Making a Mission Happen, Part 3
By Laurie Williams Sowby

As we hit the one-year mark in our mission, I felt compelled to write more about "Making a Mission Happen." (Parts I and 2) ran in October 2005, as we were entering the MTC for one week before we went off to the Chile Santiago West Mission. Our son Rob was already there, studying German for his mission to Berlin. He hit his halfway point in early October.)

The year has sped by, marked by major lifestyle and cultural adjustments, the addition of another grandchild and the recent announcement of two more yet to come, hundreds of emails sent and received, and many and varied experiences as a missionary couple.

The work of proselyting missionaries is "to do whatever the president asks us to do." Our assignment is perhaps best described by what it isn’t.  We are not in the office; we don’t supervise family history or teach Institute; we’re not over humanitarian services; we don’t serve as temple workers. What we do is a variety of things, many of which we’ve volunteered to do or come up with on our own — making our mission happen, now that we’re here.

I have become quite adept at teaching basic music directing and keyboard accompaniment courses, adding new music vocabulary and building on the high school Spanish that’s been our salvation in Chile. (But make me ask the guy in the store for something to unclog the drain in the bathroom sink, and it’s back to charades and hand signals!)

The author helps the stake president in the piano keyboard class in Penaflor Stake. Students are learning to play simplified hymns using the Church's course books. 

I also serve as a counselor in the district Relief Society presidency, and can only comment that it has been a challenge to work with people who would rather do it all themselves than delegate and involve other people. I’ve helped people study English, created visual aids for teaching Primary songs, taught missionaries, directed and accompanied choirs, given marriage talks and sung duets with my husband, and written articles about the Church and Church members in Chile.

The author helps missionaries prepare to sing a special number in a fireside for new members. 

My engineer husband, Steve, still lacks basic Spanish skills, yet he understands a lot more than he did 14 months ago and can actually pray in Spanish. This language inadequacy has not been a major hindrance, because he has employed the interpretation skills of young elders who are also getting some leadership training as they attend important meetings and interviews with him in his calling as first counselor in the district presidency.

They also help him translate material for Power Point presentations with the council or branch presidents, which he has the brothers take turns reading aloud. He finds it amusing that afterwards, they always express amazement at the "new" information he’s presented — and it’s straight from the handbook! He has formed a lasting friendship with the non-English-speaking district president as they’ve gone running together every Saturday morning on country roads in the president’s town.

Because most people work long hours and aren’t available until after 8 at night, that’s when most things happen for us — leadership meetings at the church, discussions with young missionaries and investigators in our home, music classes, visits to less-active members, family home evenings with members, and so on. Sundays are filled with meetings for my husband from early morning till night, with barely time for lunch in the afternoon.

Elder Sowby prepares to baptize Marina, whose husband of 36 years was baptized the same day. Owners of vineyards, they decided to produce vinegar and grape juice rather than wine after joining the Church.

There is also choir practice and often other meetings in the late afternoon or Sunday evening. Saturdays involve a keyboard class and, often, baptisms to attend. One of our choice experiences was when Steve baptized a couple our age, who had been married 36 years, like us. We’re watching carefully their progress as new members of the Church.

Converts Sergio and Marina, married 36 years, pose with Elder Sowby, the author, and the trio of sister missionaries who taught them. 

We do a lot of what we call "missionary support" — taking missionaries to the modern hospital in Santiago when they’re injured, driving them to far-away appointments and sitting in with them when they’re teaching older couples, inspecting and urging them to clean their apartments (pensions) and sometimes teaching them how, accommodating exchanges with other missionaries in distant towns, driving them and their luggage in to Santiago when it’s time to go home.

We try to invite the young missionaries to dinner when we can fit it in, and we make having dinner together a regular event for our entire district of 16 once during every six-week change (transfer period). We’ve twice now hosted Thanksgiving turkey dinners at our home, with stuffing and gravy mix brought from the States.

The Honeymoon

The first two months of a mission are typically spent adjusting to the new place, getting to know the area and members and missionaries, and trying to find your niche as a missionary couple. We’ve traveled all over the world, but there’s a big difference in observing how other people live in a place, and actually living there yourself, especially when you’re surrounded by people who don’t speak your native tongue and you aren’t fluent in theirs!

What once looked interesting or novel can soon feel like inconvenience and deprivation, especially when you’ve come from the United States and find that many things you’ve taken for granted just aren’t available.

(We got ridiculously excited after we’d been here four months and found ranch dressing on a store shelf! And just recently, the major grocery store in Santiago has started carrying chocolate chips! I have not had graham crackers dipped in a glass of milk as my midnight snack for more than a year now, because graham crackers don’t exist here, and the milk is a shelf-stable kind that takes some getting used to.)

American-style products that you can find are extremely expensive ($6 cake mix, $4 frosting), so we’ve learned to do without a lot of things. As an avowed non-cook, I have had to learn to make some good dishes, from scratch. I now have a few trusted recipes using ingredients found here but will be happy to call on Stouffer’s again when we return home.

We moved into a fifth (top) floor, three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Talagante, a country town an hour west of Santiago, Chile’s modern capital of six million people. We dubbed it the Talagante Penthouse, for it is among the town’s better dwellings, with enough space in the living room to feed 18 missionaries at a sit-down dinner.

Furnished thrift store-style with a gold plaid sofa from the ‘70s and brocade chairs from the Santiago Temple prior to its remodeling, the apartment had at least had a fresh coat of soft yellow paint to replace the orange before we moved in. Between the freight trains a block away and about a million barking dogs that carry zillions of fleas, the neighborhood took some getting used to. (No screens on the windows provided an opportunity for a bat to invade our bedroom one night!)

From our balcony, we overlook the tin-roofed, windowless dwellings below and, on a really clear day, we can see the snow-capped Andes to the east. The building is secured behind a wall and a big locked gate, with a guard at the entrance. (All of the missionaries live behind locked fences and barred windows. The church buildings are also surrounded by an 8- or 10-foot spiked fence and locked gates, and windows have bars to prevent theft. The chapel, which, like others in Latin America, has no refrigerator or drinking fountain, is one of the few graffiti-free buildings in town, thanks to the tall fence.)

Finally settled in an apartment that we had to fully furnish (even light fixtures to replace the bare bulbs and wires), and with a compact car that we had to buy (we laugh remembering that we bought it with our American Express card and no Chilean I.D.!), we set about meeting people, attending missionary meetings, going to choir practice, cooking Thanksgiving and Christmas turkey dinners for our zone’s missionaries, and planning the mission Christmas program a year ago.

We were relieved to know that we were not expected to even attempt to follow the rigorous schedule of the young missionaries, and that Steve could still go out and run alone — as long as he could run faster than the stray dogs in Talagante. (He carries pepper spray with him now, after being chased by 18 at once.) We were surviving and enjoying our time together, something we hadn’t experienced to this extent for decades.

Elder Sowby poses with two young elders atop a peak overlooking the fertile valley between Santiago and the sea during a P-day hike.

Challenges

But our lifeline with the outside world, our laptop computer, was cut off when the charger blew up a month into our mission. We hadn’t brought an extra, and we couldn’t find another one in Chile. It was weeks before our daughter could get a new one to us from Utah just before Christmas. (She was also able to send a replacement for my broken titanium eyeglass frames that could not be repaired on the entire continent of South America.)

Our laptop remains our critical lifeline with family, friends, banks, and of course, our missionary son in Germany, whose Monday morning emails are always a good reason to get up! Being able to see frequent photos of our grandchildren and missionary son via email makes us smile.

Christmas Day was hard, even though we had 25 missionaries over that evening for our thirteenth annual Sowby Family Christmas Music Fireside (minus most of the family). We didn’t phone family members, because they were scattered all over, away from their homes, and we hadn’t yet exchanged phone numbers with our son who’d just arrived in Germany. After Christmas, with not much going on other than an occasional evening activity or visit, and unaware that the area couples in Santiago were having regular activities on Monday and Friday evenings, we had nothing to do. Worse, I felt isolated and alone.

My husband was adamant that he was going to "stay home and study Spanish" if we had no other appointments and, as a confirmed non-shopper, refused to even consider stopping at a mall, although there are a couple between here and the big city of Santiago. (I am not big on shopping, but it’s sometimes essential to my sanity to have a change of scenery.) He was also not big on trying out new highway routes, because Santiago traffic is scary at best and requires the attention of both of us. I was not brave enough then to try it alone, although as a senior couple, we are not required to stay together at all times.

We’d made the mistake of not bringing English books to read, thinking we’d be too busy, and it almost drove me nuts not to have some good reading material. We read every word of the Church News when we got it — a stack every two months, two months old — and the Ensign, and on nights at home alone while Steve was in district meetings, I discovered byu.tv, with its live and past programming available via Internet. But after Christmas, when we’d been here two months and our days were painfully slow and we were feeling isolated and bored, the prospect of lasting another 16 months was dubious. We’d hit the wall, and something had to change.

Stay tuned for part 4 in Meridian Magazine.