Stories: Elder
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 -- Add Story
| I had to travel to Chile alone, as my companion in the LTM was reassigned to Canada-Alaska (became a Zone Leader there). My flight was changed in Miami, on Lan Chile, and the airline helped me send a wire message to the Mission Home in Santiago, with the new flight and arrival time. However, upon arrival at the airport, no one was there to pick me up. My confidence in speaking Spanish, because I had learned all of the Charlas, was clearly unwarranted, as I could not initially understand anything anyone said, and it seemed that everyone spoke about 100 miles an hour. My most-used phrase in the airport was "mas despacio, por favor"! I had a phone number in my papers for the mission home, so I naively went to a public telephone and automatically pulled some change out of my pocket--american money! Then, to top that off, I looked at the coin slot at the top of the phone, and it had two vertical ridges in the back of the slot. I was dumbfounded (not the last time that day nor in the coming days!). I went to a counter and tried to say something in Spanish about "telefono" and "moneda", and offered my american coins. The person said something about "ficha", which made no sense whatever to me, but I wasn't understanding the rest of the Spanish either, so it was all pretty intimidating. Finally, I apparently looked so pitiful that someone helped me purchase a "ficha" (which conveniently had two parallel grooves on one side!--at least something was now making sense); and showed me by motions what to do with it--although that I had actually figured out, in the middle of my embarrassment. So I proceeded to call the mission home, and was told that they had already come to the airport. I told them about the wire message from Miami, but no one knew anything about it. They said it would take them a while to get back out to pick me up. While waiting, I tried to get the words that people were speaking to somehow go "mas despacio"! |
| |
|
|
|
List All | Add Story
|
