The Gift of Tongues

It is remarkable how quickly our Spanish speaking missionaries are able to pick up the language. Imigrant Spanish speakers from the same country gather together in cities and towns throughout our mission. Our Spanish missionaries will be working with one Latin American culture and then get transferred and have to learn new idioms and accents from a different culture. I recently received this from one of my Spanish speaking missionaries who comes from Idaho:

This last week, we were walking to an appointment that we didn't need to be there for about another 30 minutes for, because of an unexpected change in travel plans, etc, and just trying to talk to everyone. We passed a younger man who was smoking, said hi, and continued on. He stopped us with, "Hey, can I ask you guys a question?" Of course we were more than happy to talk to him.

His question was about what we really do, and what church we go to. He has a neighbor that just left to do a mission like what we are doing, and he wasn't sure what it was all about. So, we explained to him that we are missionaries for 2 years, all the fun other little details, and I mentioned that we both speak Spanish.

"Oh really?" he says. Then, in Spanish, "Y como tu hablas el espanol?" (Basically, "How well do you speak Spanish?")

I replied in Spanish with something like, more or less, and said a few other things.

His jaw seemed to drop and he said, "Have you ever lived in a Spanish country?"

I told him no.

"Eso es mentira!" he said. ("That's a lie!") "Where are you from?"

I told him Idaho.

"Yeah, but where are you from, like what country."

I told him the United States. "No. That's a lie," he continued.

At this point I couldn't help but laugh. I pulled out my driver's license; he still didn't believe me.

"It's impossible for you to speak like that. How have you only been learning Spanish for a year, and you don't have an accent? It's impossible. You're lying."

Anyways, eventually I think he either believed us, or just accepted that we weren't going to change our story. We went on to explain more about our church and the Book of Mormon. He seemed really interested in everything we had to say, and asked us for a Book of Mormon. We dropped one off at his mom's store, like he asked us to, and we plan on getting in touch with him this week to see if we can start working with him more.