Birthday Tacos

January 6, 2008 – January 14, 2008

Elder Nájera surprised me on the morning of my birthday with a candle and the last piece of what I think was a cookie bar one of the local members had given us.

Compared to Christmas, I remember my birthday in Xalapa much more positively. Some of the ward members found out it was my birthday and decided to make it special. One family made us a chocolate cake and brought it by. Another bought us some tacos al pastor.

My birthday tacos and cake.

If you know me personally, you’re probably surprised I haven’t already talked about tacos al pastor on this blog. They are so delicious, I seriously have no idea how they haven’t caught on more in the states. Every missionary I met, Mexican or gringo, loved tacos al pastor. They’re basically small corn tortillas filled with seasoned pork meat cooked on a large spit on an open flame. They’re usually topped with onion, cilantro, and (if you’re lucky) pineapple. Actually, I talked to a Mexican missionary who’d worked as a butcher prior to his mission, and he described the meat recipe as “a layer of fat, a layer of meat, a layer of chopped onions, and then another layer of fat.” This is probably why they’re great.

On top of tasting awesome, tacos al pastor in Veracruz were also dirt cheap. The priciest taquerías would charge around 5 pesos per taco ($0.40 or so). The cheapest ones charged only 2 pesos ($0.15). Getting a plateful of delicious tacos for less than two dollars felt like a steal. And lots of taquerías delivered right to your door. Sometimes I’m amazed I didn’t eat tacos more often.

Elder Guerra liked tacos al pastor so much that one night we ordered a kilo of carne al pastor and other taco fixings delivered to our apartment. The whole thing ended up costing us more than 150 pesos, which isn’t much for a dinner in the states, but as missionaries in Mexico, that about cleared us out for the rest of the month. I remember we actually ran out of money and had to walk because we couldn’t afford to take the bus until more money came in. I didn’t understand how much it would cost ahead of time, or I’d probably have said something. All he told me was that I’d like them. And to be fair, he was totally right.

Anyway, a family in the ward brought us tacos for my birthday. And they were good.

A couple of days later, another family gave me a cupcake when they found out about my birthday. And another gave me a jar of Nutella. It was nice to feel like so many local members cared about me even though I was only there for a few months.

The most memorable part of my first birthday on my mission was when we joined a couple of families in the ward for a group family home evening. Family home evening is a weekly event, usually held on Monday nights, when a household gets together and talks about its needs and goals for the coming week. It often includes reading scriptures, giving a short lesson, and maybe singing a hymn or playing a game. Generally family home evening is just held by a single family by itself, but sometimes wards will organize an informal meeting at one family’s home where several families are invited. The latter was the case here.

Someone must have mentioned it was my birthday, because the whole group decided they needed to sing me a song. But it wasn’t “Happy Birthday,” like they sing in the states. Instead it’s called “Las Mañanitas” (this is tricky to translate—the best I can do is something like “The Morning Song”). I’d never heard the full version of this song before, though we sang a shortened, modified version at zone conferences to each of the missionaries that were having birthdays in the coming transfer. When they sang it for me that night, I had no idea what the words were or what they were talking about. I grabbed my camera and recorded it halfway through.

“Las Mañanitas” (Mexican “Happy Birthday”), as performed by some of the members of the Alborada Ward.

This was one of those cultural experiences that sticks with me. I really felt like a foraneo that day, but the people there were just so overwhelmingly nice and inviting. I was the only one out of the loop, the only one that couldn’t possibly have sung the song, even if it had been for someone else. I was totally out of my element, and had all eyes on me for this moment, even though at times I just wanted to disappear and look like everyone else. But I couldn’t help loving all the people that went out of their way to make me feel at home even though I was so far away from everything I was familiar with.

Back to Work

December 26, 2007 – January 5, 2008

The Pico de Orizaba on an evening in early January.

Over the next couple of weeks Elder Nájera and I continued to teach some of the investigators I’d found with Elder Guerra. One of these people was a woman named Adid, who was preparing for her baptism. Others included Daniel and César from El Mango. Their mother was still receptive towards us, even though she had never come to church with her sons. We hoped that by continuing to teach Daniel and César, she would decide to come, but the community expectations in El Mango always kept her from coming along on Sundays. Adid got baptized near the end of December; Daniel and César did the same just after New Year’s.

At César and Daniel’s baptism. The girl in the middle is their sister, who always stayed back at El Mango with her mother on Sundays.

We also worked on finding new people to teach. As usual, this meant lots of knocking on doors and contacting people in the street. In general, our goal was to find a constant supply of people interested in listening to us while also helping the investigators we’d already worked with. Easier said than done. Contacting was still super hard for me. It would take so much mental effort for me to just stop someone on the street that I would sometimes get frustrated if they weren’t interested. Of course this just makes things worse; I should have just thanked them for their time and let it slide off me. My journal includes an entry about my contacting difficulties:

Earlier today I was thinking, “without contacts, the mission would be so easy.” As if to prove me wrong, I had a rough time just walking around and being polite. I have to learn to not take out my current moods on others. I’m far too dependent on others to make me happy. I need to find ways to cheer myself up effectively.

I was starting to get the nuances of contacting, though. Even when someone says you can visit them in their home, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll happen. Lots of times we’d plan to visit a person we met in a street contact only to get there and have no one answer the door. Even when we would set actual dates and times to arrive, it was still more common for an appointment like that to fall through than to result in teaching a lesson. This may have just been the result of them forgetting about it or not actually believing we would come, but it I think might also have something to do with the culture in Veracruz. In general, people tended to avoid rejecting us directly. Instead, they would often say something like, “I can’t right now; come back some other time,” even if they didn’t really want us to come back.

My personal favorite of these polite rejections was when we’d ask to stop by at a specific time, or invite someone to attend church with us, and they’d say, “Si Dios quiere.” The best translations of this are probably “God willing,” or “if it’s possible,” but, more literally, it means, “If God wants.” A common snarky missionary’s response was, “Oh, believe us; He does.”

Keeping cheerful in the face of rejection was just really hard for me. But that’s part of what you sign up for as a missionary. You just have to roll with the punches and keep going until something good inevitably happens. Many of my best days in the mission field seemed to come right after some of the worst ones.

Xmas in Xalapa

December 22, 2007 – December 25, 2007

A nativity scene at the cathedral in downtown Xalapa.

Maybe other people have different opinions, but mine is that Christmas as a missionary is hard. For lots of missionaries, it’s their first Christmas away from family, and there’s a good chance the people in their missions don’t have a lot of the same traditions they enjoyed back home. I loved my mission, and I love Christmas, but I can’t say I loved Christmas on my mission.

The week of Christmas opened with Elder Nájera getting sick. He got a stomach bug, but he must have been feeling better by Christmas Eve because the local bishop’s family invited us over for dinner that night. Pres. Johnson told us we were allowed to stay out a little later than normal on Christmas Eve for that reason, which was nice because I don’t think we even started dinner until around 9 PM. The mission also switched P-day that week to Christmas Day, so we wouldn’t have to worry about trying to set appointments for Christmas morning.

Christmas is also one of the two days of the year that missionaries get to call home to talk to their families (the other is Mother’s Day). The week before, we asked a family in the ward and if we could have our families call their house to talk to us. Then we sent that family’s number to our families via email. I remember being really confused about the country codes my family needed to dial to get through. I think something went wrong because I remember having to use a payphone to call home and talk them through how to call us at the other number. But we finally got connected, and I chatted with my parents.

It was definitely nice to talk, but it’s also inevitably distracting. We were limited to forty minutes each, I think, so there was no way I’d be able to go through everything I wanted. I tried to make clear that I was happy and that everything was going well, so they wouldn’t worry about me. I also didn’t feel like I could talk entirely frankly about the all the cultural differences because the local family was right there with us, and I was afraid they’d understand at least bits and pieces of my English.

After calling home, we had to take Elder Nájera to the doctor, who turned out to be a member of another ward in Xalapa. Unfortunately, he wasn’t ready for us when we arrived, so we ended up waiting a long time to see him. I hated losing time on P-days because I felt like they were already too short, but Elder Nájera was really sick, so there wasn’t anything we could have done about it.

The best part of Christmas (for me, at least) was probably teaching some lessons in the evening. First we visited the newly-baptized Cadena family. Missionaries continue visiting and teaching new converts even after they’ve been baptized, to help them adjust to the new lifestyle. We reviewed some of the things we taught them the first time we met them, and they gave us some nice hot chocolate. It was fun to see how far they’d already come after just a few weeks of being members of the church.

“Stepdad”

December 19, 2007 – December 21, 2007

 My padrastro (“stepdad,” a missionary’s second companion in the field) Elder Nájera and me at the Xalapa bus terminal heading to Veracruz for a conference.

Transfers day, and I took a taxi up to the bus station, and Elder Guerra got on a bus back to Veracruz. He would spend a couple of days there and then fly home to his family in Guadalajara, Jalisco. A few other missionaries were getting transferred, too, so they and the zone leaders were at the bus station as well. Since missionaries can’t work without their companions, transfers usually took up most of the day.

Once everyone who was getting transferred had left, the zone leaders led us out of the station and over to a buffet restaurant nearby. We all got breakfast while we waited for our new companions to arrive. The buffet was all of 28 pesos (like $2.00 USD) to get in; I don’t know how they could afford to charge so little. The food was even good. I got a big plate of chilaquiles, which are basically tortilla chips or just pieces of dried tortilla soaked in a cooked salsa and then topped with cheese and cream. I liked them so much I think I went back for second and third helpings. 

About to enjoy a plate of chilaquiles on a different occasion.

Some parts of the mission were more than ten hours away, so a lot of us would be waiting a long time. A few hours later, we went to a different buffet for lunch. This one cost 40-something pesos, which I remember thinking was a lot (it’s about three bucks), but it was also good. By mid-afternoon, we went back to the bus station to collect missionaries that had arrived. I’m pretty sure my companion, Elder Nájera, was one of the last to get there since he was coming from a city called Acayucan, in the southern end of the mission (Xalapa was more towards the north).

Elder Nájera was very different from Elder Guerra. Elder Guerra had been in the last six weeks of his two-year mission, but when I met Elder Nájera, he had been on his mission for about ten months. He was taller and thinner than Elder Guerra, and while all male missionaries wear essentially the same type of clothing, Elder Nájera looked especially well-groomed. He spoke in a crisp, deep voice. He had finished college before going on his mission and held a degree in business management. He even spoke some English. When we met him at the bus terminal, he gave Elder Breceda and me one of those handshake-hugs. He and Elder Breceda had become close friends back when they were in Acayucan. After chatting for a few minutes, we grabbed his luggage and took a taxi back to our apartment.

One of the things I remember most from the first few days of working with Elder Nájera is how much more responsibility I suddenly had. I was still the junior companion, of course, but Elder Nájera didn’t know our investigators, the members, or how to get around the area. I had to make a lot of the decisions about where to go and who to teach for a little while.

For basically the first time since I’d left home, I carried a cell phone around in my pocket all the time. The mission provided each pair of missionaries a single cell phone between them, and there were lots of rules about how we could use them. We were only allowed to make calls that had to do with missionary work, like setting appointments and coordinating plans with local investigators, members, and missionary leaders. We weren’t allowed to make personal calls at all, especially not to anyone back home.

In my mission, it seemed like the senior companions were generally the ones who carried the phone. This was probably more of a practical consideration than anything else. Since the senior companions have more experience, they usually make more of the decisions about how to work in the area, so they’re the ones that the members and mission leadership usually talk to on the phone. The most common exceptions were in cases like mine, where new senior companions arrive in an area where their junior companions have been for a while. Since the junior companions know the people and the area, they’re the ones that make the phone calls for a little while.

Before my mission I didn’t like talking on the phone very much. I just felt awkward having to interrupt someone’s life and then have them yell across their house to the person I was actually trying to reach, announcing my interruption to everyone there. Things were a little better once I was in college, and everyone started to own their own cell phone, but I’d already developed a habit of avoiding phone calls whenever I could.

I’d heard that I wouldn’t have a cell phone as a missionary, and that was fine with me. The reality turned out to be that missionaries use cell phones all the time to communicate with people, so I had to get used to making calls to people that weren’t expecting or even didn’t want to hear from me. It was especially hard in Spanish; even when I could successfully navigate people’s accents, talking on the phone was tough because of the lower sound quality and the fact that I couldn’t see their faces.

I had to take a much more active role in teaching lessons, as well. When I worked with Elder Guerra, there was virtually no time when I knew more about what to say or do than he did. He’d been a missionary for much longer than me, and he’d been in the area for longer than me, too, so he knew all the members and investigators at least as well as I did. This meant that if I lost my train of thought while teaching, all I had to do was look over to him, and he’d take the reins and finish teaching the principle we were talking about.

During my first week with Elder Nájera, though, I was the one who knew the people in our area. When we planned out what we would teach each person, I had to update him on what lessons we’d already covered and what kind of progress the investigator was making. Teaching was also an adjustment just because of the difference in styles between Elder Guerra and Elder Nájera. I hadn’t worked with him as much, so we didn’t know exactly where the other was going with the lesson unless we’d prepared well ahead of time.

Arguably, these differences made my job harder, but it also gave me a chance for personal development. Not being able to rely as fully on my companion forced me to work harder myself and rely more on God. I remember feeling the Spirit guide my teaching much more during this period, helping me know what to say at times when I previously would have gotten hung up somewhere. I got lost once and said a silent prayer in my mind asking God to point us in the right direction. I felt like we should walk a certain direction, and we found ourselves back at the house of two of our investigators. One of them seemed less happy than usual, so I felt that God had led us there to help cheer her up.

Since we had just gone through transfers, it was time for another zone conference. This was the last round of zone conferences before Christmas, so instead of having separate zone conferences in each of the parts of the mission, the whole mission traveled to the city of Veracruz (also known as el Puerto (“the Port”)) to have big zone conferences there instead. I think they split us into two halves, each on a different day, since there were too many of us altogether.

The nativity scene in front of the temple in Veracruz. Just so you know it’s actually December in these photos. It was still probably 85 degrees and humid.

I have to say that one of my favorite things about traveling to Veracruz was getting to ride on the inter-city buses. Getting up early to hop on a comfy, air-conditioned bus is one of the few times when you can’t really do very much missionary work. I have to admit, it was kind of a nice break from all the pressure of everyday mission life. Xalapa isn’t all that far from Veracruz, but that hour and a half bus ride felt awesome. I loved just watching the countryside go by and not feeling like I needed to be working for a little while. 

The Xalapa zone at the Christmas multi-zone conference. Back row: Pres. and Sis. Johnson, Elders Calzada, Bowen, Schwarting, Hernández, Durán, Nájera, Tovar, Älonso, and Bada. Front row: Elders Bowman, Sharp, Breceda, and Eduardo. Awkwardly standing behind the back row: Elder Lindsay.

Elder Nájera mentioned that I should prepare a talk for the conference. Pres. Johnson had a tradition of randomly calling on a couple of missionaries to give talks at each zone conference, so you had to go in being ready for the possibility. I’m glad Elder Nájera reminded me because I was that conference’s lucky winner of five to ten minutes of public speaking in a foreign language. My talk was about humility, though I can’t remember whether I chose the subject or not. It wasn’t the best talk I’d ever given, but I got through it.

Another highlight of the Christmas conference was getting to go to the temple. In the LDS church, temples are special buildings used for performing certain types of ordinances. For example, we believe that baptism is required for everyone to go to heaven. But what about all the people that weren’t given a proper chance to accept baptism in their lifetime? This is why members of the church perform baptisms for the dead, which are baptisms performed in the temple in which living members are baptized on behalf of deceased people that weren’t baptized while they were alive. Doing so, we believe, gives the dead an option to accept or reject the baptism, based on their own free will.

The Veracruz Mexico Temple on the day of the multi-zone conference.

Temples are also where sealings are performed. While civil marriages last only until death, we believe that a marriage performed in a temple under the proper authority can last eternally, into the afterlife. Temple sealings are performed for both the living and the dead. Other ordinances, such as the endowment, are also performed in temples.

In my mission, the only missionaries that could go to the temple were those assigned to work in el Puerto, and even then, only occasionally on a P-day. Everywhere else, we had to wait for the Christmas conferences to get to go. It was my first time going in Spanish, which was kind of exciting for me. And as always, it was a peaceful and spiritual experience.

“Killing” Elder Guerra

December 5, 2007 – December 17, 2007

Elder Guerra and I on a foggy day in Xalapa.

One morning Elder Guerra and I were working in La Reserva again when we came across an area we hadn’t been to before. It was right next to an electrical grid that had a high, barbed-wire fence around it. The houses there were very small and made mostly of sheet metal and heavy cardboard, but the most unusual part about it was how packed together the houses were. There wasn’t any space for a road between them, just little footpaths in a grid. We saw a couple of boys outside one of the houses and introduced ourselves to them. They were brothers; they told us their names were Daniel and César Vera Guerra. Elder Guerra perked up when he heard their second last name. He pointed out that they might be distant relatives. I don’t know how likely that is; Guerra isn’t a super common name, so I guess it might have been possible, but either way, they bonded over their shared name.

They told us they lived in this little cluster of houses, which they called El Mango. We asked if their parents were around, and they brought us up to one of the houses in front and introduced us to their mother. We taught a brief lesson and invited them to come to church with us on Sunday. The two boys told us they wanted to come, but the mom said she couldn’t. We asked her if she had a prior commitment. Her answer was more complicated than we had expected.

She said that El Mango was a new neighborhood; it had just recently sprung up next to the electrical grid more or less overnight. It sounded like the people living there were a large group of squatters that decided to live and work together. Since the houses there had been built quickly, they were pretty insecure and needed constant vigilance to protect against thieves (and maybe the title owners of the land). The families living in El Mango assigned each adult a period of time during the week when they were required to keep watch; if they didn’t show up for it, they’d be fined. (They sounded much more organized than I’d imagined squatters being.) Their mother’s turn to take the watch was Sunday mornings, so she wouldn’t be able to go to church. Still, she was very friendly to us, and she encouraged her sons to go to church with us even though she couldn’t go herself.

From El Mango, we walked over to the Guerreros’ house to see if we could encourage them to keep coming to church with us since they’d missed the last time. No one answered the door when we knocked. Through the (rather large) gaps in their door (which was really just a piece of sheet metal secured with a chain and lock), I could see shadows moving quickly on the other side. Still no answer. We were just about to leave when Joel came walking up the road toward his house. We talked to him briefly, but I don’t remember the details very well. I think his interest in the Church had caused some conflict of opinion between him and his wife, who never really warmed up to us. That was the last time we visited them.

Since Ana and Karina’s baptisms, we’d started to make better progress teaching Raúl, Ana’s older son. He was seventeen, but between his large build and his full-time construction job, he often seemed like a grown man. His schedule made it hard for us to teach him regularly, but he had been more interested recently. When we started talking to him about baptism, we taught him that baptism was a commandment, and that it enables us to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, but the idea came into my mind that I needed to emphasize how baptism allows us to be forgiven for our sins. I did my best to explain all this through my less-than-stellar Spanish, and then I asked him if he would be baptized like his mom and sister. He said yes. We set a date for his baptism a few weeks down the road and asked him to read a few sections in the Book of Mormon we’d given him so that he would learn more on his own time.

Over the next couple of weeks, we knocked on lots of doors, contacted lots of people in the street, and taught lots and lots of lessons to new investigators. Unfortunately, no one besides the Vera Guerra’s and Raúl seemed to be sincerely interested. The Vera Guerra’s didn’t have a lot of formal schooling, so when we taught them, we had to keep things simple and ask lots of questions to make sure they were understanding. Learning a new religion’s beliefs can be confusing for anyone, but it’s especially hard when just reading a sentence takes a lot of concentration. Still, they were interested and wanted us to keep coming.

Raúl was also progressing. He agreed to stop drinking after we taught him about the Word of Wisdom. It really helped to have Ana and Karina there with us as we were teaching Raúl; when we weren’t explaining ourselves well, one of them could jump in and say it in a way that made sense to him. When we had to leave to go to our next appointment, they could provide more consistent support by answering his questions and helping him remember the commitments he’d made.

On December 11, Elder Guerra turned two. He and another missionary in the zone had started their missions exactly two years prior, so the other missionaries in the zone decided to throw them a small party after district meetings.

Elder Antonio and Elder Guerra on their 731st day as missionaries. They would return home the following week. Also pictured are some of Mexico’s unique sodas: Fanta (which comes in like seven different flavors, all of them better than the American variety), Fresca (which tastes better in Mexico because it uses actual sugar instead of artificial sweetner), and Lift (an apple-flavored soda and my personal favorite).

A snapshot of my zone in Xalapa near the end of my first transfer. Top: Elders Sharp, Guerra, and Lindsay; Middle: Elders Joaquín, Bowen, Alonso, Breceda, Antonio, Bowman, Calzada, Schwarting, and Gutiérrez; Bottom: Sisters Sánchez and Sevilla.

The next day was the Virgin of Guadalupe Day, which Catholic Mexicans believe was the day an image of the Virgin Mary miraculously appeared on the cloak of Juan Diego, an indigenous Mexican convert to Catholicism. The Virgin of Guadalupe is by far the most important saint to Catholic Mexicans. She appears in images and shrines in most people’s homes, in little huts outside on the street, and even in bus stations, just to be safe. In Xalapa that day, there was a huge parade in her honor, with big trucks decked out with images and other decorations. I wish I’d taken photos. Instead, here’s a photo of a shrine at a bus station elsewhere in the mission:

In the top right is a fairly typical Virgin of Guadalupe shrine in Santa Cruz, Veracruz.

Later that week was Raúl’s baptism. Elder Guerra performed the ordinance this time. It would be the last one of his mission. Raúl was confirmed the next day in church.

Elder Guerra, Raúl, Ana, Karina, and myself at Raúl’s baptism. Lots of Mexicans don’t naturally smile in photos.

Sunday night the zone leaders called us to tell us about transfers. Every six weeks, the mission president decides whether to move missionaries around between areas and companions. One generation goes home, and another arrives. Since Elder Guerra was going home, I knew I’d be staying in Alborada and getting a new companion to replace him. But I didn’t know who it would be. That evening, we did splits with the teens in the ward again, so when the zone leaders called Elder Guerra to tell him about transfers, he called the teenager I was with to tell me who was taking his place. He told me it would be Elder Nájera. Elder Guerra didn’t know him very well, but he said he’d been on his mission for about ten months. Sister Sánchez and Sister Sevilla were both being transferred out of the area next to ours, and two elders were replacing them.

The next day Elder Guerra packed his things and visited a few of the members in the ward. Our last visit was to a family that Elder Guerra and his previous companion had taught. They had all gotten baptized together and were becoming strong members of the ward.

Elder Guerra and myself with the Rodríguez family the night before Elder Guerra left for home. Every time we talked to them, I could tell how much they cared about Elder Guerra. I hoped that I would be able to find and teach a family just like them.

Contacts, Kisses, and Confirmations

November 28, 2007 – December 2, 2007

The Christmas decorations at the cathedral in downtown Xalapa. The man in the banner is Rafael Guízar y Valencia, a Catholic bishop in Xalapa that had been canonized (made a saint) only a year earlier. We knew his face from all the houses with stickers in their windows that said “En este hogar SOMOS CATÓLICOS” (“In this home, WE ARE CATHOLICS”). The idea was to keep missionaries like us from knocking on their door. We usually ignored them.

As I mentioned in the “Practice and Patience” post, one of the toughest things for me to do as a missionary was street contacting. I didn’t like the idea of interrupting people who had things to do and places to be and, at least on average, didn’t want to talk to us. But it’s a really important way for missionaries to meet people that might be interested in the church. The handful of interested people you find that way makes all the rejections worth it, in the end.

There were also some cultural barriers that made street contacting more difficult for me. The parts of Mexico I lived in weren’t very diverse. In my whole time in Xalapa, I think I saw maybe two non-missionaries that I thought were probably white Americans. Being a blond, six-foot-tall white guy wearing a white shirt and tie, I already felt like I was under the microscope most of the time. The last thing I wanted to do was attract more attention by stopping random people in the street to talk to them. Lots of teenagers would yell little phrases at us in English they’d learned from watching movies. Most of these were vulgar, of course. There were lots of times throughout my mission where I seriously considered dying my hair black to see if it would make me stand out a little less. (Of course there was no way to hide my height.) The reality is that a lot of good missionary opportunities come from looking different than everyone else. A lot of people recognize us as Mormons, so if we’re polite and hard-working like we’re supposed to be, it gives people a positive impression of the Church.

Sometimes, people took one look at me and assumed I didn’t speak any Spanish. One time my companion started a conversation with a man on the street. He explained what our message was about and why it could be a blessing in this man’s life. I wanted to support what he was saying but couldn’t think of anything substantial to add, so when my companion finished his pitch, I just smiled and said, “¡Sí!” The man glanced up at me, and then turned back to my companion and said, “Él no habla nada de español, ¿verdad?” (“He doesn’t speak any Spanish, huh?”) The worst part about the whole thing was that I knew I spoke pretty darn good Spanish for a missionary who’d only been out as long as I had, but my shyness about contacting made me nervous and uncertain when it was time to make a first impression.

Elder Guerra was an experienced missionary trainer, and he was really good about contacting. He would initiate conversations with tons of people, and he would often pause after starting and look to me to finish it, so that I’d get some experience. He also would tell me things like, “Okay, this next one’s all yours,” as we were walking towards someone, to make me get used to doing it myself, too. Still, though, I regularly struggled to reach the goals we set for street contacting. It never got easy for me.

Elder Guerra and I doing weekly planning for our area. Some previous missionaries must have bought that little Christmas tree. Elder Guerra found it and decided it was time to set it up.

Once a week, each missionary companionship takes a couple of hours to review the results of their work and make plans for the next week. We would go through all the people or families that we were teaching and figure out what the next things we needed to teach them were and which commitments we would invite them to make (like coming to church with us or giving up coffee, for example).

This process can take a long time, and a lot of missionaries I met thought it was boring and pretty useless. But it could be helpful if you did it right. This time, I looked through the records previous missionaries had left behind and found the names of several people that had listened to the missionaries previously but hadn’t been able to progress towards baptism for whatever reason. We decided to try contacting some of them to see if they’d be interested in having us teach them again.

Later that day we went to visit the Guerreros and help them get ready for their upcoming baptism. Joel let us in, but this time his wife wouldn’t come listen to us. Instead we only got to teach Joel and his two older children. Joel himself also seemed hesitant towards us. We asked when we could schedule a baptismal interview for him, but he said he was busy the whole rest of the week. We offered to come earlier than usual to be able to catch him before he went to work, and he finally accepted. We were glad, but it made us nervous for them.

The next day I swapped places with Elder Schwarting, one of our zone leaders, for the day. He went to Alborada with Elder Guerra so he could interview Ana, Karina, and the Guerreros, and I went to his area, Américas, with his companion, Elder Breceda. This was my first time doing splits in another area, and it was really interesting.

They didn’t have a lot of appointments during the day, so we mostly knocked on doors and did street contacting in the morning. We taught a few first lessons to new investigators, but I knew that I probably wouldn’t see them again because I was only there for the day. Still, I did my best to work sincerely and to enjoy a chance to learn from Elder Breceda directly. He was upbeat and very knowledgeable whenever someone asked us a question.

It was also refreshing to have something of a clean slate with Elder Breceda. He’d never seen me teach to real people before, so when it was my turn to teach one of the lesson points, I didn’t feel like I had to perform in a certain way. I was less self-conscious, and I think it helped me teach better. The nice thing is that I was able to carry some of that confidence back to my area with me when I went home.

One of the few specifics I remember from that day in Américas was when we visited one of the investigators Elder Breceda and Elder Schwarting had already taught. I don’t remember much from the lesson itself, but I remember the woman we were teaching was very friendly and seemed happy we were teaching her. After the lesson we set an appointment for the next visit, and I mentioned that I wouldn’t be there next time because I’d be going back to my area. When she heard this, she walked right up to me, hugged me, and did one of those kiss-greetings where you put your cheeks together and kiss the air next to the other person’s head. It’s as normal as a handshake for Mexicans, but I’d never done this before and had no idea what was going on until it was already over.

In my mission it was a well-established rule that missionaries didn’t hug people of the opposite sex, ever. The most friendly you were allowed to be was a firm handshake. While that probably sounds odd enough by itself, the weirdest thing about this rule is that it’s not even in the handbook. It says not to flirt or be alone with anyone of the opposite sex, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t say anything about how you can greet them. I guess it all goes back to the MTC, where our branch president told us to not hug any of the sister missionaries. But my whole mission I just assumed it was somewhere in the handbook. That assumption made a lot of moments like this one, where the woman knows nothing about missionary rules, much more awkward than they needed to be.

Inter-area splits between missionaries often last twenty-four hours, so that the leader has more time to train the other missionary and can get a better picture of how they’ve been working on their own. That meant I would be spending the night in Américas with Elder Breceda and wouldn’t go home until after our study hours the next morning. The Américas elders lived in a very different apartment than ours. Theirs was a studio, so everything was in the same room, but it was spacious and clean.

The best thing about inter-area splits is that you’re usually happy to start them, and you’re usually happy to end them, too. It’s refreshing to get a chance to work with someone else, learn from them, and get yourself out of any ruts you might be stuck in, but it’s also nice to return to your companion and go back to what you’re familiar with. When I got back to Alborada, I learned that Ana and Karina were both ready for their baptisms that day, but that the Guerreros, unsurprisingly, were not.

Ana, Elder Guerra, Karina, and myself at their baptism.

Karina, and then Ana, were baptized that evening. Unlike Ray, they became members of our ward, so we saw them many more times after this. My journal says that the service went well, and that I thought they could feel the Spirit and the importance of their choice.

The next day, Ana and Karina got confirmed in church. One at a time, during sacrament meeting, they came to the front of the room, and authorized members of the church (in this case, the bishop and his counselors, though it doesn’t have to be them) put their hands on each of their heads to confirm them as members of the church and to give them the gift of the Holy Ghost. While anyone, member of the Church or not, can feel the influence of the Holy Ghost, we believe that only properly confirmed members enjoy the gift of the Holy Ghost, which is the privilege of having the Holy Ghost’s constant companionship. Through the Holy Ghost (which we also call the Holy Spirit or just the Spirit), members can tell right from wrong more easily and can receive personal inspiration to be able to feel when spiritual teachings are true or not. This means that having the gift of the Holy Ghost is a great help to new members of the church because it helps keep them pointed along God’s path for them.

While we were happy about Ana and Karina, we were also sad because none of the Guerreros came to church that day. In fact, none of the people we’d been teaching came. We’d been praying that at least someone would come, though, and we were surprised to see that there was a man at church that we’d never met. Someone had just invited him along, so we got in contact with him and asked to visit. It was an answer to our prayers.

Early Blessings

November 19, 2007 – November 24, 2007

Just a small fraction of the forty people that came to the lesson we gave in La Reserva in Xalapa. The entire home wasn’t much bigger than a suburban U.S. garage, but they all fit somehow.

Despite the struggles of missionary life, Elder Guerra and I had lots of reasons to be grateful during our first weeks together. Most of these blessings came in the form of the people who were receptive to our message and wanted to learn more.

One night we helped the ward organize an informal gospel lesson in a member’s home so that members could invite their friends and neighbors to hear us teach. When we arrived, we walked up to the small, one-room, cinderblock house to find about forty people crammed inside waiting for us. We gave a short lesson and then tried to get to know everyone new to see if they would let us come teach them in their home on a different day. I was blown away by how many people there were; some were members I knew from church, of course, but many there were less active (members that don’t go to church every week). I wondered if some of them would attend church more often if it weren’t so far away from their neighborhood.

By this time, we’d taught several lessons to the Guerrero family, and they had agreed to be baptized within a couple of weeks, which was really exciting for us. We stopped by several times a week to teach them new principles, invite them to make changes in their lives, and also check up on their progress. The Guerreros were progressing well, they had already come to church with us and were working on living the Word of Wisdom. The Word of Wisdom is a revelation given by God to Joseph Smith which teaches us about what substances we should and should not use. Faithful Mormons try to eat healthy foods and abstain from all alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and illegal drugs. For many of the people we taught, ditching coffee was the biggest adjustment. In Xalapa especially, where coffee grows abundantly and it gets cold enough to want a warm drink, most of the people we met were regular coffee drinkers. But in order to get baptized, investigators need to be following the commandments, including the Word of Wisdom. If they aren’t following the commandments, the baptism must be postponed until they make the necessary changes.

We were happy to see that while the Word of Wisdom had initially been difficult for the Guerreros, they were making good progress and were still planning on getting baptized. I enjoyed teaching them because we had already covered the basic doctrine with them, so I got to practice teaching other principles, like the various commandments, rather than the same first principles that we taught to people that were meeting with us for the first time.

One of our biggest blessings during this time was meeting the Cadena family. We started off teaching Ana, the mother, and her teenage daughter Karina. Later, we got to also teach Ana’s older son, Raúl. We tried a couple of times to teach the father, but he either didn’t understand or wasn’t genuinely interested. Ana and Karina were very interested, though. When we would visit them, they would listen very carefully and try to make sense of all these new things we were teaching them about. They had a quiet, polite demeanor that made it easier for me to connect with than some of the other people we taught. The two of them quickly accepted our invitations to attend church and plan a date for their baptisms. Teaching them was always a highlight of the day.

At this point Elder Guerra and I were preparing several people for baptisms, but none of the people we were teaching would be ready for baptism for another week or two still. That all changed when we got a call from Ray. Ray was a young adult that had been to church several times with his girlfriend, who was a member. He had already learned a lot about the church and its teachings, too. He called Elder Guerra one evening to tell him that he decided he wanted to be baptized as soon as possible. We met with him the next day to make sure that he knew the doctrine we would have taught him and to fill in any gaps in his understanding. We were happy to find out that he already knew basically everything, and he was already living all the commandments necessary for baptism.

When investigators are ready for baptism, they meet with another missionary that didn’t take part in teaching them who asks them about their understanding of certain doctrine and verifies that they’re living the commandments. This is the baptismal interview. Baptism isn’t just the way to join the church; it’s also a sacred ordinance that allows people to be forgiven of their sins. At baptism, people make a promise to God that they will obey His commandments. But this means that those being baptized should have repented of their previous sins before they’re baptized. The baptismal interview helps make sure that people have repented before being baptized and understand the promise that they’re making.

The missionary that gives the baptismal interview is usually the district leader over the missionaries that taught the investigator. In our case, though, Elder Guerra was the district leader, so Elder Breceda, one of our zone leaders (who oversee the district leaders) interviewed Ray instead. When they came back a few minutes later, Elder Breceda told us Ray was perfectly ready for baptism, which we had scheduled for the following Saturday. When Elder Breceda asked Ray who he wanted to perform the baptism, Ray pointed to me. I was surprised. Naturally, Elder Guerra had done the bulk of the teaching, and he knew Ray better than me, but I was still happy to get the chance to perform his baptism. It would be a new experience for me, as I’d never done it before.

Saturday morning we went to the church and filled the baptismal font. Ray, his girlfriend, and Isaac showed up a while later. Between the short notice and unusual time of day for the baptism, I don’t think anyone else was there. We held a short service with a prayer and a hymn and a quick spiritual thought, and then Ray and I went down into the font, and I baptized him. It was simple, but I felt good because I knew how important a step this was for Ray.

Myself, Elder Guerra, and Ray just before his baptism. We wear white during the ordinance to symbolize being clean from sin.

The only hiccup in the process was the fact that Ray lived on a different side of town from us. In fact, he lived far enough away that he actually should have attended a different ward than us. Mormon congregations are broken down into geographic regions, so depending on where you live, you’re supposed to attend one ward rather than another. Ray was out of our ward boundaries. Normally, missionaries aren’t supposed to teach investigators that live inside other missionaries’ boundaries (this is called “pirating” in mission slang), but since it was Ray that asked us to teach and baptize him, and he agreed to attend his own ward rather than ours, everything was okay.

Since he didn’t go to our ward, I only saw Ray a handful of times after that. I’ve since lost contact with him, but I hope he continues to participate in church back in Xalapa.