On another thread someone mentioned that they really liked missionary stories. Since it's winter, I thought it would be fun for former missionaries to share their experiences as missionaries during the winter, especially in places with cold, miserable weather.

I spent my mission in the Zurich, Switzerland and have several stories but will share just one.

I had a long down coat that did a pretty good job of protecting me from the freezing damp Switzerland winter air. On a bitterly cold day in December I wore my coat to an appointment to teach one of the weird investigators (most were weird), took it off and laid it on the sofa. My comp and I taught the discussion and when I retrieved my coat I was horrified to see that the investigator's cat had peed on it - - not only peed but left a giant puddle of pee in the center of it! I couldn't put the coat on but had to carry it in the freezing cold, wearing just a sweater and skirt. I took the coat to the cleaners but they couldn't get rid of the smell. I finally took it to the mission home and used the washer and dryer, mostly killing the smell. I gave the coat to my companion before I went home. She didn't know about the cat pee.

Let's hear some of your stories.

Switzerland would be a wonderful place to be stuck for a year or two. Swiss investigators are weird huh? Is that all the morg can convince to study its lessons?

That sucks about your coat though in the freezing cold.

I considered going to graduate school in Switzerland, but in Lausanne or Geneva once. One of my children was accepted into the ETH in Zurich for graduate studies, then decided to go elsewhere. Someday I may get there yet! :)

My idea of a good time in Zurich is checking into the nearby Dolder around Xmas time .

So romantic.

Bring on the snow!

After getting my call, with it's accompanying list of items to bring, my mom took me to Ronzoni's, on Fremont St., and bought me a London Fog zip-liner overcoat. I really needed it during the winters in Mexico City.

The only reason I mention this rather mundane fact is that I still have that coat! Seriously! Purchased in 1965 and it looks none the worse for wear.

Can't say the same for the other garments purchased in this, the 21st century... I think that coat has guardian angels watching over it.

We were tracting in northern Ontario when it was about 20° below zero with the wind chill. Lips were numb from the cold and got tired of trying to say "We're Missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" so we shortened to "We're from the Mormon Church" .
Between the cold, the wind and the numb lips, about half the people couldn't understand and kept slamming their doors yelling, " We don't want no more damn insurance! "

I served in central Canada. That's where I learned -40° is the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit.

Never was a missionary myself, but I have a story about some serving in my community in Canada. A few winters ago, my husband and I were driving to a funeral on a pretty cold Saturday. We passed the local missionaries traipsing down the street carrying snow shovels. They looked so happy and cheerful, and were kind of goofing around together and laughing. I don’t know where they were headed, but wherever it was, shoveling snow was obviously going to be more fun than going door to door meeting rejection!

My summer story is better but here is the winter story. It also took place in Switzerland but it was Suisse de Geneve, French speaking.

I didn't much like riding a bike in the winter in a skirt so I fudged the rules a bit by wearing men's forbidden thermal long johns (they didn't have anything like that for women back then) and hid them by wearing very high boots and very long skirts. Nobody knew and I was toasty warm.

Then one day I got on my bike, returning from a district meeting, and found myself on a very steep hill. The snow turned to rain and I learned that my brakes didn't work when wet. I was past the point of no return and had to keep going careening down the hill at top speed. Not being able to stop or even slow down I went between two buses and was nearly crushed. Knowing I would go directly to the Celestial Kingdom if I died on my mission, I was nevertheless grateful that I survived to tract another day.

As I was filled with relief not to be smooshed, I then realized that the street light ahead had turned red. The only thing I could do was get behind a car with what looked like a forgiving rubberized bumper. Luckily, again, I survived death by smashing very hard into the back of a man's car bumper and not getting killed in cross traffic. Only problem was that the driver was not so forgiving. He got out of his car steaming mad and was about to pulverize me. Luckily, the light turned green just in time and I continued down the hill already searching for the next vehicle to stop my decent. I managed to get all green lights until the terrain flattened and I could walk my bike the rest of the way home in a drenching rain. That pathetic missionary flat never looked so good before.

I had nearly the exact same experience on my Peugeot bike in Caen.

Icy cobblestones and bikes with brakes that don't work when wet are a dangerous combination! :)

Good grief.

They made females ride bikes in the winter in Switzerland - and wearing skirts?

Unbelievable.

We lived in a very small cabin on a pig farm in what is known as Gippsland in Victoria, Australia. It was the winter of 1976, the coldest in twenty years. Although it was rare, it snowed that week and all we had to warm the place was a coal burning stove. Even after all these years I still smell that putrid yellow coal smoke. I laid in bed with my magic garments on, a track suit, and two pairs of socks, gloves on my hands and a beanie to keep my head warm. I had noticed that I felt a breeze while laying there, it was coming from the window above my head. Upon further investigation and a trip outside to see why the window would not seal, I learned that the window was not a typical window, it was actually a car windshield that had be installed using bent nails to hold it fast to the outside of the cabin. Being innovative as elders were, I stuffed toilet paper in the cracks to seal out the freezing wind. Nothing but the best places for the missionaries. I miss the Aussie meat pies, at least they were warm.

My mission was in Chicago and during winters the wind off the lake together with the cold made it pretty miserable for tracting. One day we had rejections at every door so we had been outside for a long time and we had no car at the time so we were getting pretty cold. Finally at one door the woman rejected us saying she was busy ironing. My companion finally said "Can we just come in and watch you iron?" She took compassion, let us in and we watched her iron till we were warm.

Chicago and the famous wind! I remember the first time we went to Wrigley Field; It was warm out , so we just had on short sleeves.
We noticed a lot of people carrying sweaters or wearing sweatshirts. We didn’t understand it, since it was warm and sunny ( it was a Day game , since they didn’t have lights yet.
As soon as we got inside to our seats, the wind hit us. It was literally cold inside. We went to the gift shop and my dad got us all nice Cubs sweatshirts. You can see Lake Michigan from the upper deck.
My missionary story was after I joined the church, the missionaries came to my apartment to just say hello and visit.
They stayed a long time, actually watching a VHS movie with me,can’t remember which one, but it was family oriented, since I like corny movies anyways. They seemed relaxed and didn’t even mention the church.
I had a feeling that they just wanted to use time up, so I made popcorn.
The bad thing was that since I was single, no other male around , and I was considered “ dating age”, even if I was about 5 years older, they had to leave the front door wide open.
No one could see in at that angle, plus I was on the 3rd floor.
It was a very warm day, and flies were all over inside, plus sweating .
That’s when I found out about the rule on missionaries and single women .
The next times they came, they let me know in advance, so I invited a couple of friends from single adults, so we could keep the door shut.
We , of course, kept our mouths shut, since we knew the stress they were under.

Might be taken as a weird proposition?

Battlebruise,

Gippsland - isn't that where there are 14 foot long earth worms? Do tell your knowledge of such creatures!

I never saw any earthworms, but I did see lots of snakes!

the room we rented was unheated. The Hausfrau (kind old soul) allowed us to hang out in her parlor which was heated with a coke-briquette-burning stove. The weather was quite cold, so the options were to tract, hang out awkwardly in the parlor, or go to bed to stay warm under the heavy duvet.

Tracting was pretty much futile--I don't recall we got a single investigator. But the weather moderated in March, and we discovered a miniature golf course in our area. We tracted it out assiduously thereafter.

No-baptisms-but-I-got-pretty-good-at-miniature-golf-ly yrs,

S

Possibly the most productive mission in recorded history ...

I served in the West Indies, Caribbean Islands. It was always warm if not hot, so we slept with no covers, or at the most, a sheet to try and keep the mosquitos off and absorb the sweat.

One winter in Jamaica, I was on a trade off in Mandeville, which is up higher in the hills. It was cold enough that I used a thin blanket when I slept that night.

Crazy, I know, but I lived to tell the tale :)

I spent a weekend in Lucerne (ungodly beauty). I drank beer at a tavern into the wee hours of the morning and was knocked out of my hotel bed by a parade with percussion at 5:30 in the morning. My hungover head was pounding like the parade drums. People with giant heads marched by, and I watched through the window, massaging my temples. My head felt as big as the parade masks.

https://youtu.be/L90smU0SOcQ
That reminds me of this old anti- nazi Donald Duck cartoon , where he was sleeping and a brass parade band woke him up in the morning, marching by his house.

In the late 70's I dated a young man who spent his mission in Scotland.

He said the roof to the room they slept in had a hole in it and one morning they woke up to snow on their blankets and floor.

I asked him if they moved to another place or if the roof had been repaired...he said they could not afford another place to live and the church would not pay for the repairs on the roof - the small house had been donated to LDS Inc. to house missionaries and he said it was in such bad shape the plumbing barely worked, no hot water just luke-warm and the electricity was dodgy at best.

I went on a mission to Italy from 1969-1971, not long after the Italian Mission was organized. I lived in nice places. But one of my friends went to the mission from 1967-1969, right after they had organized it. He and his companion rented a room in a flat belonging to an old Italian couple. The woman had some sort of prolonged infection in one of her legs, causing it and her foot to be swollen twice the normal size, and waking caused her to express puss from the bottom of her foot. Somehow she lived with it, but wherever she walked through the house, she left puss footprints, which grossed them out. He recalled sitting on the toilet and seeing her puss footprints all over the room. Being the young jerks they were, they dubbed her "Pussfoot." Two years later, the mission had everyone living as districts in nice rented flats, albeit sometimes without furniture.

I was in Switzerland in 84 and while tracking in winter c act went by and splashed us. My leg got all wet from the slush. By the time we got home my sharkskin poly suit had frozen to my leg and I lost a thin layer of skin taking off my pants!

RMs would expect that on average, your companion made fun of you and what you suffered...

I have no winter stories as I served in the Philippines. However I do have a Typhoon story. My grandma had just passed away and I had gotten the ok to call home so we made an arrangement with a member to call form there house. She was very well off and older I think she just like having the elders come to her house so she had someone to talk to. when I called home it was a signal 4 typhoon. I was talking to my family I couldn't hear them very well due to the wind. I looked out side and saw the neighbors roof gone. I told my family that I had to go. We walked home with everything flying at us she lived close to us. When we got home our house was flooded. Good times no power for 2 weeks

I was in Norway, very close to the Arctic Circle and my first winter I have since learned, was the worst winter in approximately 100 years. In the far north there were only a few hours of daylight each day in the winter. We were supposed to be out of the apartment tracting by 9:00 AM each day, and we only had one meal late afternoon then were supposed to be tracting until 9:00 PM on foot in the snow, ice, and blizzards and rarely would people let us in to warm up. My first apartment was in a poorly insulated warehouse garage, we kept our frozen food on the table, and things we did not want to freeze in the refrigerator. I have so many memories of being unbearably cold and tired and just tramping through the deep snow in the wind like a robot. My first companion was from a warm state and had no clue about how to dress warmly in the winter, I ended up buying him warmer clothes and teaching him how not to get frostbite. When we knocked on doors our faces were often so cold we could not speak to do a door approach. During one storm that lasted a few days there was about 7 ft of new snow and we had to exit our apartment to go outside through the upstairs neighbors window. When all that snow melted in the spring it created a flood of icewater that flowed down the streets and we had to walk through it to go anywhere.

Winter of 1978-79 in Chicagoland area was a bad one. Lots of snow on people's roofs. My comp and I would take shovels with us and offer to clean off roofs just to make a cold contact. People wanted to pay us and we finally relented when a lady gave us a $50 bill. We ate good that week.

Never had to use a ladder to get off the roof. We'd just jump off the roof into the snow below. Just one story houses not two.

What I remember from northern Italy was being ferociously cold all winter long. All any of us had were those "Columbo"-style overcoats. Mine was stolen during training in Utah, so I had to buy another one, but it was only knee length, and didn't protect me as much. We would hold so-called "street meetings" both summer and winter in front of the main train station in Torino, Italy, back in the day when there was thick, dirty, and sulphurous smog from people heating their flats with brown coal fires. We got filthy just standing in the open. It was so cold outside, may have been risking frostbite. One time a guy was walking along outside in the colonnade with a large dog, when his dog suddenly took a giant shit right on the pavement. Since it was well below freezing, the pile was putting out thick steam. So Elder Sears walked over to it, squatted down next to it, and held his hands up to it, rubbing them like he was warming them over an open fire. We all got a good laugh over it, but none of us had cameras available to take a picture of it.

Rarely felt warm in winter.

Wool coat stayed damp most of the time it seemed.

One cold winter day in Aomori Japan I couldn't unlock the church door. We were tracting and stopped by the church to eat our lunch and warm up, but I couldn't grip the key hard enough to turn it. My hands would hardly move.