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Now, in the previous chapters, we saw how Bobbie and Karel and Dan and Kristie
began to establish their friendship. We see a bit of how close they
already felt from the letters they sent home.
And maybe we also got a bit of a sense of how it might have happened that Bobbie and Karel were still not married to each other when they went to the islands for their fieldwork.
So skipping ahead to the island story is probably not going to impede your understanding of the rest of the novel.
Not too much, anyway.
On the other hand, you might find their years at university interesting. It could almost be a separate novel, if a little thin on plot. And you might be interested in what kinds of experiences some young Ehyephoot students might have at a Church operated university.
There's information here. Let's see how it went.
During one of the study sessions during the first fall semester, Kristie started talking about missions. They had been talking about different ways to get teaching experience.
"Does church teaching count for teaching experience?" Kristie asked.
"Of course!" was Dan's reply.
Karel thought more needed to be said. "Well, yeah, it counts as informal experience. So what you learn from the experience can be useful in the classroom and in discussing teaching methods, and you might even refer to it in a job interview, but you can't use it to fill degree requirements. In church, we don't keep the kinds of records that schools and school districts and management can evaluate."
"No grades?" Kristie postulated.
"That would be one of the problems."
"Grades in Sunday School!" Bobbie said with a grin. "That sounds horrible."
All four chuckled, and Karel continued his explanation.
"That's the dichotomy. The value of what we do for God often can't be directly communicated to the institutions in the world around us. That's one of our sacrifices when we engage in church service."
Dan groused, "Valuable to the world ought to be valuable to the institutions
in it."
Bobbie nodded in agreement.
"Even missions?" Kristie was thinking out loud. "I've been told it's okay to put our missions on our curriculum vitae."
Dan took a positive view. "We can definitely tell people about what we have done in church. Whether they accept it as meaningful to them or not is up to them."
"Exactly." Karel concurred.
Bobbie was not satisfied with leaving things at that. "We definitely shouldn't hide our missions or our church service. Jesus Himself said, 'Let your light so shine.'"
(Jesus? I could translate it Immanuel, I suppose. Or Joshua. It translates the same:
God is with us.
Or, God is our help, our salvation.
More carefully stated, the universe is not really out to get us, even if it can be dangerous and difficult, and even though some people in it think they
are out to get you.)
Karel replied, "I didn't say anything about hiding anything. We just shouldn't expect that teaching Sunday School will fill student teaching requirements or things like that."
"It'd be nice if it did," Kristie said wistfully. She thought for a few moments more.
"Say, Dan, you said you went to the Prosperous Country and Eastern Realms Mission, right?"
(Somewhat comparable in reach and function to the post-WWII Swiss-Austrian
mission in our world.)
"Right."
"So you spoke the languages of the Country of the Common People and of the People of the Spear?"
"Y también el idioma del Pais de los Conejos."
"¿Es Verdad?"
"Si, si."
And Dan and Kristie started talking about their missions in the language of the Country of the Conies.
(Permit me to borrow Spanish for effect here. I don't think the language of the
Country of the Conies is not one you would recognize.)
Karel complained, "¡Yo no hablo el idioma Conejo!"
Everyone laughed.
"So," Bobbie asked, "Kristie went to the Conejo-Respira mission, but how do you speak Conejo, Dan?"
Prosperous Country? Eastern Realms? Country of the Common People? People of
the Spear? Country of the Conies? The Wide Continent?
There are parallels in culture, history, and relative location. Sort of.
These were countries of their Old World, as compared to their UIS, one of the chief among the countries in their New World. The Prosperous Country took a neutral position in most of the fighting during the major wars on the Wide Continent in the pre-modern and modern eras of the Old World. The mission organization where Dan was assigned was one set up after the second such conflict to draw their entire world into the wars ended, and included that country and several countries around it
And I suppose it bears being more explicit -- the name of their Messiah/Christ does translate directly to Jesus, or Joshua/Yeshua: "God is (my/our) help/salvation." And it can even be understood, in the converse, as an assertion that the Parent God is not the enemy of the Children.
"I took some in high school, and the Mission pretty much was called on for all parts of the Wide Continent that didn't have regular Church organizations."
Bobby asked for confirmation -- "So you speak three languages besides ours."
"Yeah."
Kristie said, "I only speak the language of the Conies and the language of the Fishers." She sighed.
Then she asked, "Do you guys still feel like you have a testimony?"
Testimony. Witness. Some people confuse this kind of thing with a testimonial. I suppose there is a similarity.
But this testimony, or witness thing is basically a conviction or a strong belief.
Outside the religious sphere, a testimony might be compared to a mathematician's conviction that the concept of a unit vector has fundamental meaning. Less abstractly (although not a perfect parallel), it's similar to the confidence that we have that one plus one is two -- well, most of the time.
We may not be able to carefully define the contexts in which adding one to one gives two, and we may not properly understand the concept of a non-compressible unit vector, but we know that those contexts are important to us in our day-to-day lives. And we know we can use the concepts of adding and subtracting meaningfully in many places.
Likewise, a testimony is the kind of belief that gives people the confidence to do things under moral conviction, and especially to keep going when things get hard. It's the kind of belief that is expressed in faith and action.
Dan said, "Well, yeah!"
Karel asserted, "I haven't changed my mind, either."
Bobbie thought a moment. "I definitely have a testimony now, but it isn't the same one I had when I was a missionary."
"Oh?" Kristie prompted.
"When I first went out, I wasn't sure the atonement and the redemption would do me any good. I just went to be a nurse where they needed nurses."
"Well, that's a good reason to go." Dan was encouraging.
Karel nodded in agreement. "Important, saving reasons. How did you feel when you returned?"
"I was beginning to believe I had a place in the Gospel and the Church, that I could be saved, too. That's part of the reason I started saving up to work on the PhD."
"So your testimony is stronger now?" asked Kristie.
"I think so. How about you?"
"I'm not sure. I saw a lot of things that I didn't expect when I was a missionary."
Dan guessed at her thoughts. "So, were you disappointed in people who weren't perfect?"
"Yeah. I guess so. I just thought things would be so simple. Some of the elders behaved pretty badly."
Similarly to Mormons, Ehyephoot men who serve as missionaries are called the equivalent of "elders" -- even the young men. And women who serve as missionaries are called "sisters".
It can be a little confusing, since members of the church in general, in the consideration that all members of the human race are part of God's big family, are also called brothers and sisters, no matter what their other callings are.
Men seem to need the formal investiture of authority before they will get up the ambition to do good things.
Women don't seem to need that so much. And men seem to have more need to
perform set rituals, where women seem more to understand things more
intuitively. It seems to be a general rule, although there is wide variation among individuals.
But it's the same metaphysical substance of faith, whether formal or not.
Dan looked down. "I made a few mistakes when I was a missionary." Then he looked up at Kristie. "And after, too. Don't hold it against them. Some of them will have changed their ways, anyway."
And Bobbie and Karel concurred.
Karel said, "I know if I'd had to be perfect, I wouldn't be here now."
"Thanks. I tried not to judge them, but it was hard."
"Hey," said Bobbie. "I find that, when I go to the temple, it's easier to forgive people. I've set a goal to go to the temple at least once a month during school. How about you guys?"
All four thought it was a good idea. None of them had classes the next Friday morning, so they decided to go together then. Several of the other students who were studying with them also decided to join in.
"Hey, I'm still stuck on this question." Chad was one of those other students. We'll introduce him a little better later. "Listening to you guys talk about missions and the temple isn't helping."
Several other students murmured in agreement.
"Sorry," Karel ducked his head, the other three also murmuring apologies.
Kristie leaned over the table to look at Chad's work. "How far have you gotten?"
Chad grimaced. "Well, not very. Not at all. 'Do I see common elements or underlying principles in the education systems practiced on the islands in this group?' What kind of question is that? Most of these have no system at all, but three have inherited systems from the countries that used to claim them as colonies. Different countries, different systems."
Karel and Bobbie exchanged glances.
"Well, I have to admit," Bobbie started, "on first read through the material, that's what I was thinking."
Dan added, "I just wrote something like that down and moved on. Might have more to think about it now, though. What did you come up with , Kristie?"
"From the descriptions we have, I think even where they adapted the former colonial rulers' systems, they adapted things to their own culture." She glanced over at Karel, who just nodded. "Anyone else notice anything special?"
That started a small discussion, and shortly Chad and a couple of other students who had been stuck were scribbling notes and moving ahead.
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You can find the original first draft of the chapter this chapter was
extracted from, and various approaches I have tried with it here:
https://free-is-not-free.blogspot.com/2016/05/economics-101-novel-ch05-first-semester.html.
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