"You never want to hear 'pray' from a flight attendant"
--- David Sedaris (American humorist, comedian, & author)
Picking up where this story last left off, I'd spent 6 weeks in the Missionary Training Center and was ready to head to Mexico for the next 2 or so years as a missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
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FROM PROVO, UTAH TO ATLANTA, GEORGIA
We left the Provo MTC around 9:30 pm on Sunday, September 14, 2014, for the Salt Lake City Airport. It was dark. I was anxious. We were tired as always but more so because of the lateness of the hour and the business yet ahead of us that night. Quickly succumbing to muscle fatigue, I realized the difficulties I would have lugging around my three suitcases plus shoulder bag since everyone else had their hands full to really do anything. For all you future missionaries, I recommend the less the better, no matter what the manual says you can bring. Don’t bring unnecessary things you can buy later. You only have two arms.
I remember gazing out the ink-black bus window watching red and white car lights flash by like lightning. I could see nothing else besides glowing temples that stood out like diamonds on black velvet on the far horizon. Time dissolved in deep thoughts and chatter. I may have slipped off in sleep briefly but I couldn't tell. Within the hour, we were at the airport. It was so dark, I could barely see where we were so our sudden arrival caught me off guard. For all I knew, we could have been another half an hour away and I couldn't tell the difference between there and here. We had some time to buy McDonald's for dinner and that was about it. We even ran into the father of one of the Hermanas from our MTC Zone.
We weighed and checked our bags and boarded the plane without much difficulty. Elder McQuivey was able to say hi to his mom because she worked there. It was my first time on a plane; my family doesn’t travel much. (The fact that my dad and I watched “Nonstop” a few weeks earlier didn’t lighten the mood for flight at all). The plane was quainter than I expected. Nothing spectacular about the plane itself. Elder Saunders sat on my right and a mystery passenger to my left was watching the (inaccurate) movie “Noah” with headphones on and all. So, I was in the unfortunate middle seat. It was cliché. I thought to myself, “You’ve heard all sorts of conversion stories. You’re a missionary. Aren’t you supposed to talk to him about the gospel?”. But the timing wasn’t right. An effective conversation takes more than words, rather opportune soil and timing. Headphones were on. It was late and we were all tired. It wasn’t a good time so I saved my breath. Odds were, being on an airplane in Utah, he could have very well been a member of the church already anyway. Even if it wasn't religion-related, I would have enjoyed getting to know him but he didn't seem to want to talk.
If you can learn anything from the parable of the sower it is that no matter how great your seed is, if the environment it is sowed into is infertile or the seed is neglected, it will not grow. It is worth preparing the soil before going in to plant the gospel seed (Luke 8:4-15). Many missionaries I knew thought it a lesser thing to sow and preferred to reap the fruits and while I also enjoyed that, I cared most about making the field rich whether I was the reaper or the sower. Without sowers, there would be no harvest. I’d rather have one solid convert come unto God than a hundred who come today and leave tomorrow.
I felt the plane lose contact with the tarmac, the heavy tug of the fighting gravity and heard the roar of the angry vibrating engines as we picked up speed and shot into the dark Milky Way. I couldn’t help but think about Dieter F. Uchtdorf and all the times he talked about Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation and seeing God’s creations from an aviator’s perspective. I could see what he meant. I felt like I was flying through Van Gogh’s starry night. The city below turned into its own ocean of stars. How great are God's creations!
The cabin lights were dimmed and I closed my tired eyes in a partially failed attempt to fall asleep in my somewhat uncomfortable middle seat, desperately trying to keep my head from resting on the others' shoulders. All the other knowledgeable passengers put on their blindfolds. In what seemed like minutes to me we were touching down in Georgia (on the other side of the country). We got a maximum of four lousy hours of sleep that night. It was still early dawn upon arrival and our strength reserves were all but exhausted. All irony aside, it felt like I got hit by a plane.
FROM ATLANTA, GEORGIA TO MEXICO CITY, MEXICO
The Atlanta, Georgia airport was massive (the busiest airport in the country), such that we had to take an indoor tram to our waiting area; it reminded me of the Frontrunner a bit. Our connecting flight wouldn’t depart for another five or six hours so we tried to rest as best we could on the rock-hard airport floor using our suitcases and bags for pillows. But our efforts for comfort were in vain. The air-conditioned airport was better suited for a penguin than us. It must have been at least ten degrees cooler than room temperature. The icy air poured out of massive vents in the ceiling. That’s what happens in the summer when cold is considered a luxury. The following hours felt like an eternity and we hadn’t even made it out of the country! In the meantime, some of the District got to say hi to Elder Johnson's dad who happened to be there on a business trip.
Georgia was a culture shock in and of itself but perhaps that’s because I don’t get out of Utah much. Many of the airport workers and travelers were African American as per the region. They had a thick southern accent. There were shops with merchandise that's not too common in Utah. All their eyes turned to the young Utahans in suits, undoubtedly wondering why we wore suits in the middle of summer in humid Georgia. They weren't exactly friendly looks either. I don’t blame them; I would have wondered likewise. It was my first time being a religious minority too. I guess you really don’t see the bubble you live in until you look from the outside in.
Outside the large airport window, I could see relatively little. Docked were a handful of white jets but anything behind them was concealed in an ocean of gray nothingness; thick fog as far as the eye could see, a paradox. The humidity was tangible, even indoors, heavy, and sucked the energy out of you. The land was stripped of mountains, a drastic difference from Utah’s Rocky Mountains. It was flat.
By the time, we boarded the metal bird to Mexico City, I was half-asleep once more. Elder Johnson took advantage of the opportunity to take a goofy selfie with all of us sleeping again. Sleep, if manageable, was wise. The trip from Georgia to Mexico City was a long one, especially when one considers we were not all that far away from Reynosa in Georgia, but out of necessity because of connecting flights, we were forced to the deeper deep south before returning to northern Mexico.
I woke up and looked out the port-hole of a window that sat just above the blinding silver wing of the plane and watched the brown and green patch fields below us and the sea of ghostly clouds breeze by. What a weird feeling getting above the clouds and seeing uninterrupted deep blue atmosphere above us and clouds that look like dry ice fog floating and swirling on an invisible pool under us.
FROM MEXICO CITY, MEXICO TO REYNOSA, MEXICO
We were in a foreign country and it soon became evident. We couldn’t understand anybody at the Mexico City Airport. We were truly on our own. But at least we were alone together. It must have been around 2:00 p.m. by this time.
Don’t get me started About the security protocols. I’d never gone through airport
security before that trip and any know-how I thought I had came from movies. I thought the lady working the metal detector asked me to take my shoes off (as she wielded a metal detector and I got away clean except for my belt). I thought I heard her say something about “zapatos” (sah-pah-toes—shoes in Spanish) when she was actually asking if I had any “electrónicos” (electronics or cameras) in my luggage. She had to ask me at least five times before I got the message, grateful for her patience and amusement. Man, was I embarrassed though, and deeply humbled if not humiliated! Humility is undoubtedly the first thing a missionary learns because he can do so little of himself. It’s better to learn to be humble sooner than later because all other virtues come from humility.
I didn’t find the heart or energy to explore the strange airport. I barely had the courage to buy myself some donuts and a bottle of coke to snack on because I’d have to order in Spanish and didn’t know the exchange rate from dollars to pesos. I only had American dollars and was foolish to think that they wouldn’t accept the more valuable cash anyway. I felt like Elder Calhoun from the classic LDS movie “The Best Two Years” when Elder Calhoun does his best to speak Dutch but nobody can understand him and he can’t understand them (The scene starts at 28:55). I felt like at last I could sympathize when Elder Calhoun says “Oh, I’m in trouble, ‘cause that ain’t the language they taught me in the MTC”. It was a comedy but one that was shockingly accurate on many levels.
On the other side, I thought of another classic missionary movie based on a true story, “The Other Side of Heaven” where Elder Groberg who is serving on a small island in Tonga has to speak at church and says “outhouse” instead of “missionary” (The scene starts at 21:16). But instead of letting that get to him, he uses that emotion to motivate him to study the language harder. That movie makes it look like he learned perfect Tongan in three days but his book “In the Eye of the Storm” says otherwise. To be honest, that’s how I thought it would be. Give me a week, will ya? But alas, I’d say it took me maybe four to five months to begin understanding the gist of what people said and really ten months to feel confident striking up a conversation about anything and everything. Even now, after two years of study abroad, three years in high school, and study in college, I can tell you that there is no such thing as “speaking perfectly”. Perfection comes in the next life. Preparation and practice come in this life.
Again, it felt like it took a couple of terribly boring hours but we were finally let on the plane, the likes of which were incredibly smaller than the jets we had been on so far. It was clear that few people were going to where we were going.
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