I Have So Much Same Word - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/130/away-from-home

If there ever was a time that I was away from home, it was when I was living in Sweden, and it is a mystery to me how in the world the seven dwarfs made it there.

The thing that you have to understand first, is that there were seven of us traveling from Utah to Stockholm together, and after nine weeks with each other learning Swedish and how to teach, we realized that we were the seven dwarfs. It wasn't a name that we always went by, but the group of us totally met the seven dwarf characteristics.

Depending on who you ask, there were a few that were up to debate on which one of us were covering which dwarf, but there were seven of us, and most days we fit this pretty well. 

Elder Ragsdale - typically doc
Elder Francom - typically happy
Elder Jones - typically bashful
Elder Checketts - typically dopey
Elder Barrus - typically grumpy
Elder Hansen  - typically sleepy
Me - typically sneezy

Again, it wasn't a perfect science, but we were the seven dwarfs, and the seven of us got strapped into a plane with nothing more than a few papers in our hands telling us where we would need to transfer and which planes we needed to make.

The only problem? The one of our transfers was in Paris, and none of us knew French. We could get around in Swedish, but French, not so much, and we were stuck in the Paris air port trying to find our gate and everything to get to the place we were actually headed.

After pure luck / divine intervention, we made it to the gate when Elder Jones managed to get out to a group of Sweedes next to him, "How do you say "jet lag"?" (but he asked in Swedish). He wanted to know because he was starting to feel it. We were eight time zones away, had been on planes for a while and were only going to be on one more plane.

Their response was, "Samma ord" = same word. They were trying to tell him that the Swedish word for jet lag, was the exact same thing as it was in English. All he had to say in Swedish was that he had so much jet lag, but with a slight Swedish accent on the 'jet lag' and he'd been just fine. His brilliant mind, partially in the place where we had only learned religious Swedish, and also had a significant amount of jet lag, thought that the word for jet lag was literally same word. That meant that he went back into the conversation he was trying to have in Swedish and said, "I have so much same word."

I make fun of Jones, and it's easy to try to make him the person of jokes, that he didn't know what was going on, that he didn't get the language in use, or anything else, but it could have just as easily been me, but I was trying not to talk to anyone because I was still me.

Being a missionary is wrapped up so much into that one experience. Jones was coming from a very pure and innocent place. He just wanted to talk and be understood, but he had no clue what he was doing. The same goes with every day missionary work in Sweden. We tried as hard as we could, and we just wanted to talk to people because that's what we believed in and knew helped us, but then reality hit in and none of us knew what to do because none of us had any experience in actually adulting.

For two years I was away from home, and had I actually known what I was doing, things would have been drastically different.