1 being normal and 10 being totally out of control
1. Spent nights in hospital with elder who fasted 1 week and attempted to bridge veil with book of mormon.
2. District elders carried guns.
3. Fellow district elders roamed in a gang picking fights with locals.
4. Local elders burned American flag at mission home.
5. Local member / lunch lady would jerk off elders in my house.
6. Elders took flights to beach resort outside mission area.
7. Contacts made with local CIA operative (seriously).
8. Robitussin-tripping and rampant abuse of opiates (prescriptions not required at local pharmacy), alcohol consumption not infrequent, and some steroid abuse.
9. Multiple companions and me had numerous girl friends, some more serious than others.
10. Elder in home attempted suicide.
11. Use of laying on the hands to caste out spirits of mentally ill in streets.
12. Frequent back-stabbing to gain positions of authority.
13. Elders marrying locals while serving their mission.
14. Elders baptizing young girls after alluding that they would only marry members of church.
15. Clubbing, concert going, generally being young kids.
I'm going to say it's nearing 10 based on other stories I've heard.
The CIA contact thing isn't so strange though. I've heard that a lot of CIA and secret service members are LDS (maybe because they are good at keeping their sacred secrets, but probably because they have squeaky clean backgrounds that are well documented and drug free, with a lot of background in following authority and letter of the law). That said, I can't remember if I heard this from a TBM source or a neutral source.
Sounds like your mission snitch system broke down. I think most missions have enough snitches that it can't ever get that bad. Isolated cases stay isolated. We had our share of weird happenings, but nothing rampant. There was one missionary who got "dear johned," became depressed and ran off for a revenge binge in a red-light district. He turned himself in to the mission president a few days later.
There was another missionary who tried to cut his willie off because he couldn't conquer his masturbation problem.
Other than that, the transgressions were pretty tame--things like sightseeing trips that required going a short distance out of the imaginary mission boundaries, sleeping in late and the like.
My 3rd comp was the one that killed the rest of my mission. He had a mental breakdown after I had been with him for 2 weeks. He left the trailer one night about 2 in the morning and went out to his own personal sacred grove of trees. I didn't worry about it I figured he wanted some alone time. He came back 2 hours later, woke me up and began to preach to me that he had, had a vision and that he would be the next prophet of the church. In a nut shell the next few weeks were filled with him singing hymns, making an alter room that he would pray in and light candles and having hour long prayers at member homes. He was transferred to the mission office for a couple of months and then the church in all their wisdom put him back in the mission field as a zone leader.
1. Not really that unusual in that it seems pretty typical to have had a nutty companion who did something nutty and ending up hurting himself.
2. Not sure what you mean by district elders. If you mean missionaries, to me that's highly unusual. If you mean ward missionaries, not unheard of in my mission.
3. Roaming in a gang picking fights? To me that's unusual. Getting in fights? Not unusual.
4. Unheard of in my mission but I served stateside with almost exclusively American missionaries.
5. Happens somewhere in every mission, it seems.
6. Reasonably common.
7. Unheard of in my mission but once again we were stateside. My brother-in-law was actually detained on his mission in Brazil on suspicion of being involved in some kind of intelligence operation.
8. Not atypical. Definitely some roiders on my mission, definitely some guys who drank. Had an AP who could not kick smoking.
9. Typical.
10. Typical for missionaries to attempt or at least think about suicide. I had a couple of suicidal companions but neither actually made an attempt to my knowledge.
11. Pretty common. Had several non-Mormon people with crazy stuff going on ask me for a blessing or to pray over them in the street.
12. Um, de rigeur.
13. Happens.
14. Happens.
15. Not at all unusual.
Some of the things you described were kind of off the wall but overall most of them didnt' seem too unusual.
1. I was such a goody, goody, and all of my companions were goody goodies too. Being a sister missionary, I didn't hear of all the dirt the elders were up to.
3,4,5,6,8,9,13,14,15 - Are you guys serious!? That shit would happen??? My hell... I guess you could argue it is more of individual douche baggery than the churches fault but still the church teaches you to go on a mission when many, many, many young men should not.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/20/2011 09:30PM by digdir.
Times have certainly changed. My Grandfather's missionary diary of 1911-1912 in California talks about days spent on the beach, opera, theater, rides in those new-fangled automobiles, an occasional streetcorner stump speech, dinners at converts' homes, train travel through the country, etc. Some of those activities with his mission president participating.
Those weren't the only things he did, and knowing him he would have been a very conscientious & dedicated missionary, but in considering the tiny farming town he came from in Central Utah, in his case he was allowed access to cultural activities he most likely never would have seen during his lifetime otherwise. His mission, I have no doubt, benefitted him in that respect far more than it did the church.
The rules common today came along much later, a totally different world.
One thing has not changed, though. He later married one of two very pretty sisters he met on his mission. :)