Precursors at the Training Center

We have now reached the time where I talk about formative experiences while I was on my mission.

I feel like I will need to start every post with a disclaimer, but perhaps I can only say it once: I absolutely knew then that I should go on a mission, and I still know that it was right to go. That there were painful things isn't even surprising. 

To be fair, I have pangs as I disclose some things about my family too. People are complex and feelings are real, and we will spend time on that.

Obviously, the way some things hit me had a lot to do with whom I already was.

I entered the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah on February 3rd, 1993, left around April 3rd for the California Fresno Mission, Laotian-speaking, and then returned home on August 3rd, 1994. Obviously it's been a while, and and a lot has changed.

The Fresno mission had missionaries who spoke English, Spanish, Cambodian, and Hmong, as well as Lao. For the Asian languages, none of the relevant countries had missionaries, so any missionaries speaking those languages would be working with refugee populations. The day I went home, one of the Cambodian elders from my mission flew to LAX then PDX with me, where he met three other missionaries and they were going to Cambodia to open it up there. (There had been some service missionaries already.)

The point of that (besides that maybe you will find it interesting) is that there were never that many missionaries speaking any of those languages, and in fact only Fresno had Lao sisters. It would have been only four at a time, but there was an older sister who spoke Chinese and Thai, which is close to Lao, and they had her work with us. You don't change companions much and most importantly, only one Lao sister would go through the Missionary Training Center at a time. This meant that I was the only girl in my class, and that my companions were in the next room learning Cantonese to serve in Hong Kong.

I could easily have had issues fitting in anyway. I was politically liberal from a part-member family, and they were sometimes shocked by jokes I would make. Also, one was kind of passive aggressive when she had problems with me. I started being able to figure out what was bugging her when it was bugging her, but it was kind of frustrating.

More to the point, they just clicked instantly with each other. One was the other's maid of honor later. 

One of their agreements was that on Prep Day we should do the earliest possible temple session, and then we had the rest of the day for laundry and letters. I am just going to tell you that most of the rest of the day for them was napping, which you could argue was not efficient, but that was a minor nuisance.

There was a bad experience that wasn't really their fault. They both tried out for the choir, and made it. The choir director at the time was weird about people not being able to observe practice. Normally if your companion is in but you aren't, there is someone else with that issue and you can pair up with them. I guess I thought I would find someone or that just quietly staying in the room wouldn't be a big deal. I didn't and it was, and I found myself out in the hall, without a companion.

That was a big deal; companions are how we stay out of trouble. So there I was, newly a missionary, and breaking rules because I hadn't prepared, or because I was in a stupid threesome, or maybe just me always somehow being wrong, still and again.

I sat down on the floor and started crying.

Some staff (one was Mary Ellen Edmunds who ran the Relief Society meetings, and whom I adore) discovered me. Without berating me for being unaccompanied, everyone tried really hard to be helpful, but I couldn't talk. I tried, and no words came out. They eventually let me be, which was the kindest thing overall.

That was the first time that happened to me. It doesn't happen often. With some of the issues I have had asking for help, occasional mutism makes sense. Usually I can say other things, even if I can't say what I need. That was more the case for the next time.

My companions and I mostly got along, but often the things that they were talking about were about Cantonese or Hong Kong or things from class, and I was just peripheral. One day I heard them say to each other how important it was to really focus on only speaking Cantonese as much as possible. I remember suddenly feeling cold.

I know to them it felt like obedience and necessity, so I didn't protest. They really did increase their Cantonese speaking. Incidentally, I still know about 20 words in Cantonese after all this time. Impressive perhaps, but it didn't get me far. I started feeling more and more left out, and more and more deeply sad.

You know, we often don't credit men for being very sensitive, and there are reasons for that, but those seven 19 year old guys in my class noticed that I was hurting, and they insisted on me telling them. They related to that need to practice language, but they also didn't want to see me so isolated.

The district leader, Elder Taufer, talked to one of the counselors in our branch presidency, and he came and talked to the three of us. He said that the need for me to be a part of things overrode the need to practice their language when they were around me. He promised that their learning would be blessed, and that they wouldn't fall behind by considering me.

It was only two months out of eighteen, but a lot of what happened during the other sixteen months had similarities. And I still survived.

I did get banged up a little.