Item Detail
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A Bird Suprises a Missionary
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10/6/2014
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Provo, Utah
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Male
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Beaver, Utah
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Hurricane, Utah
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25
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Self
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Caucasian
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The Church of Jesus Christ of\rLatter-day Saints
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The informant comes from a family of five. He has two sisters. He was nervous to go on a mission because he tends to be on the quiet side when it comes to conversation and meeting new people, but the mission was a good experience for him. He does appreciate a good practical joke if it is not mean-spirited.
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I collected this item while I was sitting at a carrel at the Harold B. Lee Library on the campus of Brigham Young University. I am typing on my laptop with no one else involved in collecting it. Others are studying on the floor. I edited it at home and at the library after looking at some pictures I had of the event and recalling a little more detail. The item I am collecting took place in an apartment for missionaries in a town near Cincinnati, Ohio. It has two bedrooms and a bathroom along with the kitchen and living room. My missionary companion and I were the only two in\rthe apartment at the time the item took place.
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Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints often serve as missionaries for the church when they are in their late teens to early twenties, especially males. While on your mission you are paired with another missionary known as your companion. Missionaries are often referred to as elders, and your nametag says Elder and your last name, so when missionaries refer to other missionaries they will often just say elders. You and your companion share an apartment. Some areas, such as the one in which this item occurs, have different sets of missionaries who are trained to or already speak different languages to work with those who do not speak English, and in this instance the item occurs to Spanish speaking missionaries. They cover the same area as the missionaries who do not teach Spanish speakers, often referred to as the English elders by the Spanish elders, so they live\rrelatively close to each other. Zone leaders are missionaries who act as a type of supervisor to missionaries in a certain area. They train missionaries at meetings and collect statistics on work performed by the missionaries. Being a missionary can be stressful or tense at times, and sometimes missionaries will play jokes on each other.
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missionary, joke, practical joke, bird
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How item was collected: I collected this item by sitting down at my laptop and writing it down from memory. I then edited it for grammar and other errors and to add a detail here and there. I looked at pictures of the event and rock mentioned and then edited the ending a little from what I had originally wrote to include that we had put a name and dates on the rock.\rText: From what I remember, my companion and I got a call from the zone leaders while we were away from the apartment asking if we were there or not. We were not sure why they would want to know, but we were going to find out really soon. When we got back to our apartment, my companion needed to go to the restroom, so he went down the hall to the bathroom while I stayed in the living room. Suddenly, I heard my companion start screaming while he was in the bathroom. I had no idea what was going on, but before I could do too much my companion came running out of the bathroom. It turns out the other elders had decided to play a practical joke on us. They had been in contact with a non-missionary acquaintance who had bought them a small pet bird, nothing too expensive. They had then gotten into our apartment. For some reason the zone leaders had a key to our apartment, I'm not sure why. They then proceeded to drain the toilet of water, cover the hole at the bottom, and then leave the\rbird in there with the lid of the toilet down. When my companion raised the lid the bird came flying out in a panic and flew around the room, which is what started the screaming. We thought it was really funny afterwards, and we even decided to make a little cage for the bird out of boxes we had until we could find someone to take the bird. Unfortunately, the bird flew into the side of its cage and tragically passed away, but we made sure to bury it outside the apartment close to the sliding door and leave a headstone made out of a rock there with a name and dates attached. Hopefully future missionaries will notice it and wonder what it is for if they did not hear the story. Moments like these show that missions are not always serious affairs.
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Kaden
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Taylor
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Male
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25
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English\r640R
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Professor Eric Eliason