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¡Este Mono Es Suyo! |
Escrito por Jeff Holt |
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©1996 Jeffrey D. Holt
Please note: These are some really great stories that anyone who served in Ecuador will relate to. However, if you or one of your loved ones is going to serve in Ecuador in the future, please don't let these stories scare you. I'm sure it isn't Jeff's intent to cause parents any undue stress. Ecuador is safe. Really. And while the missionaries who serve there tend to have more fun than in most missions (due to the high availability of beaches, hairless dogs, etc.), they also have many great spiritual experiences, and testimonies are made and strengthened. Honest.
We now return the program already in progress...
Kevin Tolton grew up within two miles of my house, yet we did not know each other before we accepted calls to serve two-year missions to Ecuador for the Mormon Church. Kevin used to refer to the two of us as "contemporaries that had never met." (Kevin and I had, in fact, met very briefly, prior to our missions.) Kevin graduated from Olympus High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1976, and I graduated from rival Skyline High School in 1977. We both began our missions shortly thereafter, I in October, 1977, and Kevin in November, 1977.
Our meeting was fortunate in that, out of 250 missionaries serving in Ecuador, we were both initially sent to serve in the same area, the La Chala Branch, a small but rapidly growing congregation in Guayaquíl. A group of us lived in the same pension, a four-room house, owned by a woman who was a member of the Church. Six or seven other elders, as the male missionaries are called, shared the pension and Kevin, being the most junior, slept on the floor, while the rest of us slept in bunks. It was there in La Chala that Kevin and I began our friendship.
The Ecuador Quito Mission combined Ecuador and the southern two provinces of Colombia. It was organized into about a dozen geographic regions or "zones" and each zone was led by two missionaries designated as the "zone leaders". Each zone contained two to four "districts" and each district was led by one "district leader". The six or eight elders and sisters that made up a district were paired into "companionships". Kevin and I lived in this pension in La Chala for a couple of months and then we were assigned to each other as an official companionship in another area. Even though we were only officially companions for one month, we continued to see each other at zone leader conferences and mission conferences over the next eighteen months. Occasionally we even ended up working in the same district or living in the same pension.
Kevin and I forged a friendship made of respect, hard work, and laughter; lots of laughter. Kevin appreciates a good joke even if he is the brunt of it and he loves a good story, which is probably why we hit it off so well. These collected stories about Kevin describe some of his more unusual experiences. They have been repeated by me so many times that I had a hard time stripping them down to just the facts without damaging their time-tested resilience. Jenna, my wife, will never have to read this compilation of stories. In the ten years since Kevin and I returned from Ecuador she's heard them all a million times.
J. D. H.
Wilton, September 30, 1989
Kevin was an elder distinct in many ways from other Salt Lake City born-and-raised Elders. Kevin had more travel experience, appreciated and wore finer clothes, spoke and wrote well, and basically carried off a more cosmopolitan image than the rest of us.
Throughout his mission he clung to the finer elements of his past. He used to show up at zone leaders' conference in the same brown pin-stripe Barney's suit that he had brought from the states and he would whisper into my or John Neeleman's ears that the crotch hole in his pants was now a four-finger hole instead of a three-finger one as it had been at the last conference and that he would, despite this small inconvenience, continue to wear the suit. On Quito's Peter-and-Paul day he ceremoniously burned his Florsheim wing-tips in a neighborhood street fire after having resoled them so many times that the uppers wouldn't stand another resoling.
These types of annoyances added to the overall load of hardships carried by any missionary in the "field". Kevin endured his aggregated hardship like a red badge. Not because he had a macho underbelly but because being young and vigorous and singularly dedicated to the work it was cool to "ski the moguls."
My favorite story about Kevin occurred while he was working as the district leader in San Carlos, a northern Quito suburban area. Missionaries walk a lot. Kevin spent months walking the rough cobblestones of Quito and he had developed an ingrown nail on his big toe. He refused to visit the large suburban hospital in San Carlos, not knowing what might lie within.
The toe worsened. Pain has a funny way of overcoming inhibitions and Kevin decided, "How bad could the hospital be?" So one evening he and his junior companion visited the now dim hospital. (They shut off their lights at night to save money!) He was admitted by an elderly nun. He filled out a form at which time she asked him to pay the bill before he was treated, twenty sucres. Twenty sucres is the equivalent of eighty American cents.
It is necessary to know two things before one can understand why Kevin would continue through with the eighty-cent treatment. The first is that Kevin is now a doctor. He always wanted to be a doctor. He used to jump at the chance of giving the required Gamma Globulin shots to all of the elders and sisters at mission conferences. So because of his deep interest in all things medical, he felt compelled to go the distance with this hospital. Second, Kevin was the kind of elder that would go into a hack Ecuadorian barber for the ten-cent special just to see what it looked like coming out. Whatever the outcome, an eighty-cent ingrown toenail would make a great journal entry!
The nun took him and his companion into a room and had him sit up on a table with his foot resting on a bench. After uncovering the foot, she handed him a small 1/4 inch pine board. He asked what it was for. She replied, "To bite down on, of course." Kevin knew that he was now in serious trouble. The nun opened a drawer, retrieved a pair of knives, sat down, and by candlelight began to gouge, carve, and eventually extract the offending nail herself. Kevin was bathed in sweat after the three-minute ordeal and had nearly bitten through the board. The nun bandaged up the wound and Kevin limped around Quito for a week. I have never heard him say that the experience was worth the cost, monetary or otherwise.
In my second month in Ecuador, our zone of Guayaquíl elders rented a school bus on a P-Day (preparation day) and loaded the whole group up for a day trip to Las Playas beach near Guayaquíl. After arriving at the beach, Elder Tolton and I, still being in training, were told that we could not "join in any reindeer games" until we had memorized and passed off our sixth discussion.
A discussion comprised five or six pages of Spanish dialogue necessary to teach a section of the gospel tenets to an investigator. In addition to memorizing all of the eight discussions as part of our training, we were also required to memorize and pass off over eighty individual scriptures. So while the rest of the Elders and Sisters played on the beach, Kevin and I sat at a picnic table under a cabana memorizing our discussion.
About noon we finished and passed it off to the zone leader. After exploring the nearby cliffs overlooking the ocean and chasing lizards with sticks, Kevin and I decided to walk into town to see what there was to see. What there was wasn't much: only four houses and a store.
On our way back to the beach we saw a group of about twenty pigs laying around a feeding trough in an unfenced field near the road. Kevin started chasing some of the smaller pigs and we got the idea to try and herd the whole group of pigs out to the beach. Without chasing around too much or alerting the villagers, Kevin and I started walking around the individual pigs and worrying them to their feet and out onto the dirt street. It took us about an hour to get them all together and moving down the road. About 300 yards down the main road was a side street that led to the beach and it took us another twenty minutes to get the more obstinate boars headed into this side street with the rest of the group.
Then we charged. The pigs bolted down the alley en masse. The narrow street had a low fence on both sides all the way to the beach and at the end of this chute were about twenty elders and sisters playing volleyball. The pigs blasted onto the beach squealing and scattering in every direction through the group of missionaries. Kevin and I had just discovered that we could work together quite effectively.
Toward the end of my stay in Guayaquíl, I was assigned to the Guayaquíl Fourth Branch as a senior companion in a four-man companionship. Elder Tolton was assigned as my companion. The move was significant in that I was leaving La Chala, one of the poorest sectors in the city, to join the new group in Barrio Centenario, one of the richest. The new pension was a beautiful house in that very wealthy neighborhood.
The dueña (landlady) was away working in New York City and had employed a domestic to care for her Guayaquíl home. Zoila (or Juanita as Kevin preferred to call her), was a skilled chef in the Gringo style and we relished her meals: edible salads, medium-rare steaks, and mashed potatoes and gravy. Each morning she would put two full pitchers of fresh-squeezed juice on the table: orange, mango and passion fruit, but never, never, papaya juice. This pension was an oasis of great food in a country otherwise devoid of anything but rice and fried bananas.
Each Wednesday was steak and mashed potatoes day and one particular Wednesday, Kevin and I were working our way back to the pension to partake with the other elders in the midday feast. We had talked of the upcoming meal all morning. Nothing could come between us and steak and mashed potatoes day. Rather than get into a substantial commitment and risk losing out on lunch, we had been killing the last two hours on mini-visits to the houses of certain members and investigators which would lead us in a straight line back to the pension, and our lunch.
For our last stop we decided to see some member friends just long enough to say hello. The building they lived in was a two-story walk-up in a middle-income neighborhood (cinder block with no windows, just bars). There were two boys sitting out on the sidewalk throwing tops. After stopping to throw tops with the boys for a few minutes, Kevin and I squeezed up the narrow stairway and greeted the family as we entered their apartment. Immediately we knew that something was wrong. There were more family members present than usual. The word "event" flashed in both of our minds with its accompanying time commitment. We began to extricate ourselves, but the family would have nothing of it. It was someone's birthday and we didn't want to be "mala gente" (bad company), did we? So we sat down and a plate of rice, fried bananas, and worst of all, a greasy chicken wing was placed into each of our laps. Had it just been rice and bananas we could have begged off, but a chicken was somewhat of a financial sacrifice and we were now mired in deep. We smiled plastic "muchas gracias" smiles while our eyes screamed out in desperation to each other across the void of the living room. As we picked through the chicken wing for edible parts and spread rice around our plates we were conscious of our "dream meal" being only minutes away.
At that moment an older daughter entered the room carrying, horror-of-horrors, two tall, thin glasses of papaya juice; warm papaya juice. The glasses were thin so as not to subject the person drinking the juice to its smell. Papaya juice has the aroma of vomit and, worse, it has the consistency of mashed potatoes stirred into water. Papaya is a melon and one can imagine drinking a cantaloupe drink, served warm with all the pulp in it.
As the daughter approached Kevin with his drink I'm certain I heard a nauseous sound coming from the back of Kevin's throat across the room. After serving Kevin, my drink appeared in front of me, and the serving daughter and I both saw, at the same time, suspended on the lumpy surface of the pinkish-orange juice, a long curly black hair. I blanched. She quickly apologized and withdrew the drink. I was saved. I smiled across the room at Kevin who returned my smile with a stark white face. But just then my glass was magically returned, too fast to be above suspicion. An image jumped into my mind of two dirty fingers picking out the twist of hair and flipping it into the garbage, then simply returning the drink to me. I accepted the drink and looked past the daughter to Kevin. He was smiling again.
The daughter left the room and I noticed that for a split second Kevin and I were alone. I was seated next to a window and instinctively I moved. The pink stuff went out the window and splat on the hundred-degree-plus sidewalk one story below. My only thought was for the boys playing tops under the window. No screams came from the street, so I was safe. Kevin's face was again pale because in that instant the family had returned to the room and the opportunity for him was gone.
I handed my plate (with rice spread out evenly and mostly under the napkin) and now empty glass to the daughter with my hearty thanks and a big smile. She then asked if I wouldn't have another glass of juice. I plead my satisfaction to her and she moved on to Kevin and asked, "Don't you like yours?" He replied that he certainly did and put glass to lips, closed his eyes, and knocked back the drink in straight gulps as if it were hard liquor. I thought that he would shatter the glass he was squeezing it so hard. As his head came back down he looked over at me with the stare of a broken man. He croaked out his thanks to the hostess and we begged our leave to another engagement.
Passing by the now dried sidewalk stain, we groaned home to a dinner that had now lost a bit of its appeal. On our arrival, the rest of the Elders from the district had convened for the great feast. Wearing a large grin I related the details of our late arrival to the group as we all sat down to the white linen tablecloth and the smell of charbroil. There was only one thing for Kevin to do. He excused himself to the bathroom and after consulting the toilet, returned smiling, having been purged of all impurities, to join us as an equal in his enthusiasm for the feast.
It seemed that so much of the comic relief we felt while in Ecuador came from the very things that provided unusual physical hardship. Because of the unsanitary water conditions, we all had severe amebic dysentery many times, and Monilias, an intestinal fungus, even more frequently. Germs and parasites were everywhere. Amoebas lived on the skins of vegetables and in the water. Every surface that one touched was suspect as a carrier for a variety of germs.
Medical care, being what it was in Ecuador, proscribed treatments that were more often than not, worse than the illness. The treatment for "Amoebas Hystolíticas" was a prescription for eight pills made in Germany, but certainly not USFDA approved. No prescriptions were ever required at pharmacies in Ecuador except to obtain the more addictive drugs. Medicines such as tetracycline and penicillin were freely available over-the-counter. These particular German pills were taken four at a time on each of two consecutive mornings. The effect was a complete stripping out of the intestinal tract, very expensive and very painful. The cost of the eight pills was about twenty dollars U. S. and their taking would incapacitate an elder for three to four days. This treatment was much worse than the sickness in the short run. Each of us were exposed to this dysentery and its cure many times.
The effects of these types of hardship produced most of the really good mission lore. One of our favorites was the "brown out". Many times elders would be out working hard while suffering with dysentery. Picture this: While on a bus going back to his pension, Elder Mark Bradford starts to get symptoms of diarrhea. As each contraction comes on, he sweats profusely and musters all of his strength to hold back the wave. He hopes that he can make it back to his pension, there being no public rest rooms anywhere, and struggles on valiantly for another ten minutes. Finally, the heat on the bus, the press of the people, the sickness, and the shear desperation of the situation overcome the Elder and he passes out. The combination of the "black out" and its rush of effects constitutes a "brown out" and clears out the bus very quickly. This could happen anywhere. It usually happened at least once to every Elder during his two-year stint.
I returned home to the United States in October, 1979, and Elder Tolton came home a month later. On Kevin's first morning back, we were riding up 33rd South Street in Salt Lake City in his mother's gold Mercedes. All of a sudden Kevin spun his head around toward me and with great surprise he said, "I can lick my fingers!" And he began to lick his fingers and hands with great delight. Two years of vigilant guard against the unseen had come to an end.
Guayaquíl was extremely humid and each day it sweltered under the face of the equatorial sun. And when it rained there it usually poured. The people had a saying for a really heavy downpour. It was called an "agua cerro" or a water hill, because it looked like a solid wall of water.
If an elder was caught outside during an "agua cerro", it was impossible for him to remain completely dry. If that elder was unfortunate enough to have leather soles, like Kevin (he couldn't bring himself to wear the cheezy Nunn-Bush, rubber-soled shoes that most of us got stuck with at Z.C.M.I. in Salt Lake City), that elder would return home to his pension with soaked leather shoes and the next morning a layer of green mold would appear across the bottom of each sole. There was a local product used to treat fungus of the body called Fung-Y-Rex. Kevin used to swab the green liquid onto the soles of his shoes each night before bed to prevent a growth of overnight mold.
A similar problem attacked several of the more successful elders. It had to do with baptizing new converts. If an elder had to perform a baptism and didn't have an extra change of undergarments, he would have to wear the wet ones back to his pension. This unpleasant situation usually befell the most junior of the companions. That act was almost always a mistake in the coastal areas of Ecuador. Fungus attacked more than just the soles of shoes and while serving in Guayaquíl, Kevin, being a successful elder as well as a junior companion, was stricken very severely with this fungal malady in a most sensitive region. Unwilling to use the same third-world product that he swabbed onto his shoes, Kevin came to me for help.
He knew that I had been previously stricken with a similar handicap and had gathered a great assortment of creams, liniments, and various other bottled treatments. My scrape with death came while I was serving the required two-month initiation to the Spanish language at the Language Training Mission in Provo, Utah. During an attempted cure of my ailment I came across the product Desinex, a tube of white greasy cream that harbored a lot of hope for recovery. I brushed off as inconsequential a small warning on the tube, "For use in treating fungus of the skin, exclusive of hairy areas." I was, however, quite desperate and being young and intolerant of specific warnings had asked myself, "How bad could it be?" After squeezing out a two-inch ribbon of white cream and thoroughly applying this to the affected area, I prepared for the midday meal. Within seconds my crotch was on fire. I laid down on my bed to die. I was completely immobilized and almost unconscious with pain for over an hour. When I recovered, I looked, expecting to see nothing left. To my astonishment, all was as before, except I could see that I would lose about four layers of skin over the next few days. I limped off to lunch having learned the hardest of lessons.
So Kevin came to me, the fungus doctor, and asked if I might dig deep in my bag of medicines for a cure. Unfortunately for Kevin, he had earlier that day bested me for the hundredth time in a heated wrestling match, where I was bent into a double pretzel grapevine or some such thing. We were not yet back on very friendly doctor/patient terms when my eyes fell upon the tube of Desinex. I smiled as I squeezed out a three-inch ribbon onto Kevin's finger. We all retired to our bunks, he on the bottom and I on the top. The last words Kevin spoke that night were, "Hey, Holt, this stuff burns a little." The incoherent babbling came later.
During our stay in the luxurious Guay Four pension we encountered a bidet in both the front and the back bathrooms. The four of us had all come from the western United States and none of us had ever seen a bidet or knew how they worked. Our curiosity overcame us and Kevin and I tried turning on the one in our bathroom but couldn't get it to work. We tried turning valves, tapping pipes, yet nothing helped. So, we trooped off to the bidet in the back bathroom. Both Kevin and I knelt over the bowl and Kevin tried the knob. It was shut tight with disuse but gave way under Kevin's twisting grip. He was instantly sprayed with the most noxious green water possible, right in the mouth, eyes, nose and teeth. It smelled terrible. We both fell back onto the floor, he blubbering and spitting and I laughing hysterically. He ran back to our bathroom, jumped into the shower, scrubbed himself, and brushed his teeth for almost an hour. The stains never did come out of his clothes.
I don't exactly remember how Kevin and I first met Mario. We spent a number of weeks in April, 1978, visiting his Guayaquíl home to teach him and his wife the gospel discussions. Being a very serious yet friendly individual, Mario immediately found something meaningful in the teachings of the Church. Every couple of days Kevin and I would bus over to Mario's neighborhood then walk down a narrow alley to the fenced-in dirt yard where a single flight of wooden stairs rose to Mario's two-room second-floor apartment. At the top of the stairs on the handrailing immediately opposite the apartment door sat the family pets, Blanco and Negro, two large roosting chickens. Each time we climbed the stairs to visit or every time we opened the door to leave, the two chickens would leap off the railing where they normally slept and would flutter and cackle into the dirt yard below. Kevin and I, being city boys, took an inordinate amount of interest in the chickens and more than once crept up on the sleeping pets to surprise them off of their perch.
After a few weeks of discussions with the two of us, Mario set a date for his own baptism. He was concerned that his wife should also embrace our religion and so invited us over for a big Sunday dinner to talk with her more about the Church. We spent a wonderful evening with them and enjoyed very much the chicken and rice meal that they had cooked for us. Just as I finished eating the last drum stick my eyes fell upon the stair railing outside the screen door. On it sat a single black chicken. I whispered to a shocked Kevin that we had just eaten our little buddy Blanco! He couldn't believe it and for days we were distraught that we had broken up the duet. Little Negro never seemed the same again.
Personal privacy in some parts of Ecuador was almost non-existent. It was rare to find a home without open windows because window glass was too expensive, not to mention the cost of the window frames themselves. Cooling a home that was shut tight would be prohibitive also, so most of the homes on the Ecuadorian coast went without glass windows and simply had shutters to keep out the critters by night and a grate of bars covering the outside of the opening to protect the house from the many opportunists around. Paul Howarth and I actually converted a family after we walked by their house and saw through the large open window that the entire family was gathered around talking and we felt inspired that they might be amenable to a visit from us.
A second breakdown in Ecuadorian personal privacy was the lack of public rest rooms. Public rest rooms were few and far between which caused some people to resort to more direct means. For example, in Quito, if one of the lower class Indian women were in dire straits, she would simply sit down on the edge of a curb, spread her skirts out neatly about her, and for a moment the gutter would run. Men, however, were not so discrete. Perhaps it was a Latin macho thing, but if a man needed to urinate he simply found the nearest wall, leaned against it with one arm over his head, and urinated on the wall. What was so amazing about this was that dozens of people could walk by and not one would even seem to see him or care that he was doing this in public.
I think that this unusual degree of anonymity had to do with the way the Ecuadorian men held their equipment. In private rest room quarters, Ecuadorian men would handle theirs the "normal" way as one would expect. However, when a public display was necessary, they would reverse their hand over their equipment, thereby covering more of it up. I believe that these Ecuadorian men have discovered a secret "cloaking device" that makes them invisible to all those passing by. They simply reverse the grip and no one notices.
At first, newer missionaries were shocked by these practices. Slowly they became accustomed to seeing men urinate in public, then after a while, when necessity demanded, even tried it themselves. Kevin took a great interest in the practice, especially with the method of concealment, and he himself experimented with the technique quite often in varying degrees of crowd density. To avoid creating a spectacle of himself, (being a gringo in a white shirt and tie), it was necessary for Kevin to faithfully use the reverse-grip cloaking device.
Latin women in Ecuador were not particularly modest either. When it came to nursing their babies, they could be anywhere; on a bus, on the street, at home or at the market and they would think nothing of whipping out a breast in full view of the world to feed their child or children. Missionaries were subjected to this demonstration many hundreds of times during two years in Ecuador. Covering up was unheard of, especially if the indiscreet action could be used to fluster two missionaries sitting across the aisle on the bus. The worst offenders would extract both breasts, then let their two-year-old feed from one breast to the other, indiscriminately, during an entire bus ride.
Kevin made up the phrase, "busting the kid in the mouth," to describe this behavior. He would elbow a "green" Elder and point to an offending mother and say in English, "Oh no!, She's busting the kid right in the mouth!," which attention would bring a smile to the mother's face and completely wilt the new Elder with embarrassment.
No known cloaking device for this has yet been discovered.
When Kevin came into the mission field he wore soft contact lenses. He was obsessed with the procedure of cleaning those lenses. Each night after the normal ritual of brushing his teeth with bottled mineral water, he went through the cadence of washing his hands and drying them in the air and then carefully cleaning and rinsing each lens, being careful not to touch anything else in the process.
Kevin was also concerned that nothing undue would befall those lenses. One time Kevin and I visited someone working in an automotive repair shop. When the paint sprayer started up and spewed clouds of paint into the air, Kevin ran for the hills. When I gave him a hard time about this fear, he recited to me once again that the lenses were porous and that nothing foreign should get into them.
He had owned a pair of wire-rimmed glasses but at some point during his mission he lost them. So the precious contacts became the only things between him and a foggy existence.
Later on he somehow ruined the right lens and was forced to give his contacts up. He lived without eyes for a while and after having tried on Preston Kirk's glasses, he quietly "acquired" them. Apparently, Preston needed them less than Kevin did and even though the glasses weren't a perfect prescription for Kevin, they allowed him to see reasonably well again. After Kevin got this new pair of glasses, he was assigned to Esmeraldas, a coastal city, about two hours west and north of Santo Domingo, and right on the ocean.
For a time I worked as the zone leader in Santo Domingo de los Colorados, a city on the foothills of the Andes but still very much on the coast. It was famous for bananas, which it exported by the millions of bunches and for the Colorado Indians, a tribe of painted-up men and bare-breasted women that the government paid to remain in their "native" dress for the tourist season.
During my stay in Santo Domingo, Kevin called to inform me that there were some investigators he had met that lived in a city bordering my zone and his. Kevin and his companion wanted to jointly visit the family so that my Elders could take over this family's instruction. My companion and I rode atop the "cholo" bus and arrived in this city a little later than planned. We walked around for a while before spying Kevin and his companion down a side street. I called to them and Kevin turned and squinted down the block at us. He had on Preston's glasses but didn't seem to recognize us. When we were as close as ten feet away he said, "Holt, is that you?" I looked at his glasses and immediately saw the problem.
He related that he had been wading/wrestling/swimming (?) in the shallow water on Las Palmas beach in Esmeraldas and had lost Preston's glasses in the surf. He was frantic. He searched around the shallows for an hour to no avail. Later on, as they were about to leave, he again checked the beach and found them flopping around in the surf line. One look at the glasses revealed that a spot the size of a nickel, at the center of each lens, had been worn opaque by the sand of the ocean. Kevin wore them that way for months.
When Kevin left on his mission, he was writing faithfully to his girlfriend Julie Cook, and she wrote back uplifting, spiritual letters every week. She was very pretty and Kevin thought himself lucky to have such a girlfriend supporting him back home. In their correspondence, Kevin told Julie about his companions, and she even wrote a couple of letters to Preston Kirk and to me, much to our collective surprise.
One day Kevin was showing off a picture of Julie to a group of Ecuadorian Elders at a zone leaders' conference. One of them spoke up and said, "Hey, that's Elder Haymore's girlfriend." Elder Haymore #1 (there were two Elders named Haymore so they went by Haymore #1 and #2) had also attended Olympus High School with Kevin. Subsequent verification on our part showed that Haymore #1 was also showing Julie's picture around and that she had been writing to him for some months. She was representing herself as his "girlfriend" had also "faithfully" sent him off on his mission.
Kevin did some further investigation and discovered that while he had been in Ecuador, Julie had started dating yet another young man back home and that this young man would soon be leaving on a mission as well. We suspected foul play. She had been "faithfully writing" to Kevin, Haymore #1, and she would now possibly be writing to another.
Kevin wrote and told her that he had discovered this wanton multiplicity. She wrote back and replied that the "thing" with Haymore #1 was over and that she wanted to remain faithful to Kevin. It was now a full-fledged scandal. The letters from her that followed were simply off the deep end; lovesick, overly spiritual, and a little crazy. In subsequent letters she even discussed the possibility of a marriage when he returned home!
Kevin then crossed a boundary in his relationship with Julie by implementing an idea unique in the annals of letter writing. Kevin thought that not only was Julie beyond getting an honest response to her letters but that the entertainment value of her letters was beginning to reach grand proportions. So he began to share the letters with us. And what great excitement they caused. At each zone leaders' conference we would get together over dinner and the first order of business would be for Kevin to take out his best Julie Cook letter for that month and pass it up to the head of the table for me or someone else to read to the group. We all derived a high degree of demented pleasure reading her strange, syrupy letters, that is, if laughter is a good measure.
The letters from Julie continued to arrive month after month. She started mailing Kevin's letters in little paper lunch bags with a large "KEVIN" pre-printed on them. She would add his last name and address, fold up the bag, and put postage right on it. This packaging gave Kevin the idea to expand the readership of these very entertaining letters to every elder that came into his pension by taping an open lunch bag/envelope onto the wall and then placing several copies of her most recent letters inside. A sign above the bag would read something like, "These are letters from Julie Cook. Please feel free to read them, but please return them to the bag when you are done so that others may enjoy them as well." The bag became a lending library of sorts. Within a few months, Julie was notorious throughout the mission.
One night at dinner, after a zone leaders' conference, Kevin passed a letter up to me to read to the group. I could tell by the grin on his face that something was up. I read through a few dozen pleasantries and then something to this effect: "Kevin, I met a couple of elders the other day who had just returned from your Quito mission. They seemed to know who I was and told me that as you read this letter now there are probably six or seven other elders reading it with you!" The jig was up. She knew all about our little game. We laughed ourselves hoarse. And yet even after that she still wrote to Kevin and sometimes to the whole group!
To commemorate this roasting, I had t-shirts printed up that said, "I Read Julie Cook's Letters in Ecuador," and distributed them to our group of friends. Imagine Julie's surprise when she saw a returned missionary playing racquetball at the Sports Mall while wearing his "Julie Cook" T-shirt.
In hindsight I think it necessary to thank Julie for choosing to send her love to more than just one "steady" and for being an especially good sport after finding out that Kevin had chosen to bless many elders' lives with her letters.
Julie married a close friend of Kevin's and I understand that Kevin and his wife, Virginia, see them socially quite often. Kevin tells me that Julie's post-mission abrasiveness towards him has now worn smooth and he thinks that someday he might be forgiven completely.
On a hot, dry Quito afternoon, my companion and I were walking down the street from the mission office, clad in short-sleeve white shirts and ties, on our way to run some errands. We approached a very old beggar lady walking up the dusty sidewalk. She was carrying a large box wrapped up in an old rag. As we passed her she turned and muttered, "Quiere un mono, quiere un mono?" We passed without really listening to her question. Then it hit me that she had said something about a "mono" and I grabbed my companion's arm and turned back. I asked to see the "mono" and she opened the cardboard box just enough to produce a chattering little monkey. She asked one hundred sucres for it, only four dollars. It just happened to be the right price.
When I produced a hundred sucre bill she quickly raised the ante by twenty sucres for the old rag that covered the box. We laughed at her learned sense of the gringo mentality and I gave her the extra twenty.
She handed over the box and we carried it straight back to the mission home to show the other Elders.
Upon arrival, we opened the package on top of the receptionist's desk and the hysterical monkey slowly stood up in the open box. For the next hour, this little animal was the hit of the mission office. The monkey slowly became more familiar with its situation and all at once jumped out of the box and ran into the mission assistants' office. It jumped on the highest bookshelf and screamed at everyone that passed by. When I tried to feed it a banana it threw little pieces all over the room. The novelty soon wore through and the monkey became just a noisy, filthy little creature that was going to be a problem to keep.
The two assistants politely made it clear that the future of the monkey was my problem. They just wanted it out of their office and the monkey feces cleaned off their drapes and carpet. I proposed putting it up in the eucalyptus tree in the back yard with a long chain hooked to its belt. But any permanent solution was going to be difficult to implement because every time someone approached the monkey he would scream, back away, and bare his sharp little teeth. It was plain to see that someone was going to have to brave a number of nasty bites to capture the thing and that "someone" was going to be me. As a last try at forcing the monkey back into his box, I bent a coat hanger into a hook and, threading it through the bottom of the box, hooked the monkey's belt and dragged the animal backwards into the box from whence it came. I re-wrapped the box with the world's most expensive rag and left the mission home to secure a chain.
A few blocks away at the hardware store, Elder Darin Kerr and I found out that linked chain, having to be imported, was going to run me the equivalent of fifty American dollars. This little lark was going to cost a lot more than I had bargained for. After abandoning the purchase, my companion and I stood out on the dusty street scratching our heads to find a less costly way to deal with my newly acquired buddy. Just then I had an amazing revelation. Kevin Tolton! Elder Kerr and I raced back up to the mission home, scooped up the monkey's box, stuffed a bunch of sweet "Orito" bananas in through a small opening in the top and raced to catch the last evening bus to Esmeraldas, where Kevin Tolton was posted at the time.
We arrived at the station just in time to send the package. I simply wrote Mono on the packing slip where the description of contents was required. For thirty sucres, I had rid myself of the problem animal, and in addition, would be receiving a big bonus in the form of "the rest of the story" at the next end-of-the-month zone leaders' conference. Darin and I called the Sisters in Esmeraldas and told them to inform Kevin that he had a package coming on the late bus.
Elders love to receive packages.
Well, I chuckled every time I thought about it for the next two weeks, anticipating the follow-up story. With an extra-large grin on his face Kevin related his story to a circle of friends at our monthly dinner in Quito.
He had arrived at Transportes Esmeraldas with visions of red licorice dancing in his head. There was an annoying little monkey climbing around the inside screen of the package cage, screaming obscenities at passers by and generally being filthy. It seemed, according to the freight man, that someone had sent the monkey to a friend and that the monkey had torn its way out of the package during the night. Kevin approached the baggage clerk to retrieve his anticipated treasure and shivered at the thought of the poor sucker that would have to catch that monkey and carry it home. As the clerk sifted through the receipts looking for "Tolton, Tolton, Tolton ... Yes, here it is ...." A big grin swept over the clerk's face. "Mira," he said, pointing to the monkey, "¿Éste mono? ¡Es suyo!" And with that, the inhabitants of the entire bus station peeled out in laughter.
Kevin looked to see how this mistake had occurred and when my name appeared on the receipt, he knew that he was now the proud owner of the offensive monkey. He and his companion spent an hour catching the monkey and spent more time boxing it. Just as the three were leaving, a lady who was a local member of the Church walked into the bus station and greeted Kevin. She commented about what a nice little monkey Kevin had and Kevin smiled very wide and said "Mira, hermana. ¿Este mono? ¡Es suyo!" And with that, Kevin transferred ownership of the dreaded little beast to its present owner.
I spent the last month of my mission in Esmeraldas and I happened on that member woman's house one day. The monkey was playing with some of the children in the front room. The minute I walked into the room it began to scream and jump around and hiss and spit. The mother of the house apologized to me and being perplexed as to why the monkey had reacted to me that way, explained that to that day, the monkey had expressed a similar dislike for only two other people: herself and Elder Kevin Tolton.
One evening Kevin and I decided to visit a neighborhood in a sector of the Quito First Branch in which he and his companion had recently been working. The people there had been exceptionally disinterested in hearing the message of the missionaries and Kevin had not been successful in finding anyone to teach.
We tried to see a few families that evening, but had no additional success. As we started over a hill back to our pension it began to rain a light drizzle. Suddenly we heard a tremendous crash that emanated from where we had just been. We ran back over the hill into the neighborhood and saw that the roof of one of the larger homes had entirely collapsed, demolishing its insides. Most older homes were roofed with heavy clay tiles layered over a wood frame. The wood in this particular roof had rotted and could not hold the weight of the clay tiles made heavier by the brief rain. The family had been partially forewarned by a cracking noise in the rafters and all but one of them escaped just prior to the collapse.
When we arrived, the mother told us that her fourteen-year old boy was still inside the house. We crawled inside the dark, dust-filled house with a couple of other men from the neighborhood and pushed through the rubble looking for the boy. Within minutes we found him unconscious and covered with blood.
As the three other men carefully dug the boy out, his uncle asked Kevin and me to bless him and pray for him. Having my consecrated oil with me, I quickly anointed the young boy even though the others were anxious to move him onto a stretcher board. The men quieted down as Kevin and I jointly laid our hands on the boy's head to seal the anointing and bless him. Kevin gave the blessing and told him that he would live and fully recover. The Spirit of the Lord was present in the room as we gave the blessing. When we finished, we turned around and saw that a great number of people from the neighborhood had been quietly watching the blessing through the large doorway in the front of the house. As the men moved the boy onto the stretcher and toward a waiting truck, the whole crowd continued to stare at us in complete silence.
At one point that night it was rumored that the boy might die, but as it turned out he lived and sustained neither broken bones nor internal hemorrhaging. Several days later, Kevin and I saw him out watching the other kids playing in the neighborhood, happy to be alive but badly bruised and very sore.
Although Kevin and I were changed to other assignments shortly thereafter and couldn't follow up our teaching and proselytizing in that neighborhood, we both believed that someone would be brought to the Church as a result of that blessing.
In February of 1978, our mission president called me on the phone to reassign me to the mission office staff in Quito. He would not explain what I would be doing, he simply said, "I have a special job for you Elder Holt, and I'll tell you more about it when you get to Quito." Having had a special three-month assignment in the office staff earlier that year, I was ready for anything. I was in Santo Domingo at the time and quickly packed my bags, jumped on a bus, and arrived in Quito seven hours later ready to start.
President Ferrel met me in his office in the afternoon and told me that I was going to become a part of the office staff and remain out of the proselytizing work for only as long as a certain problem continued to exist for the mission. I was on the staff for five months, the duration of that problem.
It seemed that when Kevin's group of eleven elders and sisters had entered the mission, the Immigration officials at Quito's Mariscal Sucre Airport had stamped their passports with one-year visas instead of two. This left them and all the groups of missionaries that followed with visas that expired a year too soon. About 130 passports were affected in the now-divided Quito and Guayaquíl missions. But Kevin's group was affected the most because their visas had already expired and they were now in the country illegally. I was put in charge of correcting the situation.
Our mission president, David W. Ferrel, was formerly an Under-Secretary of Commerce in the Gerald Ford administration after working as a member of the finance committee in the Ford Motor Corporation. President Ferrel ran the mission like a business--planning for, and expecting, results, but without burdening the missionaries with a lot of detailed supervision. This encouraged his office staff members as well as his other missionaries to use personal initiative in accomplishing their goals and appointed tasks. He was a great leader.
Needless to say, the entire visa situation was left up to me to work out. After meeting with our Church Abogado (Attorney), Gomez de la Torre, I concluded that Kevin's group would have to get out of the country quickly while we paid "fines" and processed their re-entry. The legal work to extend the other 119 or so passports could be done over the next few months and would be less painful to accomplish.
My companion was Darin Kerr, the financial secretary for the mission. Having Darin as a companion had its privileges. Not only was Darin a lot of fun to hang around with but he also held the mission purse which had to be employed liberally in this situation. Darin and I designed the exodus for Kevin's group on my first night in the office and we scheduled it to begin the next day. We selected Kevin from our mission, (the Quito mission) and our old friend Preston Kirk, who was now in the newly formed Guayaquíl mission, to jointly lead the group of eleven. Darin and I withdrew $2,500.00 (U.S.) and sent the money to Kevin as traveling money.
The eleven elders and sisters whose visas had expired were gathered from all over the country and told they were going to Lima, Perú, to pack lightly, and to dress like students on a tour. Kevin traveled down from Loja to Guayaquíl to meet Preston and his group and to rendezvous with the others of the Quito contingent. Darin and I, in Quito, briefed the two of them by phone in Guayaquíl. They were to go by bus to the border of Perú and then just walk across, avoiding Ecuadorian immigration if possible. They were to check into Perú and ask for thirty-day tourist visas and continue on to Lima to await Gomez de la Torre, who would meet them to arrange their repatriation. The plan was for Kevin and Preston to keep the group under control and cover the expenses of the trip out of the money we gave them which they were to carry in their shoes. We told them not to do any sightseeing and above all, not to have any fun.
The group's exit from Ecuador went off without a hitch. As usual, the Ecuadorian border guards were asleep and after an uneventful walk across to the Peruvian side they obtained thirty-day visas from Peruvian Immigration.
The total bus time from Guayaquíl to Lima was over twenty hours. Kevin and Preston called us when they arrived to tell us that they were all safe. Gomez de la Torre arrived by air the next day to start the legal process which would enable them to return to Ecuador. He spent four days laying the necessary legal ground work (twenty minutes of work and three days of dinners, drinks with old friends, and generally spending the Church's money). After the four days passed, we were told, much to Kevin's delight, that because of a processing delay the group would not be allowed to return to Ecuador for two more weeks.
We received many postcards from them, phone calls from time to time, and a wonderful accounting upon their return. In short, they had a blast. The exchange rate was extremely favorable and Kevin and Preston took full advantage of their temporary tourist status. They dined, shopped, and saw all the sights. What could have turned out as an ugly international incident ended as a great boondoggle for the group. My only mistake is that I didn't somehow wrangle my way onto the trip with them. They needed someone like me to keep them out of trouble.
President Wagner, the new mission president assigned to run the Quito mission in July of 1979, called me into his office one day and asked me what I would like to do for my last two months in the country. Thinking fast, I suggested that possibly Paul Howarth, Kevin Tolton and I could get back together and spend some small amount of time in Otavalo developing a program or two that might be helpful to the mission in general and then split up to teach the program to newer Elders in diverse parts of the mission. After some skillful lobbying by Craig Clayton, the president's assistant, Kevin and Paul were called into Quito to discuss the strategy.
The three of us were given a couple of weeks together in Otavalo, to collect our thoughts on effective missionary techniques before dispersing. Paul had been a zone leader there and pretty much knew his way around. We collectively oversaw three "green" gringo elders in addition to six other Otavalanian Indian elders and four Otavalanian Indian sisters. Kevin and I bought the traditional Indian ponchos and hats and took the opportunity to revert to our corduroy Levis and Adidas tennis shoes, as was the custom for missionaries in that locale. We rode around in an old Chevy Blazer, the only car used by missionaries outside of the mission office staff in Quito. It had been donated by a former missionary's family to this companionship.
We had a great time together in Otavalo, including having pancakes with Mora (Serviceberry jam) every morning and Pollo Frito (fried chicken) for lunch at Ali Micui's. It was a good time to regroup and rethink our combined teaching experiences before receiving our final assignments. But one particular experience colored the end of our stay. On this particular day we decided to drive out to a small village, eight to ten miles north of Otavalo, to scope it out for further canvassing. One of our members lived out there and we felt confident that we could anchor off this family to visit others in the surrounding countryside that might be interested in hearing about the church.
We arrived in La Bolsa down a narrow dusty road about two miles off the Pan-American highway. There were six of us, five Gringos and one Indian. We all piled out of the truck and stood around waiting for Howarth to call at the door of the mud-walled house belonging to the member. Our contrasting heights must have been quite a sight to the villagers, because a small crowd of people began to gather in the street. We continued talking amongst ourselves and didn't give much credence to the crowd that by now was numbered at more than thirty.
An Otavalanian youth of about twenty years old approached us and the crowd pressed around, getting more vociferous at once. I turned to greet him and saw that he was an angry young man marked by his green beret with a small red star on its front crest. He was a Communist and, judging by his enthusiasm, a Communist in the spirit of the much worshipped Ché Guevara. We had heard of isolated South American Indian communities converting completely to Communism and we wondered if we had gotten into one here.
I tried to explain to the young man that we were just there to visit a friend of ours, and he began to scream back at me to leave them alone and to leave the village. He called us C.I.A., a popular belief amongst the lower classes all over Central and South America.
As we contended, the Indian elder, Cabascango, was pulled into a brawl with some of the crowd and Howarth instructed the two "greenies" to extricate him before it got worse. Howarth turned the truck around while I continued my discussion of personal freedoms with the leader. This discussion would at least focus the crowd on Tolton and me while Howarth prepared for our departure. The two "green" Elders loaded Cabascango, face bloodied, into the truck, then ran to unblock the road. The Indian villagers had earlier thrown large tree trunks across both ends of it. The crowd was now well over sixty persons and somewhere in the village a bell was ringing. We could see villagers coming in from all over to join the crowd, and most were carrying shovels, pitchforks and clubs.
Through all of this I contended with the head rebel, in the best Spanish that I have ever rattled out. I will never forget that through it all, Kevin Tolton stood with me, shoulder to shoulder, spelling me in the argument and providing strength against the crowd. I think that the primary reason the crowd did not attack us was because they were intimidated by Kevin's presence.
At last, Howarth, with the truck turned around and running, the road cleared, and all but Tolton and I loaded up, yelled to us to abandon the peace talks. Tolton and I slowly backed to the Blazer, careful not to exit too quickly lest we get a pitchfork in our backs. I leapt into the passenger seat after Kevin, and Howarth spun us out of trouble. As I yanked the door shut on the crowd, I narrowly escaped a large melon-sized rock that ricocheted off the inside of the door and into my lap, a souvenir of a pleasant afternoon visit to a quaint Andean village.
Kevin and I formed a very close friendship with a small group of other missionaries. Not all of us had been each other's companions but we had all become zone leaders very early in our missions.
Zone leaders met at the end of each month for two and a half days of reporting, meetings, and most important to me, visiting with each other. We came from hundreds of miles to be there and stayed in various Quito elders' pensions for the event. Wherever in the dusty countryside they might be assigned, zone leaders were able to enjoy this monthly respite in Quito. After several months of zone leader conferences, our group formed up. The members of the group were Kevin Tolton, John Neeleman, Paul Howarth, David Haymore, Craig Clayton and myself.
After our conference meetings were accomplished for the day our smaller group would usually slip away to a good restaurant in which to while away the evening in discussion and revelry.
Paul Howarth and I discovered a place called La Casa de mi Abuela (The House of my Grandmother) where we spent many wonderful evenings. The abuela was a cranky old Argentine woman who could cut meat into fine steaks and who served particularly good beef fondu. She used to come out and say "tengo un sensimillo para cinco" (I have a beef tenderloin for five), in that fine Argentine way that meant we would all go away stuffed and happy. At the Abuela's, there were countless philosophically intense discussions on every topic ranging from the absolute perfection of God to the right class load to take in college. Dozens of Sprite bottles filled the red-checked table cloth by the time we had said all there was to say.
That camaraderie, that sense of belonging, and that sharing of dreams and plans for the future solidified each of us on a course of study and work that has carried us through the most critical and formative years of our lives. We are all well on our way to achieving our goals because we dreamt our dreams together and checked the desirability of the results against the high standards of the group.
The members of the group are now evenly distributed over the fifty States as follows:
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