can’t give you either the title or the author, but back when I was a student (30+ years ago) I borrowed a book from the university library written by a man from Lancashire who walked across Iceland, since when I have always been interested by the country. Things I remember from the book- he mentioned that the Lancashire dialect shared some similarities with Icelandic, a round around the circumference of the country with a regular bus service, much of the inland at the time not being well-mapped, and the lava fields shredding his walking boots.
Favourite authors writing scout other countries.. well fiction in this case… Alexander McCall Smith writes lovely stories, set in Edinburgh, set in Botswana, and more recently Italy and France..
I haven’t served a mission, but I have spent time in Japan as part of my postgraduate research as a student, and also participated in music exchange trips to France, Germany and Italy in my teens… a couple of funny stories.. in France a couple of friends and I managed to get locked in the Eiffel Tower. This was in the 80s whilst it was being renovated. Only one staircase leg was open. However, when we were coming down from the top, someone had unlocked the entrance and we exited by the wrong leg. We should have realised something was wrong as we met no one coming the other way, and it was all rather grimy. We got to the bottom to find couldn’t get out as the glass doors were closed and the metal grill down. The woman in the souvenir booth indicated to us to go back up. And we tried, but didn’t get half way before encountering a now-locked gate, and had to head back down. In the end a maintenance engineer escorted us underneath the tower past the lift machinery and out of the maintenance door. Now that’s part of the tower you don’t normally get to see.
In Japan I was based in Tokyo, but attended an academic conference in Nagoya. As a student I didn’t stay in the plush hotel, and a room had been booked for me at a business hotel. It was pretty busy and an en-suite room had been unavailable at the time of booking. I arrived to check in after a tiring day, and was asked if I was okay with a room with no en-suite. Not knowing any better I agreed. Took the keys and went up to my room. I needed a restroom. Checked the map in the corridor and headed over. To my consternation there was only the men’s restroom. Obvious by virtue of the low swing door at the entrance allowing full view of the urinals and similar swing doors on each cubicle. There was no one else around, but since there was obviously no privacy in the cubicles, or indeed any obvious locking mechanism, I balked at using them. I decided if I could locate the women’s bath I would be able to find the necessary facilities. I headed back down to reception to ask. I could certainly hear a lot of splashing (communal bathing is a thing in Japan), however the man on reception informed me there was no women’s bath. I looked at him hard, and he asked if I would like a room with an en-suite. Yes I would! I paid the difference and changed rooms. I stayed two nights in that particular hotel. On the morning I checked out, I greeted the chambermaids in the corridor, one of whom turned to the other in complete shock and said 女の人！(a woman!) Yeah. Definitely unusual for a woman to be staying in a business hotel. Ooh, said the guys in the laboratory when I got back, and who had provided the hotel information and helped with the booking, we didn’t think of that!
“So here is a challenge for readers: Say something honest about your mission. Something you didn’t put in your letters home and you wouldn’t mention in your homecoming talk.”
That’s a challenge, all right. I didn’t hold back much in my letters home. They were my only escape from a very stressful mission, and so I poured all my stress and angst from the week into them in great detail.
1. I was never very good at speaking Argentine Spanish with respect to pronunciation and slang, but I worked very hard to get the grammar and vocabulary right. Several times people told me that I sounded “like a Russian.” I wrote about that in my letters, since I thought it was kind of funny. Here I am, an American boy in Argentina, and they think I’m from Russia! It wasn’t until years later that I learned that was an antisemitic slur, derived from mocking the language of Ukrainian Jews. Hmm, glad I didn’t write home about that.
2. Another thing that I don’t think I put in my letters home – or at least only as a passing vague mention that would cause no alarm – was an incident in the MTC that I thought of at the time as a very mild bit of hazing. Thinking about it years later, I’m not sure that it wasn’t somewhere on the spectrum of sexual assault. Similarly for the indignant (though perhaps naive) feelings of violation in the pre-mission medical exam.
I could go on about the good times and bad, but I have other things to do today. Suffice it to say that I tried to communicate the good times in my letters home, but the only bad time I can remember offhand that I categorically did not communicate in my letters home was point no. 2. I did not, for instance, fail to let my parents know when I was robbed in the villa twice in two months, or when I was sick with some unknown low-level respiratory illness for months at a time, or when we went hiking with the sister missionaries in the hills outside town my second Christmas (which was the single best day of the mission). So: good times and bad. Hum de hoo. Time to do other things.
I can relate the prior comments to my own mission experience. I served in Indiana from 1973-1975. I was there when Larry Bird was in high school and his prowess as a basket ball player was becoming well known. At the time in Indiana the state wide high school basketball tournament was very big. It was bigger than the NCAA and NBA tournaments combined. The experience with language that I had was when I was transferred to Kentucky and had to re-learn the English language. I had the good times as well as some or the not so good times. Had a couple of companions that I thought were real jerks, but then then again there were probably some my companions who probably thought the same of me. My mother served a mission in the Netherlands from 1948 – 1950. She told me some her experiences she had on her mission. What she related to me before my own mission were a far cry from what she related after I got home. the difference was that what she was telling me about after my return were things that I would understand and appreciate. My father spent much of his childhood in the Kingdom of Tonga as a Mission President’s kid. His experiences were different because were seen through the eyes of a child growing up in a different world and culture. That experience affected his world view in that he had little patience with people that expressed racists views and attitudes. That rubbed off on me.
Really good travel book, even if you are not a surfer: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. It is the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for best Autobiography. Get it!
*Last of the Donkey Pilgrams* by Kevin O’Hara exalts the sublime and plentiful Ireland, its people of vigor and sauciness, its trades and habits, and its chronicles and whim. The author took a donkey with him to walk around the entire coastline on foot. Yeehaaw!
Hmm. I was pretty candid about the things I didn’t like in northeastern Brazil in my letters home. It was the same weather everyday. Sun rose at 5:30 and set at about 6. People were very warm and friendly. It was easy to interpret warmth as lasting or meaningful. In reality people were very laid back and flaky on commitments. Everything was amanha (leave it for tomorrow). People weren’t planners and tended to act more spontaneously. Girls were extremely forward and would come on to guys. Male missionaries were commonly grabbed by girls. They made cat calls at me and other missionaries on a regular basis. Most people were scantily clad. Men often went around shirtless. Women would often wear halter tops and very short shorts. Drunkenness was common. Fruit was abundant and there were fruits there you wouldn’t imagine actually existed. All kinds of juices. One called suco de jenipapo tasted like gasoline. Suco de graviola, on the other hand, was the nectar of heaven. People ate beans and rice literally everyday. A favorite music was called forro (pronounced foh-Ho). It was like a sort of polka with synthesizers and accordion (they loved the accordion there). I found it incredibly obnoxious. They would take all sorts of English pop songs and turn them into forro. People also listened to brega and funk, which sounded like you had to be incredibly drunk to write. Streets were extremely dangerous, but not if you were a missionary. Criminals were superstitious about harming religious figures and left us alone. People spoke a very different dialect of Portuguese there. Poor illiterate folks were not understood by native Brazilians from southern Brazil. And when native southern Brazilians would speak to them, they often didn’t understand them too well. They would sometimes pronounce the v and the s a “h”. Aviao (airplane) became “ahiao”. “Estava (was) became ‘taha. In fact, sometimes we would pretend that I was the Brazilian and that my native companion was the foreigner. Some folks couldn’t tell. When it rained the streets would often flood. You didn’t want to walk through floodwaters as they were contaminated and dangerous. But gung-ho missionaries trying to prove faithfulness or something would walk through them anyways. Many would get crippling foot infections putting them out of commission for days and even in some cases weeks. People had a lot of national pride, especially when it came to soccer. During the World Cup all eyes were on the game. Life would cease to function. But people knew Brazil had problems. It was mostly poor with a small class of wealthy people, who would achieve their wealth often not on merit but through their connections. The wealthy were whiter. The poor were darker skinned. Political corruption abounded. The government was slow and full of red tape. The roads were crazy, not well maintained and full of buracos (potholes). You had to be careful driving. But it became my culture for a couple of years. I miss the place. I also weep for it as drug gangs have turned so many of the cities in the northeast into even more violent horrific places. Much of the poverty there is truly soul-crushing.
Served a mission rural Guatemala in early 1990s, at the end of the civil war there. In summary, for the first decade after my mission, I loved it and told everyone about it. After my faith crisis I wish I could have those two years back.
The good: learned Spanish pretty well and I use it frequently in Arizona where I live. Met some really great people, some of whom I still communicate with. Witnessed crushing poverty, the type that most Americans can’t comprehend. This was probably the first step in my conversion from radical right wing to fairly progressive. Learned how blessed Americans are – when you call the fire department they show up and out out a fire.
The bad: got a tooth infection that still bothers me intermittently 3 decades later, could have been treated easily at the time. I definitely had a know it all attitude- after all we were representatives of Christ himself. In hindsight my presumption was off the scale and I’m embarrassed how I “taught.” I really wish I could have those two years back.
Postscript: one of my 4 children chose to serve a mission. She served in the height of Covid in Brazil and then California and then Brazil. I believe that it damaged her emotionally and physically, still seeing therapists and various doctors. She doesn’t blame it on anything other than bad luck , but I wonder what the future will bring her.
I don’t think I wrote home about the evening soccer games we played during my 6-month stint in the mission office (Buenos Aires, Argentina). We played them *in* the office — foyer and entry area. They were pretty much “anything goes” games. Several bruises and the occasional blood was spilt, but the 4 or 5 of us in the office sure found that it helped relieve the stress and offset some of the boredom of office work all day!
A favorite travel book: Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux. I was in my early 30’s when I read the book which was published in 2002, and still an idealist in so many ways. I didn’t fully appreciate Theroux’s experience of traveling from Cairo to Cape Town as an older man, more worn by life’s disappointments as he realized his work in the Peace Corps and the years of foreign aid administered in Africa seemed to have made very little lasting, positive impact on the Dark Continent. Now that I’m older, I understand the book better and appreciate Theroux’s missives all the more. I too was an idealist when I was young and believed my church service might drive real change over time. Thirty years later, like Theroux became, I’m more grounded and realistic, if not jaded. I don’t think I moved the organizational needle at all, and now as someone older I feel like I’m half way through my own journey from “Cairo to Cape Town,” so to say, assessing the state of things in the church and how I relate to it.
My third companion get a Dear John letter, got very depressed, refused to go out. All of which I reported to the mission president. Next, he got a letter that his parents had separated, but were meeting with the Bishop. Then, the parents were getting a quickie divorce. Then, his father was excommunicated. Then, his father married my companion’s former girlfriend. Through it all, the president was offering to send him home, but he refused. That lasted until he went home; it all took a couple of months.
My fourth comp was a bully, who as we went about our day, wrote down everything I did that he did not like in a little notebook. Evaluation consisted of his reciting all my flaws. This proceeded to his shoving me, hitting me, etc. One day a junior companion got transferred and a new Elder arrived from Wyoming. Elder H was as big as a barn door, and had been a football player. It took his a couple of days to figure out what was going on. He grabbed my companion, shoved him up against a wall and told him that his abuse needed to stop or he would kill him. Things got better.
I traveled to Iceland last August and fell in love. The weather, the never ending daylight, the hospitality of the locals. And no spiders or snakes! I hiked for days. But I have a feeling winter tells another story.
My mission companion was quite ill and we got permission to see the mission doctor. He was given a prescription and began to recover. I of course caught what he had and was unable to receive clearance to see the mission doctor. As a result, I was sick for three weeks. No idea why my mission President treated us differently. Never told my parents about this.
I served in Hong Kong. Extremely small mission. One former companion didn’t get along with his companion and would frequently just leave him and take the subway 20 minutes to my area and work with me and my companion. This lasted several months. Sometimes he would even spend the night with us. None of us ever told anyone: parents, leaders, etc. we just took care of it ourselves. Which I’m sure is frowned upon. Oh well.
@ John W. Your experience in Brazil sounds uncannily similar to mine in the Dominican Republic. Except it was baseball not soccer, and “Spanish,” of course. To answer the question, my mission was an overall positive experience despite being sick with stomach issues much of the time and completely wiped out for 3 weeks due to some kind of mosquito related illness (as far as I know). Plus the constant guilt of not measuring up to expectations (ie. Baptisms). I did meet a lot of amazing people and had some fun too. Looking back, I cringe at how judgemental and know-it-all -ish I was at times, and wish I could have spent two years doing Peace Corp type service, instead of knocking doors. In terms of travel books -I try to avoid them since I haven’t had the opportunity to travel much, and it’s just depressing. Would love to visit Iceland, though.
Las Palmas, Spain – several years after Hna. Plunge.
Difficult truth 1: We spent waaaay more time trying to fill our empty days with almost anything we could than actually doing anything useful.
Difficult truth 2: A GA visited us and said that we were one of the lowest baptizing missions on the planet, and that this was our fault for not working hard and being absolutely obedient. This caused me to both feel a huge amount of anxiety (others eternal salvation was stalled because of me!) and to be hugely judgements of the other missionaries since they’d been there longer than me.
Addendum Difficult Truth: 90% of the members on the church rolls were stated as living in missionary apartments. Shades of Hna. Plunge’s era.
Of course, these previous missionaries were also the reason we were seen as being so disobedient that we were unworthy of having people to baptize. (Such a screwy way for leadership to see the world!)
John W, your description of NE Brazil fits my experience nearly perfectly. I, too, was catcalled by girls and found Forró obnoxious (though I eventually discovered Antonio Carlos Jobim and Djavan whom I adore). Most American missionaries I knew got severe food poisoning a couple months in, including me. I also got dengue fever in the last month of my mission. I can confirm your reports of the importance of soccer and booze to everyday Brazilian life. I also saw a lot more nudity over the course of two years than I expected to see as a missionary (including at the baptismal font. That was a whole thing). I taught people who talked to ghosts. I taught people who had seen Jesus face to face. I taught a woman who recognized a photo of the SL temple from a dream she had. I taught a different woman who had a dream that the Book of Mormon tried to eat her.
And then there’s the baptism thing. People in Brazil (this was true in the early 2000s at least) change religions pretty easily. There was a big evangelical boom about fifty years ago resulting in a mind-boggling diversity of churches—many of which are nakedly corrupt. As a result there are many Brazilians who find the Joseph Smith story relatable and, if you manage to get them to a sacrament meeting, find our understated atmosphere preferable to the exorcisms and unknown tongues of the more bombastic churches. What you said, John W, about Brazilians in the Northeast being extremely warm and also flaky—for us that translated to a whole lot of baptisms and very little retention (I read somewhere that while the church reports over a million members in Brazil, only 200K self-identify as LDS).
Oh, baptism. I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but my mission was expected to baptize 400 people a month and we often pulled it off. I logged 119 baptisms on my mission, only a handful of which I’m confident remained active. That meant I was part of the “100 club.” But there was also a “200 club.”
I was born in a US army hospital accessed by a car going rope suspension bridge near Finschhaffen New Guinea . My father had built a long wheelbase jeep from parts left after ww2.
I served in the Irish mission 1968 to 70. But had been on a building mission with my parents for 6 years before that in UK. Built chapels in Kirkcaldy, and Kilmarnock in Scotland, then Coventry England, where I met the wife I am happy to be married to 53 years later.
Mission memories: first area Portrush near giants causeway we lived in a guesthouse in the off season, we had 4 fried meals a day each included fried potato bread. I put on 16 pounds in 6 weeks. Tracted all days never got in.
Mission policy we stayed where we had landladies who provided meals. We had to wear hats, and we had to go to our accomodation if we heard gunfire.
There was a civil war between the catholics and protestants. In catholic suburbs the kerbstones were green and white, in protestant areas the kerbs were red white and blue. Most of the street intersections had roundabouts with machine gun emplacements. In the poorer areas only the main roads were open to cars; the side roads were baricaded off with car bodies to make it more difficult for troops to get in. Like the locals we climed over the barricades to tract.
Rumor had it our mission president was a sheep farmer called on a mission to reactivate him. I never had an interview with him.
When people joined the church they still had to be catholic or protestant depending on where they lived. They were not to be seen with the other side, and if they did not participate in riots or other political activities their house would be fire bombed. The MP did not understand this. When he called a branch president who was a catholic mormon, the protestant mormons could not come to church and visa versa.
I remember 3 companions. Elder Flamm was a funeral director from rexburg, and insisted on standing to attention, and taking off your hat when a funeral passed. I have visited him since and seen his coffins with cowboys on the underside of the lid.
Another companion had a collection of pop music of the time, and a playboy collection. We were required to have a tape player to play church tapes to investigators, his had 7in tapes and weighed 50 pounds.
Another was writing a musical comparing the sex life of college girls to that of the outer mongolian wood ant.
I was involved in the baptising of one female university student in Dublin, and a family in a country area of Ulster.
The most dramatic travel experience. The first time we went to Kruger National Park in South Africa we stayed in a rondavel (round eath building with thatched roof inside Olephants which is a large walled camp to keep the animals out at night. The next time we went to Kruger we went with a guide and stayed in tents out with the animals near a water hole. We heard animals including lions during the night, and saw lions a couple of hundred meters from our camp in the morning. The guide had a car top tent, we were on the ground.
ReTx,
Did you ride the people sleds?
I enjoyed reading Hermana Plunge, which was the same mission where I served. I was there several years later. I enjoyed reading about many of the same areas that I served in. The book confirmed some of the mission rumors that I hadn’t originally believed, including that a former mission president had told missionaries not to go to church unless they had an investigator.
Unlike Hermana Plunge, I had very little desire to serve a mission. I felt like it was a commandment for all males, and that my marriage prospects would be severely limited if I didn’t serve. I still worked and wanted to do well, but I counted down every day looking forward to the end.
I had a missionary companion who was abusive. Like in DaveC’s story, he delighted in keeping track of my most minor infractions so that he could berate me for them. He criticized everything up to the groceries I bought. But he would brook no criticism himself, even when he did outrageous things like falling asleep (repeatedly) during discussions.
Years after I got home, I Googled him. This was in the early days of the Bloggernacle when blogs were all the rage. I was sure that such a self-righteous guy would have a blog up somewhere that he used to call the world to repentance. Instead, I discovered that he was on death row after he and his brother had murdered five people after the brothers’ investment fraud scheme had gone wrong. My former companion has since killed himself. See the story linked below for details.
(Ordinarily I wouldn’t reveal a former companion’s name, but I figure that when you make a name for yourself as a murderer, you’ve become a public figure.)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2309952/Justin-Helzer-case-Notorious-killer-murdered-people-bizarre-plot-speed-Christs-return-Earth-hangs-death-row.html
Ziff, wow! Looking forward to the Hulu series. You should definitely consult the director when they’re shooting the mission flashback scenes.
^ That, um, takes the cake for stories of Mission Companions Gone Wild, methinks….
Collections of mission stories like these are always entertaining, but often leave me feeling like I served a very boring mission. I was in southern Brazil in the early 2000s. The poverty mentioned by others is very familiar, though as I served exclusively in small cities I think that poverty felt different in many ways. When visiting one family, we would read the BoM by candle light, because they didn’t have electricity. They didn’t have running water either. Their home consisted of two separate buildings, both of which were probably better described as sheds. I only ever went in the larger one where they would hang out during the day, and meet with the missionaries. The smaller one was, I think, only big enough for the 7 of them (2 parents, 4 kids and 1 nephew (orphaned?)) to sleep. Even for Brazil they were very poor. It’s now been 20 years. One kid is an active member of the church, and it sounds like his parents are sporadically active. That one kid is the only baptism from my mission that I’ve had any contact with in many, many years, and I assume that the large majority of people I baptized are no longer active; I’d be very pleased if I found out that 25% remained active after all these years, but I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that kid is the only one.
Generally, I was a “good” and reasonably obedient missionary and had good companions. A couple of them got on my nerves, but our issues were mostly just personality conflicts.
Looking back, I wish we had all endeavored to be more thoughtful missionaries, and that the MP had taught us and empowered us to be more thoughtful. We presented discussions in essentially the same way every time because that’s just what we did. And we just marched through discussions and reading assignments in the BoM, because that’s what we did. We rarely stopped to ask what would best serve our investigators, instead we had a pre-planned checklist (even if it wasn’t a formal checklist) of material to present and tasks for them to perform (go to church, read the BoM) and then they could be baptized.
If I could do it all over again, and somehow be both the mission president and missionary, I’d spend a lot more time thinking about simply going about doing good. There were many people who probably would have been better served by some manual labor, or friendly conversation or two dollars worth of rice than a message about Joseph Smith. Reports back to the leadership about how much good you accomplished that week would have felt a lot better than a number of people you talked to and discussions you presented. That sort of missionary program is probably a lot to ask of a 19-year-old.
-I took my family to Iceland once and absolutely loved it. I felt like I was exploring the very edge of the earth, or perhaps another planet. One of our AirBnB hosts cooked breakfast for us, even though it wasn’t included in our reservation. New and exciting stuff to see at every turn. Would definitely go again.
-After my dad passed away, I found he had a collection of volumes of Stoddard’s Lectures gathering dust on his bookshelf. I casually pulled one volume out and started reading about the author’s travels through Europe, where I had lived previously, and was pulled into the narrative immediately. His quirky and illustrative 1890s prose was very enjoyable to read as I was processing the loss of my dad. I later found out John Lawson Stoddard was a turn-of-the-century American travel writer who spent most of his time overseas, but came back to the States for a few months every year to publish his books and give entertaining sold-out lectures recounting his journeys, opening the world to industrial-era American audiences for whom global travel was cost-prohibitive and unthinkable. He was the Rick Steves of his day. Speaking of which, Steves’ book Travel as a Political Act is a good explainer of a number of modern geopolitical issues, and how global travel helps us understand them better and makes us better people overall.
-I read Hermana Plunge and thoroughly enjoyed the author’s refreshing candor about the realities of missionary life.
-I didn’t go on a mission. The idea of 2 years of unpaid door-to-door sales was offensive to my introvert heart, and I was enjoying college too much to interrupt it. The pressure from my bishop and YM leaders to go on a mission felt manipulative, and made me want to go even less. My parents, though, were supportive of my decision not to go, since I was purposeful and not merely avoiding it out of laziness or indecision. Years later, as I found more honest mission experiences and memoirs like Hermana Plunge, I don’t regret my choice to not serve. Though I would have enjoyed the immersive language learning experience, I would not have been OK with having no say in where I would be sent, or what language I would be expected to learn, or spend hours a day sharing a testimony that I didn’t really have. In hindsight, knowing what I know now about myself (and my 19-year-old self), the mission experience would have either wrecked me mentally, or turned me into a colossal self-righteous prick for the rest of my life.
A mission in W Europe 1990 – a Catholic priest was overly friendly with the (male) missionaries but I think we were all quite naive.