(Other stories about my mission and the MTC linked below)
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,413439,415986#msg-415986http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,407018,407042#msg-407042http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,408509,408509#msg-408509Tales of Violence from my Mission to Rival the Book of Mormon
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic 1989-1991
There I was, in the first week being in the actual mission field, sitting in a tin-roofed home in the Arroyo Hondo barrio of northern Santo Domingo, giving a discussion with my companion. This was a poor neighborhood, but one I'd encouraged my companion to tract in, as we'd tried tracting in a rich neighborhood the first couple of days of my mission without being invited into a single home. Suddenly, gunfire erupted somewhere in the streets outside the home (when I say streets think of dirt tracts running willy-nilly on the progressively steeper as you descend slope of a hill that ends up in said arroyo). We saw people running like rioters on the street in front of us, fleeing from the gunshots. We sat low and waited several minutes until normalcy returned to the streets. We finished up and left. Not interesting or a big deal in and of itself (the following stories are much better), but it sets the stage for the looming threat of violence that hung over Arroyo Hondo for the next couple of weeks while we worked there.
The following week we were in front of a tin-roofed shack talking with an investigator and a couple of her/his young children (I can't remember if one or both of the parents were there). This was a quiet side path of sorts, with more space between the ramshackle dwellings. I looked to my right for no particular reason and saw three young men, about 15 yards down the path staring in our direction with menacing looks and sheathed machetes hanging from their belts. Gulp. I looked to my left and saw at an equidistance two young men decked out in the same attire of mean looks and machetes also staring in our direction. With a yell, the two men unsheathed their machetes and began to run toward us. With almost no time to think, we scooped up the kids and ran straight into the investigators shack, barring the door behind us. On the outside we heard screams, the clashing of machetes, and the trampling feet of the running marauders. They all scampered off soon enough leaving us with the realization that the two small groups had been targeting each other, and not us. We just happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It turns out that this clash was related to the previous gunfire, and was all to do with an unpaid gambling debt of some sort. The violence culminated later on the Friday night of that week when somebody had their neck cut, causing their death in the midst of a neighborhood dance. Apparently that settled the score and we saw no more violence in Arroyo Hondo. We did see several baptisms, though, in my one month in the area (I served my first month in the mission office because they needed some help with typing. I'd been tested at 81 words per minute net a few months before starting my mission). A funny thing happened when were baptizing a teenage girl. After getting dunked she was climbing out via the stairs when our eyes were attracted to some red lettering on her underwear now visible through her wet baptismal gown. The phrase "Hot Stuff!" was printed on her undies, with a large lipstick kiss next to it.
Anyway, shortly after the machete fight I decided I had enough good material to compose a letter to my parents -- I described the violent encounters in great detail just to cause my mother needless stress.
At the end of the first month I was transferred eastward to La Romana. After a couple of months there I happened to find myself on a one day split with a former member of my MTC district -- my best friend from that group. We were glad to be able to spend a day together. As fate would have it, that day ended up being 3 or 4 days stuck indoors as another missionary somewhere in the capitol was shot through the leg while riding his bicycle. Two men on a motorcycle had driven up and targeted the missionaries. There was a fair amount of anti-American sentiment at the time because of the invasion of Panama. The shot missionary was pretty lucky, as he was shot with a large caliber pistol with the bullet going through his leg near the knee, yet no major bones/joints were hit and destroyed. It was a mission miracle(!), the story of which I relayed in my homecoming talk. My aunt (married to my blood uncle) came up to me afterward and told me that the shot missionary was actually her nephew! Small mormon world, I guess.
Not a mission miracle? -- the missionary who was run over by a garbage truck the month before I got to the island. He died. #JesusCan'tStopGarbageTrucks
Several months later I was back serving in Santo Domingo, living in an apartment on the roof of a home owned by an elderly widowed woman that we'd recently baptized. She lived alone in the house below. There was another one room apartment on the roof, inhabited by our zone leaders. Our one room apartments were connected but had separate doors to the terraced roof.
In the zone next to ours was a great little Mexican restaurant that made delicious tacos. Tacos are not native to the Caribbean. Dominican cuisine was a pretty simple affair consisting mostly of fried chicken, rice, and fried plantains and the grim tasting yucca plant. Pretty drab, overall, but I did really like a good plate of the aforementioned fried chicken and rice with slices of avocado on top. You know you're an adult when you make the transition from liking guacamole more than fresh avocado to liking fresh avocado more than guacamole. But I digress.
So yes, we were leaving our zone to procure these tacos on a weekly basis. We were no great fans of arbitrary boundaries in those days. These are the same missionaries (the zone leaders and my companion the district leader) with which we'd also travel outside of our zone most P days to a casino/hotel for a grand feast from the buffet and an afternoon of shooting craps and playing blackjack. We were once in the middle of changing out of our missionary clothes into civvies in the hotel/casino bathroom when a man walked in and said "Hello, Elders!" He was a young men's president from one of the wards in our stake. I was ensconced in a stall when I heard this salutation, followed by the hasty reply from one of the zone leaders that we were here to partake of the buffet on our day of preparation.
One balmy Caribbean evening we found ourselves at the Mexican restaurant, which in actuality was an outdoor establishment with a 3 sided bar/ordering area in the middle, with tables to either side of it and the street in front. If I recall it may even have had thatched roofing over the top of it all. We ordered our tacos and settled into a table on the right side of the bar. A couple of tables back from us sat 2 young men and women. We recognized the girls as living very near to us, and the two young men as rumored drug dealers that lived a little farther away in a large house/compound. The two suspected drug dealers looked at us, snickering, calling us "CIA" and "@#$%&." After a minute of this, one of the zone leaders, a hot-tempered, short but buff football player from Kanab, turned to their table and said "You're the @#$%&, you keep looking at us!"
The two suspected drug dealers angrily got up, practically dragging the girls with them, and got into their tricked out van, complete with lights on the running boards. They proceeded to pull up and stop right in front of the restaurant. I can't remember why, but for some reason I was now sitting at a table on the left side of the bar, and the other 3 missionaries were on the right side still, getting cokes, about to join me on the left side. I happened to look up at the van which had just pulled up and saw the driver pointing a pistol aiming toward the gap of the sliding van door which his compatriot had opened. The girl in the front passenger seat was knocking at his arm in an effort to stop him from shooting the pistol at the missionaries, but the driver still fired off a few shots before speeding away. Luckily nobody was hit -- there were probably a good dozen people on that side of the bar. Elder hot head ran out into the street after them, yelling "That son of a bitch tried to shoot me!"
I was never in danger, being on the opposite side, but the other 3 missionaries were pretty rattled and pretty full of adrenaline. Our tacos came, but we decided to take them in the car and leave. The other 3 missionaries were literally too shook up to eat, so I pigged out on everyone's tacos the whole ride home.
This was just the beginning of a long night, however, as we knew that the girls knew where we leaved, and that there was some chance that the shooters did, as well. We talked amongst ourselves of the possibility of the shooters making a raid on our apartment that night in an effort to finish us off. We decided to all spend the night in the zone leader's room, as it was the most protected, not having any exposed windows on the roof level where our conjoining apartments were. We also shut all the windows. We lay there suffocating in the heat, listening for the sound of soft footfalls outside. The stifling heat was soon too much to bear, and I decided to go downstairs into the newly membered-ladies' house and attempt to sleep on her vinyl-covered sofa. Without a working fan to keep me cool, the heat was even worse downstairs. After half an hour I crept back upstairs, onto the roof, and knocked softly on the apartment door. I did not want to wake up the Elders if they were sleeping already (fearing the temper of Elder hot head), so I knocked softly again. Still no answer. Drats. I went back downstairs to suffer through the rest of the night. In the morning I ascended groggily. The other Elders asked me right away if I'd tried to come back into the apartment last night. I was still pretty out of it, not thinking right, and I answered "no." They looked at each other in a panic. "Oh wait -- yeah, I did come up and knock on the door after a while last night." "What? Why didn't you say it was you?!?!"
It turns out that my anonymous knocking pushed their on-edge imaginations over the edge. One Elder hid in the closet, one stood guard by the side of the door, the other by the side of the window slats which were only accessible by creeping along a very thin ledge on the perimeter of the home. They maintained their vigil for at least an hour. Sorry, Elders! Nothing, thankfully, ever occurred after the taco shooting night of 1990.
We called the Mission President the night of the shooting, confessing our slight straying from zone boundaries and to apprise him of our nervous situation. Previously we'd also called to confess leaving our zone to eat at the buffet after we'd been spotted by the member (did we confess to the gambling? What were we, stupid?), just to cover our bases as it was already going through the local rumor mill, the sister missionaries having brought it to our attention (the same sister missionaries who "innocently" told us all once of how they showered together to save water, which was good for a few mental Polaroids).
Having thus confessed almost weekly to our brand new MP, I found myself transferred to one of the least desirable cities in our mission, La Haina, a semi-skeezy port town, which I didn't end up minding, really, it wasn't that bad. In our branch was a newly baptized teenage boy who suffered mental episodes periodically, causing him to act in a very childish, impetuous fashion. He suffered thusly, we were told by others, because as a young child of three he witnessed, from hiding, the brutal killing of his much older sister, who was stabbed to death via 30 or 40 knife wounds from an ex-boyfriend.
We were pressing him, one day, to do splits with us, and he said that he would if I were to give him a pair of church shoes, as he had none, whereas I had at least 3 pairs. I did in fact have a fairly new pair of cheap patent leather shoes that I'd bought, which I gave to him. After a month or so, the teenage boy stopped coming to church. Running into him on the street one day, I said "Hey, I gave you those shoes so that you could do missionary work and go to church. If you don't come back to church I'm going to have to take those shoes back!" in a joking way to prod him to return to church. I had no real intention of taking the shoes back.
Well, in his mind, he apparently thought I was serious about the shoes. We'd taught his older brother a couple of discussions a few weeks before, and stopped by their house, where only the two boys were home. We sat in chairs in the front room, and asked the elder brother if he had any questions about the Book of Mormon.
"Yes, I have a question," he said, before exiting into an adjoining room and then returning. In one hand he held up the shoes I'd given his brother, in the other hand he held a machete.
"Who gave these shoes to my brother?"
"I...um, uh, I did..."
He held the machete up to my neck, with a look of pure malice in his eyes (Possessed! I thought at the time.)
"My brother said that you wanted these shoes back that you gave him. You don't ask for something back that you give to someone. If you weren't Christian, I'd kill you right now," he said, seething.
He proceeded to hack into one of the shoes with the machete, cutting along the sole, peeling it like a piece of fruit, while I sat there, stunned. My native companion, apparently, was not so stunned.
"What good does it do to ruin the shoes?" he said, "That doesn't accomplish anything."
I looked at him incredulously.
After slicing both shoes in two, the older brother stepped back into the other room. This was the opening I was looking for. I bolted out of my chair and right out the front door and onto my bicycle, aiming it down the street waiting for my companion, who I assumed was a mere fraction of a second behind me. But no. I waited a good 30 seconds before my companion strolled out of the front door. Jesus Christ!
We saw the older brother just one other time, crossing over a bridge by some sugar cane fields outside of town, a remote enough location to get my blood-pumping, as no one else was nearby, but he just glanced in our direction and kept on going.
This next and final story occurred near the end of my mission, which I barely survived -- unlike the poor chap who is the subject of this tale. Again we lived in a second story apartment with the owners living below. For about a week they'd had a 20 year old nephew of theirs staying with them while he worked painting the house. One early morning I was lying on a mattress in our living room, deep in scripture study -- well, with my face deep in the Book of Mormon, as I had it open and propped on my face to try and block out the light so I could get some more sleep. I'd actually taken the initiative of having separate bedrooms, for no sinister reason, and had been sleeping in the living room adjacent to the kitchen.
On this particular morning I heard a thud out in the backyard, which roused me from my scriptural reverie. Our kitchen had a wall consisting of nothing but a gaping crosshatching of rebar, with the backyard clearly visible below. Soon after the thud I heard the 60ish female owner of the house cry out in alarm, and then start wailing "My son! My son!" over and over (though as I mentioned, it was her nephew, but she clearly cared for him as a son in her care).
I raced to the kitchen to survey the scene below. In the backyard was a large fruit tree. Running along the left side of the backyard, and passing through the tree branches, were a large number of power lines, as tangled and third worldly looking as you can imagine. The lady of the house kneeled at the base of the tree, cradling her nephew's head in her lap. His body was inert, the front of his face was split from the top of his forehead to his mouth. Next to them was a pile of split wood, and a long piece of rebar. As far as I could tell, he died twice: first, when standing in the tree trying to knock fruit out of the tree with the rebar and making contact with the power lines, and second, when he fell from the tree (10-12 feet) landing face first on the edge of a piece of chopped wood. Several neighborhood men quickly came running over, hearing the sound of her wailing. Four of them each grabbed a limb of the body and quickly carried it away.
A pall hung over the neighborhood for a couple of weeks. Being Catholic, there was also a week of dressed in black mourning and a funeral procession of some kind, from what I remember.
No humor in that story, obviously, but one of the most vivid memories of my two year mission.
This wraps up my final installment of mission stories. They were the hardest two years of my life, without a doubt, but also the most interesting experience wise.