Unggoy!

Year: 1999
Place: Almeria, Biliran, Philippines
My age: 21

Alright, so I'm delving into missionary memories now.  Most of my mission was in 1999, so I deem that as perfectly acceptable.  I thought about making a blog of mission memories, but I have enough blogs already.

So, August of 1999 found me in my third area, which was Almeria on the small island province of Biliran.  It was one of, if not the most beautiful of the nine areas I served in, and my companion, Elder Christian Pfister, was one of my favourite companions (I had 16).  One of the reasons I loved this area was because it was a small, isolated, rugged town with some of the friendliest people I ever met.  One family that we were teaching lived in a small group of houses with the ocean to one side and rice fields to another.  To get to it, we had to hike along a beautiful black-sand beach, and then wade through a stream.  There was a house along the beach that we would pass whenever we headed out there that had a pet monkey on a leash out front.  It was a male monkey, so it hated us, but that didn't stop us from visiting it and feeding it snacks when we saw it.  On one particular day, we saw the teenage girl from the monkey family doing this:

She walked up to the shore and just chucked the monkey into the water.  It swam back to her, and she picked up and threw it again.  She did this maybe three or four times.  When we asked what she was doing, she told us that she was giving it a bath.  Finally, after the monkey swam back to her for the third or fourth time, she picked it up and wrapped it in a towel.  It looked like an adorable, furry baby.

The Amazing Exploding Closet

Year: 1998
Place: St. Albert
My age: 20

After returning to my family after graduating high school in Raymond, I was demoted from my room at the top of the house to the tiny room in the basement.  It wasn't so bad.  It had all the room that a young male adult needed.

For as long as my family had been living in our house in St. Albert, we had water issues.  Every  now and then, the basement would flood a little.  Don't ask me any of the details of the process that I'm going to talk about, because I have no idea how it's supposed to work.  One day, in an attempt to stop future floods, a contractor came out to flush something out.  There was a small open pipe on the roof, and apparently, you can spray water in it at high pressure, and it will flush some sort of system of pipes in the house, and somehow that fixes the flooding problem.  So the guy comes in the morning while I'm in my room getting ready to go to work.  The water he was spraying was really loud in my room.  I figured that the first bend in the pipe must have been right above my closet, so I didn't think too much of it at first.  After a minute, I decided that it was too loud, and I opened my closet to look in and see if there were any leaks.  It was just then, as I stuck my head in the closet, that the closet exploded in a generous shower of water and soaked drywall.

I ran upstairs covered in white globs yelling, "What the hell is going on?!"  My mother saw me, and I informed her that my closet had just exploded on me, and she went outside and told the guy to shut the water off.  After a quick inspection, it was discovered that this system of pipes that I am not knowledgeable enough to describe further didn't exist save for the one long, open pipe leading from the roof of the house straight down to the roof of my unfortunate closet.  A cap was installed on the pipe to prevent any future watery explosions.