The average number of discussions weekly was something like this:

Inside London - 15 to 30 per week
Outside London - 1 to 2 per week

That is no exaggeration. Maybe others that served in Birmingham, Manchester or elsewhere that might have had a lot of Africans in the big cities with very few Africans outside them can back up those ratios.

Sweet - you went to Thailand? What years?

I was in Taiwan in 97-99. The investigator was Thai and he moved to Taiwan to escape the Thai mob.

One of the elders in my mission who was friends with me from before the mission told me of his companion that was pretty hard-core, and one of the local churches was building a new church. So he went out to it while still under construction, laid his hands upon it, and "with the authority of the Melchizedek Priesthood" cursed it.

At the height of our comraderie and fun in the islands, we had a zone meeting (baptism too I think) on one of the very small uninhabited islands. BBQ. We waded in the shallow ocean there.

However this wading was translated into "the entire zone went swimming" to the Mission President. ZL was sacked and many of us were moved out to the other zone. Those were great times.

I found myself singing The Doors' "People Are Strange" song to my self virtually every day of my mission because of all the wackos LDS missionaries meet. Here's a few of my highlights:

1. In Mbabane, Swaziland at total stranger walked right up to me, asked me how to spell "fallopian tube," borrowed my pen to write it on his hand, and then walked away.

2. Also in Mbabane a very intoxicated man asked us to come pray for his pregnant wife who was having severe stomach pains. When I asked him how long his wife had been pregnant, he replied "Since last Thursday."

3. In South Africa, a teenage boy asked us to pray for his girlfriend because she wouldn't sleep with him.

4. Leaving an investigator's house one night after a discussion. Their house backed up to a road that had lots of trees between the road and their back fence. In the trees we could hear commotion that sounded a lot like a man hitting/beating a woman. My comp and I didn't want to walk away from the situation nor did we feel like confronting an angry man. So we hid behind the back wall and threw rocks at the man.

5. Doing community service in Mbabane government hospital's children's outpatient clinic and seeing a woman bring her dead child into the room. The child was asthmatic, had an attack, mom was out of medication, and it took her too long to get to the hospital to save the child. I've never seen a person more panicked in my life.

6. Same government hospital, having to take overflow from the STD outpatient clinic when there were no more kids to help. The STD clinic had a 12 inch black painted wood phallus that they used for condom demos. There was also a short, squatty woman in a rubber apron that administred the "stick test" which involved a long wooden q-tip. YIKES!!!! Every so often we'd see less-active members of the branch in the STD line (which was always enormous). They weren't so thrilled to see us.

7. Hitchhiking and getting picked up by a white dude who just got back to SA from Harvard MBA school where he and his wife attended the LDS church with Covey kids. Told us that if they had stayed in Boston they would probably have joined but now that they were back in SA it was out of the question.

8. Teaching a first discussion to one of SA's most well-known day-time soap stars who was living with two white women in a township. My African companion thought this guy was the greatest; kind of like the way American males think of Hugh Hefner.

9. Teaching a first discussion to a dude who, upon presentation of the BofM, said, "I know this book." He stood up, went to his room, and came back with an old copy. He said that a friend of his gave him the copy back in 1984 and he'd been trying to find the church since then. He said he was a minister from Lesotho and was going to convert all three of his congregations to LDS. I went home two days later so don't know how it played out.

10. Going to a less active members hut with a comp who had porno issues pre-mission and was dealing with some severe mental demons as a result. Less active dude opens door to reveal that his entire hut is literally wall papered with porno pics from magazines. Seriously, there wasn't a single square inch that wasn't covered. My comp nearly passed out.

Reminds me of the different customs/mores/tastes of the native elders in my mission.

First off they thought people kissing was about the stupidest thing ever. "Your mouth is for eating. They called kissing 'eating rice.'

Also one of the native elders, when we are talking about eventually getting married says "I hope my wife has had lots of sex with lots of men before we marry."

We kind of stare at him.

"So she'll be good at it."

That reminds me of a couple:

1) We were working blue-collar neighborhood one night in Japan and a man let us in to do the first discussion. It was him, his wife, and a baby as I recall. They took us into the main room and had us sit down facing a wall that was completely covered with a huge poster of a naked woman. I am pretty sure he did that just to see what we would do. He had a smirk on his face the whole time.

2) In another house in this same neighborhood we were teaching a family with a mom and dad, two teenage kids, and two grandparents. At one point in the discussion I looked up and all six of them were smoking a cigarette. I half expected the dog to light up. This happened quite a bit actually. The Japanese are terrible about smoking.

Teaching the Word of Wisdom has to be tough in Asian countries, or teaching it to Asian families, period.

"No tea and no tobacco? Forget about it!"

Yeah, porno was a pretty big issue in Taiwan. In one area we would see a security guard near our apartment several times a day. He was proud of his habit of viewing American pornography and was under the impression that all American men were as physically blessed as the actors he enjoyed watching (if he would have seen my companion fanning off after the shower, his illusion would have been shattered). He regularly asked us about the size of our units and he would use hand gestures to guess how big we were. It was always embarrasing when other people were around.