20 years ago today - Getting ran out of our apartment - September 1997

Twenty years ago today Morris and I took a member, Igor Smirnov, with us on a discussion. Igor has an immense knowledge of the gospel and understands the bible like no other. We made a habit of taking a local member with us on discussions for a variety of reasons. I'm sure our fresh linguistic abilities left something to be desired when it came to communication. Morris was only six months in country and he spoke the language leaps and bounds better than I. It was my understanding that the area of the city we were assigned to work, was a little on the rougher side. We had just rented a new apartment in the area that I understood as having never had any missionaries live there before. Being the fresh Greenie that I was, I asked my companion if, among the many buildings in the area, if we could tract or knock on the doors of our own high rise building to look for potential investigators. Against his better judgement, he relented. We handed out invitations to attend church to all that would take them. Listed on the invitation was our phone number and the address where we meet for Sunday services. However, it's not difficult to find out where the American missionaries live. So needless to say, everyone in the area knew who we were and where we lived. On this particular night, the person we were attempting to have a discussion with didn't answer their door. This happened so frequent we had a phrase for it. We called this, being "Jaked". Whether the discussion was successful or not, to thank the branch member for helping us on the discussion, we had made it a habit to feed them a meal as our way of saying thank you. We had two members we relied on most for this, Igor Smirnov and Volodia Astashov. Both young at the time, Volodia is now an area authority in the church. (A member of the quorum of the seventy.) On this particular night we had Igor with us. We went back to the apartment after the unsuccessful discussion attempt. While we were preparing dinner we had some girls call asking us out on a date. We told them we couldn't as we are missionaries, explaining that it was forbidden for us to meet with or date young women while we are missionaries. Then they said they were coming over and to just open the door and let them in. We mostly ignored the call and began to eat dinner, because no one ever knocks on our door. Well sure enough, there was a knock at the door. We didn't answer it, but carefully and quietly we each peeked out the peek hole and sure enough there were a couple of cute girls on the other side of the door. We figured, no big deal, we'll just ignore them and they'll go away. Then we noticed out of the very side part of the peek hole, that there were a few other male figures hiding just out of view. At this point we got concerned. They went away for a bit and we started to decide what to do when they called again. This time we put Igor on the phone, hoping that a native Russian with no accent would scare them away. It didn't. They showed up a little while later knocking on the door again. They finally went away but we were too freaked out to stay any longer. We made contact with the zone leader and he agreed we should pack a few days worth of clothes and try to get to his place. We stuffed some clothes into our backpacks, dressed in street clothes, made sure the door was clear and carefully made our way down the stairwell. It was getting dark and there were three of us, instead of our usual two, so we hoped at least our numbers would be different than what they were expecting and they wouldn't recognize us. When we got down the stairwell we were quite shocked to see a large group of 20-30 youth had gathered just outside the door in the courtyard. We quickly, yet casually started our way through the crowd. Somehow, we managed to slip through the crowd unnoticed. Once we had successfully made our way around the corner and out of sight, we started running to the street, hailed the first taxi and managed to get out of there safely without incident. We didn't go back for three days. Even then, it was only to cancel the apartment contract. We didn't work that area much more. Later when I asked Igor about what he would have done if we had been caught in the middle of the crowd, I'd have helped them of course, he joked.