As a contribution to this month?s topic of ?International Mormonism,? I agreed to write about my experiences as a missionary in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1996-1998, which agreement I now sort of regret, since I?m not sure what to say. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sends out missionaries, and a significant percentage of them go to countries other than their own. [1] I was one of them—and I wasn?t kidding about not knowing what to say. Since my scheduled post time has come, I?m going to put bullet-points on my brainstorming and pretend that this is a carefully designed exercise to provoke discussion about international and inter-cultural aspects of Mormon missionizing.

• I find it difficult to discuss the mission and use glibness to shield my various vulnerabilities. To that end, I have constructed an easy-to-deliver set of sound-bites that, to my shame, emphasize exoticism and speak lightly of heavy things: You?ve never lived until you?ve gotten up from a toilet full of blood and not-feces! I did not defecate ?like an American? until I had been home for two months! It was so hot/sunny that I had a tan line through my not-so-white shirt showing my tie and my garment ?eternal smile.?There was raw sewage running in the streets in some favelas! [2]
• Blond hair was a big deal; in the region where I worked blond hair was not common, unlike in southern Brazil. It was not unheard of to have people want to feel the hair. No barber I found knew what to do with liso—smooth—hair.
• One of the members a few hundred kilometers from the major city said, when I showed her my family picture: ?Americans are all so blond and have such big families.? On the one hand, she probably knew more Americans than any non-Mormon in her city (who had not visited the US), but her perception was very skewed by the fact that they were almost all from Utah.
• We were frequently described as ?the church of the tall Germans.? Depending on the gender and age of the speaker, sometimes there was a ?gorgeous? thrown in also.
• Kids on the street would call out to us, ?Fala inglês, alemão?—?Speak English, you German.?
• Brazilians are very friendly: even those who were ?born Catholic and going to die Catholic? would invite us in for conversation and visiting; they?d offer food or a chance to shower or take a nap; and so on. Of course, saying something like ?Brazilians are very friendly? is hopelessly reductive—as if all Brazilians were the same and I know this because I met all 270 million of them. What I mean is that I worked in Georgia before my visa came and there was a difficult-to-say-how-enormous difference between my proselyting experiences in Georgia and Minas Gerais, which difference I am summarizing as ?friendliness.?
• On my first visit to a favela (an urban neighborhood of densely-packed, semi-permanent squatters) my first thought was, ?it?s like being in a National Geographic: there’s trash and debris and disorder and goats and everything.? My second was, ?National Geographic fails to convey what the places in those pictures smell like.? (I have since traveled a fair amount and no longer think of the favela as unique: people, or at least their cities, smell like poop, unless there’s curry involved; then it smells like poop and curry.)
• When I wake up sweating at night my first conscious thought is that I’m back in Brazil. When I have nightmares that involve screaming, it?s the voice of the man tied to the stretcher across from me when I went in for treatment for face-falling-off-mango-disease. In my first-world-meets-third-world tragicomedy spiel, I usually follow this sound-bite with some touristy wisdom: If you want to get to know a country, do two things, receive medical treatment and have a dessert.
• Speaking of which, one time my companion and I attended a birthday party. There was what looked like a big sheet-cake decorated like an American cake with off-white icing (most of the ?cakes? we ate did not have icing and were more like a sweetened cornbread than American ?cake.?) I was very excited? until I figured out that it was potato sticks covered with mayonnaise.
• I am from Texas. Multiple times in introductions: where are you from? Texas. Oh, bangy-bangy! (/’bahn-gee ‘bahn-gee/, ie, a shoot-?em-up Western movie/TV show). Where?s he from? Utah. Where?s that? Between California and Texas. Utah associates also commented on okra and beans and rice and large insects, all of which were well within my normal experience range.
• I have lived in three countries and visited dozens; I have taught in three countries across language and culture and nationality and race barriers; I?ve been an unmarried male who wears a tie and tries to persuade often less-than-enthusiastic people to understand and act upon sometimes hard things (spirituality/religion and math/science). I think these various experiences have given me (what I judge to be) understanding about which parts of each experience were unique to it and which kind of go with me wherever I go. What I cannot do is go back and be young again. In this regard the mission is, for me, unique.

Discuss.