Craziest mission stories.
 

Here are my top 10 mission stories. When I say top, I mean most crazy (mostly horrible and tragic). I served in Russia, if anyone cares.

1. Fellow missionary was murdered and my former companion (his companion at the time) stabbed, but survived.

2. Gun held to my head during a street robbery.

3. Next door neighbor had his head cut off by the mafia.

4. Branch President disappeared to Argentina unexpectedly with his wife. A few months later, the mafia found him and cut his head off.

5. Had my phone line cut and peep hole painted over as 5 men broke through my windows. Luckily, I had tear gas (given to me by a cop member of the Church after the gun incident). Also, I called the cops just before they cut the phone line. They should have cut the phone line before they started breaking in.

6. I saw a dude get run over by a street car and his body was cut into at least 3 large pieces.

7. I found marijuana growing around the mission office.

8. I attended the Hare Krishna temple with my companion and bought a necklace made from a special tree, and I was told that if I would wear the necklace it would prevent me from being reincarnated as a dog as long as I never eat meat. I went home and made a hamburger.

9. A KGB guy was assigned to follow me because I was trying to help an unemployed English-speaking Russian guy by paying him a thousand dollars (money actually from my parents) to translate something for me...and the KGB guy was trying to catch me employing someone for the Church secretly and evading proper procedures. When I realized I was being followed and questioned about incidents that happened inside an apartment (which could have only been heard by a bug), I told the unemployed Russian dude to take the money as a gift and not worry about translating anything. (The translation idea was an attempt to make the exchange less awkward.)

10. I had an semi-elderly female investigator describe her sexual affairs with random men "from the yard" in graphic detail in the middle of the fourth discussion. (We tried to stop her.) It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.

Um. Yeah. If any of those are true it's a damn good thing you served in Russia and not Arkansas.

Here are my top 10 -

1. I ate beans and rice for lunch everyday of my mission

2. I walked a lot

3. I had lots of brazilian teenage girls whistle at me

4. it never got below 80 degrees

5. I got scabies from a companion

6. I saw a drunk guy in dress ride a bike at about 10-15 mph right into a telephone poll (morning after carnival)

7. I ate a fruits of the sea omellette that was like eating boogers

8. there was a prison break as we were walking home one night. rifle shots from the guard tower were shot into the street. I hid under a bench that was generally used for people waiting for the bus

9. I was interviewing a 20 year old for baptism when the police busted down the door and dragged him away

10. I had a gentleman tell me about the saint francisco who if you left a glass of water in front of his statue for 2-3 weeks he would drink half of it. Apparently evaporation hasn't made it to the brazilian school system

1. I had a guy turn a "last door" moment into something else. He was not really listening as we taught the 1st discussion and finally he interrupted and said "one of my hobbies is taking video, would you guys mind if I filmed you for a while?" He offered us drinks while he went to get his camera equipment at the back of the apartment. We left before he came back out.

2. A crazy, bearded man who looked exactly like Animal from the muppets once followed us along the doors while tracting for a couple of blocks. With each door he got a little closer to us beginning at the street and moving to sidewalks and closer. He was breathing hard, like a kid pretending to be a monster and staring us down. We kept on working but of course he was scaring the hell out of anyone who answered their door. It finally reached the point where on the final door he was on the doorstep with us. I kept telling my comp to just ignore him. A middle aged lady opened the door, and despite this lunatic staring at her from over my shoulder she listened to the entire approach (a rarity in Belgium). This guy is breathing like he just ran a 100m dash and he has his meanest face on and I ask her if she knows the guy. "No, I assumed he was with you." Needless to say, she didn't have time to hear our message.

3. I ate horse meat.

4. Women occasionally answered the door topless. Not once did this occur with a woman you might hope would answer the door topless.

5. We got to put cool things on our french fries. Mayonaisse and peanut sauce being two of my favorite.

6. I had 4 bikes stolen. The final time one of my bikes was stolen, we had 4 elders who had all locked our bikes to the same pole. We had 4 u-bolt locks and 4 of the built in back wheel locks that are common in Europe. When we came out the next morning they were all gone. I lifted up on the pole, and sure enough it came right up out of the ground with ease. A sucker pole.

7. I was about to be placed under arrest for not having my passport on my person (our visas had all expired and the govt. was dragging their feet granting new ones at the time). Heading for likely deportation, I name dropped the name of a cop we'd taught from several towns away on the outskirts of Brussels. The cop who was arresting us happened to be good friends with said cop and immediately let us go with no questions asked.

Back in Indiana, former BYU OL recruit Junior Kato and his companion were teaching a lady in the neighborhood. One day her husband got this great idea of dressing up in a Teletubbies costume (the green one) and following the elders as they tracted the rest of the neighborhood. Obviously that unsettled the neighbors enough that they didn't get in anywhere else.

Despite that, the Teletubby did pose for the elders so they could take his picture.

1. Lots of native boobs in the Pacific. Including flashing teenagers (less common).

2. The couple mission, Elder R. had a habit of watching the women wash clothes (visible from mission house). After he went home, the zone leader found a Swimsuit edition SI in his desk. We got a chuckle out of that.

3. The elder who was notorious for spending at least an hour in the bathroom every morning. His former comp told me that one time he had knocked on teh door and told him to hurry up and the elder blew up and didn't talk to him for three days. After he went home, we found a hidden jar of vaseline with his name on it in the zone house. We got a good laugh out of that one.

4. Pot plants 5 feet tall next to one of the mission shacks.

5. Rats everywhere. The elder who replaced me killed over 50 in 3 months, then they stopped coming into the shack.

6. First night in the primitive islands, outhouse not functioning, going into the dark jungle to take a dump. Scared *&(#$less.

7. The brouhaha that occurred when we dug our outhouse next to a well.

8. The brouhaha when for a second time the bathroom/outhouse was dug next to a well.

9. The brouhaha that occurred when a kid asked me for some gum, and I gave him the piece in my mouth. You'd have thought I had cut off his arms.

10. Over several months helped build a rock dock for a member, hauling rocks in our truck. He went inactive the day it was done.

11. The time my companion rode his bike full-on into a telephone pole.

12. The time my companion told me he had never read a book in his life.

13. The time when a guy, whom I now believe to be an international criminal, was repainting his boat, and painted it white, green, and red and I said "looks like a Christmas tree."

14. When I went back at the end of my mission to my original area, ran into someone who had a longtime investigator's cell number, called it, and said "WHO GAVE YOU THIS NUMBER!?"

15. Riding in the motorboat back to our areas in blowing rain and 6 foot chop.

16. The brouhaha in the elementary school (we taught English) when I said before a test that I would fail anyone who cheated, and I followed through. I was fired.

Ooh, if only I had time to play this game but am running out the door. Suffice it to say that during the course of my mission, I grew close to a friend who worked in the Confidential Records Department of the Church Office Building. I would frequently write to her as a therapeutic way of venting, because I thought she would be the only one who would believe my stories, because they were too bizarre. (She reads the details of evey missionary worldwide who gets disciplined and/or sent home).

Once around my 20th month, she wrote to me, "someday when former missionaries are sitting around comparing their craziest stories, you will not be allowed to participate, because you will win every time."

I believe you. That was funny when you spilled real names and someone on the board freaked out because one of the guys was his friend and now a "respectable" Mormon.

Mine are pretty dull

1. Those rare days in England when the sun was shining and it was over 70 degrees, people would get loaded and then wander the streets. One guy approached us and started spelling everything. "You guys are missionaries, right? M-i-s-s-i-o-n-a-r-i-e-s." I said "Yes! Y-e-s." He went on for quite some time with normal drunken babble interrupted with intermittent spelling of some of the larger words he'd use. We counted it as a first discussion since no one else would talk to us that day.

2. A lady answered the door in a knitted sweater that was not high-density. Two extraordinarily large, long nipples stuck through the sweater as it was your normal English cold day.

3. My Aussie companion had a air gun. He went on a workover with the district leader and took his gun with him. They saw a pheasant out in the field and the DL pulled over and my comp shot it. Our landlord was a very good cook.

4. My Aussie comp and I would switch accents on our door approach since no one would let us in anyway.

5. In one really old neighborhood, my Aussie comp would use the door approach "We're angels sent from God and it's time for you to come home." They'd just politely say "Not interested." and close their door.

6. The brother of a very famous LDS QB was busted for getting a girl pregnant and having porn mags in his suitcase. I got paired up with his comp immediately afterwards and he was a complete burn-out from having to deal with that guy.

7. Went to a church meeting with 10 guys that believed in a "prophet" from Arizona who turned out to be an ex-Mormon. Their prayers were virtually identical to the Zoramite Rameumptom prayers.

8. Four missionaries barely got out of the King's Cross tube station right before a massive fire killed 30 people.

9. Other than that, it was 24 months of uneventful knocking on doors and being perpetually wet and cold.

I hesitate to wander into any discussion like this if ute4ever is on board. Nevertheless...

1) Had an apt right next to the local Japanese mafia headquarters. Scars, missing fingers, the whole nine yards. But they spent most of their time polishing a big black Caddilac and playing catch.

2) We were working a train station one night near a port and a semi-drunk sailor (I think he was Australian) came up to chat with us because we were the only non-Japanese around. He kept asking us for directions to the closest whorehouse and for recommendations on which one would have the best whores. Like we would know. We got a good laugh out of that one.

3) Occasionally a drunk old man who was missing a leg or arm would see us across the street and start yelling and cussing at us. WWII vets. That was always ackward.

4) I was in Japan the day that John Lennon was killed. People kept stopping us and yelling "What's the matter with you crazy Americans?!" John Lennon was like a god over there.

5) One of our recent converts hung himself in his apt. Haunts me to this day.

6) We had an investigator (and I use that term loosely) who was a horny middle-aged woman. She would hit me up for sex all the time, typically in front of her husband. He would just grin and shrug his shoulders. We kept trying to ditch her and she would show up at our apt. in suggestive clothing talking dirty and trying to hand me envelopes full of cash. It was about too much for this small-town Utah boy to handle.

7) We are biking past a row of Japanese "love hotels" one day and a guy waved us over. He said that he had suffered a groin injury in a car wreck a few years back and was unable since that time to keep his wife satisfied. He was hoping the two of us would go up to her room in the hotel and take care of business for him.

Sorry. I can't think of ten.

But how hot was she?

She was more horny than hot. Not hot enough to be much of a temptation. Thankfully.

1. Raiderette answering the door while tracting wearing only a towel....that wasn't wrapped around her.

2. Gave a Book of Mormon to the lead singer of REO Speedwagon...Kevin Cronin I believe is his name.

3. Watched all the girls in the Singles Ward I served in flock to Steve Young like he was the next Messiah when he came walking through the chapel doors. I kid you not. Companion and I are sitting there. Shooting the bull, and suddenly we see this onslaught of women move in one direction at the same time. Was pretty funny.

4. Had a knife pulled on me by a man and chased us down the street on his feet while we were pedaling away on our bikes.

5. Tracting, ring a doorbell from a media referal. They wanted the "Family First" video. No one answers. Hear a clinking sound on the window....look down to see the drapes partially separated looking straight down the face of a double barrel shotgun. Couldn't even see a face or the hand that was holding it. My eyes wide, I poke my comp, he looks over...his eyes get wide...we don't say a word, quietly back away and never look back.

6. Played Streetball with gangmembers in Fremont/Hayward all the time. Was a blast. And in one game seeing a full on brawl break out over a foul that was called. You'd think it was regular Ward ball. Companion and I step over to the side during the brawl to avoid the melee...one of the guys who's become good friends of our and whom we're teaching the discussions, in the middle of the brawl comes over and goes..."Just stay here,,,and if anyone touches you....I'll fuck em up....no one messes with my power of god people".

7. Wake up in the middle of the night....see my companion isn't in his bed. See his bike isn't in the garage. it's 3:30 in the morning and I have no idea what's going on or where he is. I hear him coming, he comes walking in with this surprised look on his face, surprised to see me awake. I ask him where he was,,he tripes..."none of your business". Shortly thereafter he's sent home and excommunicated. He'd snuck over to a ladys house in the ward. She was a single mom of 6 kids we'd been trying to re-activate....apparently they had a boinkfest.

8. Some Elders get busted for surfing down in Santa Cruz, one of them claims he would never do it again, as he says he saw a Great White shark and that it scared him straight. Of course he gets sent home 3 weeks later for taking their car, driving up to San Francisco to catch a Giants game. Car battery dies and he has to call a member in the area to drive up and "Save him from getting into trouble"....yeah...doesn't work. We never believed the Great White Shark story, but the taking the car and sneaking up to watch a Giants game story is true, lol.

9. 3 days into the mission field....watch my companion go at it with a Muslim bashing away and they get into a very heated exchange, while at the same time I don't say a word and have no idea what in the hell is going on or what they're talking about. The Muslim and I get along very well, he gives me a leather bound copy of the Quoran as I give him a Book of Mormon and the rest of the elders are jealous because I've got a "Cool souvenir".

10. That same day...we go into downtown San Jose,,,where several blocks everything is Vietnamese...all the shops, restaurants. We're with the Viet speaking Elders. They order me a big bowl of Pho...as we go out a prostitute is sitting on the car saying something in Vietnamese and I suddenly feel like I'm stuck in "Full Metal Jacket"........

So what happened with Kevin Cronin? Did you teach him about Moroni 10:3-5 and did he respond by singing "I can't fight this feeling any longer..."?

lol...never saw him again. He called me once on the phone to thank me and that's it.

A guy in our Singles Ward was a Roadie for the band and they used to give him all kinds of crap about being a Mormon. I challenged him to give Cronin a BOM, and he said..."Do it yourselves",,,so we were invited to meet the band before a show, and we got to meet the band and I handed him the Book and thanked him for letting us come backstage. He was very nice to us.

one of the cooler things I got to do.....we stopped the motorboat in about 70 feet of water. I put on a diving mask and leaned my head over, underwater. There not far from me at all in plain view was one of the sunken Japanese big ships.

We weren't allowed to do any snorkeling or scuba diving. This is as close as I ever got.

I'm still awaiting fusnik's Baron Munchausen mission stories.

My mission was mostly mundane. We didn't Little Rock Arkansas stories, and we observed the rules. Nonetheless, our baptism ratio was extremely low, so the numbers of baptisms does not necessarily correlate with rule adherence, despite many ZLs and APs preaching the contrary.

Some weird things happened, but not usually involving the wrongdoings of elders.

Ah, the Western European missions. Brings back fine memories. I always thought when we turned in our stats that we should have been required to split them into 2 groups sane/insane. The number of discussions we taught to the sane were something less than 1 per week on average. At least Holland and Belgium are warmer than England.

An investigator in my mission was murdered by the Thai mafia the day before his baptism.

I wrecked my bike face first into a rice paddy.

I ate at over 25 different McDonalds.

I interviewed over 20 women for baptism, almost all of them either had abortions or lesbian experiences. Almost all the men I interviewed denied encouraging or paying for abortions.

I was kicked out of both Jehovah's Witness and evangelical Christian revivals that were being run by Americans.

I became friends with a Saudi who, I'm thoroughly convinced, was a member of an Asian terror cell.

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.

The curiousness of other cultures on that point is strange to say the least. Once, we were swimming in another type of economic neighborhood, where children of a different ethnicity were in the changing rooms. The range of comments over even as youth toward manhood was comical at best.

If you ever wish to feel insignificant, you should be in the lockerroom of an NBA team. You'll make certain nobody ever sees you naked again.

Busses

When riding the bus in the afternoon (they are very, very packed) teenage girls in their school uniforms would press their bodies against you while you stood in isle – facing you or not. Excusing myself, I’d slide to one side, but then inevitably their friends would pick up where they left off. The first time this happened, when I jumped off the bus at our stop, I half wondered if I needed to talk to the MP. Once I realized it was going to happen all the time, which it did, I’d just look at my comp and say, "Matt 5:28, Matt 5:28, Matt 5:28!!"

One more bus story. As I said the busses are very packed (at peak travel times) in the capital city. Passengers jump on the sides of busses and hang on the handles outside the doors, if it is already packed inside. You pull out your fare and it is passed inside to the ayudante for you.

These are the stereotypical converted school busses of Central America.

One morning we were late for a meeting on the other side of the capital – out of our zone. We jumped on the outside of a bus going to our destination as it slowed to let some people off. If we didn’t grab this bus we’d be very late. I’m in the front doorway and my comp is in the back doorway. We are both completely outside of the bus holding on to the step-up handles with only the tips of our feet touching the bottom step, the bus doors are open.

As the bus leaves the stop and is already back in the middle of the road, some dude runs up saying, 'wait, wait" and jumps on my back. He is not touching any part of the bus. I’m now supporting his weight and mine, trying to hang on as the bus accelerates. It’s not going to slow down for me, even if I fall off. The bus is going faster and faster. I can start to feel my hands slipping. "I’m not going to fall off this bus," I say to myself. So like a scene from a Stallone movie, I start giving this guy elbow shots to the ribs. My comp yells, "knock him off!" One more solid blow to the mid-section and the guys is rolling down the side of the road in a heap of dust. I could never think of a way to integrate that story into a talk, but I’m open to suggestions.

CCR was huge in Central America. It seemed like all of the busses blared CCR tunes. I can distinctly picture my comps and I racing down roads, in crowded busses, mouthing the words to "Lodi” or some such song.

LOL...that is awesome

being violated
 

A drunk Pakistani name named Ali saw my companion and me, and yelled "Jesus police!" He invited us in to the lobby of his apt and sat us down on the bench. Then he sat down with us, and started kissing us. My companion was calm, while I was shying away. "Looks like your friend is a little shy," Ali said. My companion, always joking, said, "Yeah. You better train him. Give him another kiss." Then he started necking us, so we had to pull away.

My companion had to close his legs, because Ali was going for a full encounter. So we headed out, but not before my companion got his number and made an appointment to teach him. I told him that he'd have to go on splits if he wanted to go. He did, but the appointment juked.

Just curious, if you had to call the police, what criminal act did you expect to accuse the man of doing and what did you expect the police to do?

Stop that. If you ask that question again I am going to call the police.

I was serving in Dodge City, KS and was visiting a family investigating the church. We were helping the mother with laundry behind their trailer. We hear a commotion from the other side so we rush around the house. Her husband is in a fist fight with the neighbors. It turns out that they were fighting because they each had boys the same age who they made fight each other and our investigator's son beat the crap out of the other kid and now his dad was pissed off about it. So I break up the fight. Our investigator was taking it too the neighbor. So he started popping off in the Mexican machismo way. So the neighbor came back for round two and I jumped in the middle again. The neighbor then came after me and I threatened to kick his ass and then call the cops on him. Other neighbors were watching and they pulled the neighbor away towards his trailer. I was trying to get our investigator to go into the house but he's still running his mouth and jumping up and down. He's drunk off his butt too. His wife is screaming at him to stop and get in the house. His youngest kids a girl and a boy are getting very upset by everything too. Next thing we know the neighbor still salty and licking his wounds jumps into his full size Chevy pickup and floors it heading straight for us. I start screaming run to everyone. I grab the two kids and literally jump out of danger and miss getting clipped by inches. Our investigator stands there and takes it head on. The neighbor just drives straight through and doesn't even stop. Our investigator shattered the windshield with his face and was flipped up and over the truck probably 10'-15' high and landed face down in a puddle of mud. He raised up onto his knees and then collapsed unconscious. The wife is hysterical. The kids are hysterical. They're screaming "my daddy's dead!" All the neighbors who saw everything disappear like cockroaches. My companion just soiled himself and can't seem to move. I run after the truck and try to get a license plate number but all I could see was dust. I run back to our investigator and check his vitals. He's barely breathing but has a pulse. I beg a neighbor to let me use the phone after being refused by 3-4 homes. The police and ambulance come. Not a single one of them speaks Spanish so I translate for them all. None of the neighbors will cooperate. They all deny seeing anything. So I tell the cops they're all lying. Finally we get to the neighbor's home and his wife pretends that she has been sleeping. They ask about her husband and she claims he was deported a few weeks prior. So the cops make me put the squeeze on her. I felt horrible doing it, but I guess I was just translating. She finally broke down when I told her they'd take her kids away and she'd go to jail for protecting her husband.

Our investigator survived. He didn't even have a broken bone. We spoke with his doctor and he told us that he was so drunk it probably saved his life. The neighbor fled and was never captured.

Mostly I just taught and baptized though.

I almost got in a fight with the husband (or maybe ex-husband) of one of my investigators. Apparently drunk control freaks don't like to be laughed at when they physically threaten you. But it's not really a good story because it only could have been a fight, but wasn't.