Chapter Three: My trainer
We spent the next day playing basketball and talking to the gardener and Sister Lunt. The gardener was an leathery, middle-aged church member. He had a number of kids, all of whom had served missions. He was a die-hard member and it was no wonder he worked for the Church.
My first impression of Sister Lunt was that she is a character! Even as the President was tall and broad, Sister Lunt was short and round. She wasn't fat ... but there was a sort of softness to her features that made her very motherly and not at all scary. She seemed President Lunt's opposite in so many ways. He was stern and sharp-minded while she was bubbly and somewhat scatter-brained. He was always frowning while she was never without a smile. President's glasses were large and thick, while Sister Lunt's glasses were square and elderly and perched on the tip of her nose like a librarian's. I liked her immediately.
The only thing I remember of that time was the nervous energy I felt, the fear of the unknown and of being in a new country -- foreign in every way. When we ate breakfast that morning we looked out the kitchen window at a volcanic peak, Santa María, which rises, green and lush, above Quetzaltenango as if straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.
That day passed too quickly, and that evening we each met with President Lunt in his office for a one-on-one interview. It was quite daunting to sit across from President Lunt, especially in a tiny office with pictures of missionaries wallpapering the wall. The President kept plasticized cards and pictures of every missionary in the mission on the wall. These were organized by companionship, area, and zone, for easy reference by the mission president. He would also use these when he was reorganizing companionships once a month.
I should probably take a step back and explain some of this terminology for anyone who isn't familiar with Mormon missions. Mormon missionaries almost always travel in pairs called "companionships." With older missionaries a companionship is a husband and wife pair; but with young missionaries, a companionship is always Elder with Elder or Sister with Sister. You're assigned to your companion for a period of time dictated by the mission president, ranging from a month up to six or more. Once a month a mission will have "transfers" or (as we called it in our mission) "change day," where a missionary (usually the missionary with more time in an area) will leave to a new area and new companion.
The reasons for this are simple: first, it mixes up the mission dynamics so that missionaries don't get bored; second, it allows for one missionary to remain behind who is already familiar with an area. So, most often, it is the missionary with more time in an area who receives the change and the missionary with less time in an area who reamains -- no matter how much time either missionary has overall in the mission field.
Another thing you need to know about missionary companionships: they are usually comprised of a "junior" and "senior" companion -- the senior companion being the missionary with more time in the missionfield and more experience as a missionary. The general rule is that you are a junior companion for the first year and a senior companion for the second year. That is not always the case, but that's the rule of thumb.
One last thing: when a missionary first enters the mission field, they are commonly referred to as "greenies." Their first companion is called their "trainers" since they "train" you on the way to be a missionary and usually have a huge influence on you. When our mission president interviewed us that first day, he told us that he had already decided who would be our groups' trainers, but he wanted to get to know us some to see which of us should be paired up with which trainer. President Lunt sat me down and asked me a little about my family and background. He also asked me about my leg.
Before leaving to Guatemala, when I was still at the MTC, I had been playing soccer with some missionaries and had somehow managed to kick another missionary. My leg had bloated to twice its size and had turned green and red. At first I thought I had broken my leg but--not wanting to be held back from my mission--hadn't gone to see the nurse at first. Finally, my friends convinced me to go see her and, when I did, I ended up having to get a battery of x-rays to see if the bone was broken. It ended up just being a bone bruise, and I was given the green light to go on my mission, but President Lunt must have been worried about my ability to walk.
I answered his unspoken question by saying, "President, I can climb any mountain you throw at me."
I didn't know how wrong I was.
My first impression of Sister Lunt was that she is a character! Even as the President was tall and broad, Sister Lunt was short and round. She wasn't fat ... but there was a sort of softness to her features that made her very motherly and not at all scary. She seemed President Lunt's opposite in so many ways. He was stern and sharp-minded while she was bubbly and somewhat scatter-brained. He was always frowning while she was never without a smile. President's glasses were large and thick, while Sister Lunt's glasses were square and elderly and perched on the tip of her nose like a librarian's. I liked her immediately.
The only thing I remember of that time was the nervous energy I felt, the fear of the unknown and of being in a new country -- foreign in every way. When we ate breakfast that morning we looked out the kitchen window at a volcanic peak, Santa María, which rises, green and lush, above Quetzaltenango as if straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.
That day passed too quickly, and that evening we each met with President Lunt in his office for a one-on-one interview. It was quite daunting to sit across from President Lunt, especially in a tiny office with pictures of missionaries wallpapering the wall. The President kept plasticized cards and pictures of every missionary in the mission on the wall. These were organized by companionship, area, and zone, for easy reference by the mission president. He would also use these when he was reorganizing companionships once a month.
I should probably take a step back and explain some of this terminology for anyone who isn't familiar with Mormon missions. Mormon missionaries almost always travel in pairs called "companionships." With older missionaries a companionship is a husband and wife pair; but with young missionaries, a companionship is always Elder with Elder or Sister with Sister. You're assigned to your companion for a period of time dictated by the mission president, ranging from a month up to six or more. Once a month a mission will have "transfers" or (as we called it in our mission) "change day," where a missionary (usually the missionary with more time in an area) will leave to a new area and new companion.
The reasons for this are simple: first, it mixes up the mission dynamics so that missionaries don't get bored; second, it allows for one missionary to remain behind who is already familiar with an area. So, most often, it is the missionary with more time in an area who receives the change and the missionary with less time in an area who reamains -- no matter how much time either missionary has overall in the mission field.
Another thing you need to know about missionary companionships: they are usually comprised of a "junior" and "senior" companion -- the senior companion being the missionary with more time in the missionfield and more experience as a missionary. The general rule is that you are a junior companion for the first year and a senior companion for the second year. That is not always the case, but that's the rule of thumb.
One last thing: when a missionary first enters the mission field, they are commonly referred to as "greenies." Their first companion is called their "trainers" since they "train" you on the way to be a missionary and usually have a huge influence on you. When our mission president interviewed us that first day, he told us that he had already decided who would be our groups' trainers, but he wanted to get to know us some to see which of us should be paired up with which trainer. President Lunt sat me down and asked me a little about my family and background. He also asked me about my leg.
Before leaving to Guatemala, when I was still at the MTC, I had been playing soccer with some missionaries and had somehow managed to kick another missionary. My leg had bloated to twice its size and had turned green and red. At first I thought I had broken my leg but--not wanting to be held back from my mission--hadn't gone to see the nurse at first. Finally, my friends convinced me to go see her and, when I did, I ended up having to get a battery of x-rays to see if the bone was broken. It ended up just being a bone bruise, and I was given the green light to go on my mission, but President Lunt must have been worried about my ability to walk.
I answered his unspoken question by saying, "President, I can climb any mountain you throw at me."
I didn't know how wrong I was.
___ __ ___ _ ___ __ ___
Change Day was once a month, always on a Thursday, at a church in downtown Quetzaltenango called the Calvario Ward. The Church is big on organization: so the entire Church is organized into regions, then stakes, then wards -- each with its assigned Church leadership. A ward is thought of as the smallest unit. It's headed by a Bishop and usually has between 50-400 members. If an area has too few members to have a ward it can have a branch, headed by a branch president, who oversees 10-20 people.
Calvario is one of a number of Quetzaltenango Wards. It was chosen by the President Lunt for Change Day due to its close proximity to the bus terminal: which - though I didn't know it then - is how missionaries and everyone else travels in Guatemala. Most people can't afford a pickup truck or, God-forbid, a car. So the bus lines are pretty intense, reaching out to every part of the country. A person who knew what they were doing and was able to speak the language could travel anywhere in most 3rd-world countries if they were comfortable taking a bus.
The way Change Day works is this. If you are in a companionship and one person is getting "changed" out of an area, both companions will take a bus to Quetzaltenango either the day of or the day before Change Day. The missionary receiving the change will bring all of their baggage with them -- on the top of the bus -- and then take a taxi to the Calvario Ward. They'll leave their things out in the yard or tucked up against the church house, then mill around and talk to all of their missionary friends: some of whom they may not have seen in months. Two a newby ("greenie") like myself: the whole thing was rather scary ... especially since I couldn't understand Spanish yet and heard a lot of Latin missionaries conversing with one another or with the white missionaries, who spoke it so easily.
We greenies stuck out pretty bad. We only knew each other so we remained in the chapel for the most part, sitting up on the front row and knowing that - within the next hour or two we'd be saying goodbye to the only people we knew and heading off with an assigned trainer ... someone whose job it would be to teach us Spanish and get us learning what it means to be a missionary.
Even without our inability to speak Spanish and our tendency to hide near the front, we would have stood out in a crowed of missionaries due to our clothes: brilliantly white shirts, expensive silk ties, rigidly creased slacks and polished shoes. Compared to the other missionaries we looked like store mannequins.
Most of the missionaries in my mission wore graying shirts with permanently dirt-stained collars. Their shoes were heavy-soled and worn from trekking up and down mountainsides. Most missionaries had long ago ditched their stylish American ties for grubby 70s-era, woolen things with ugly brown and yellow stitching. And their hair was much longer than ours. Some even sported skater haircuts, making them look like they were about to go surfing.
In addition to this, there were Guatemalan woven "purses" everywhere, making everyone look like hybrids of North American and Central American culture.
Yeah, it was scary.
<< Home