David Evans Following the Mormon custom, Spanish instructor David Evans traveled across Chile during his missionary trip over 20 years ago. Although there were challenges along the way, Evans connected with his faith and mastered the language he now teaches without any prior instruction.
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is hands are shaking as he opens the envelope. He’s nervous but excited. Ever since he sent in his missionary papers a few weeks ago, he has waited to see where the next step of his life will take place. Today is the day he finds out where his mission is. Today is the day that determines where he spends the next two years fulfilling his role as a Mormon missionary. As his hands are shaking, 19-year-old David Evans unfolds the paper. He opens his eyes, takes a deep breath and reads… OSORNO, CHILE. –––– • Growing up, the tradition is for young men to go on a mission. It used to be from the age of 19 to 21. That has changed now to start at 18, but I went when I was 19. • You fill out your missionary papers, and you wait for your call in the mail and open up the envelope. You find out at that moment where you’re going. I remember opening up the envelope and seeing ‘Osorno, Chile.’ • The Osorno, Chile, mission within the church spans the entire southern half of Chile starting directly south of Concepción to the tip of South America. It goes to Punta Arenas, which is the furthest south you can get until Antarctica. • You’re sent to the missionary training center in Provo, Utah, for a couple of months after you get your call. You have to live in the training center where you learn how you’re going to share your message and also have a crash course in the language. I hadn’t learned any Spanish before I went, so it was very difficult. • It was daunting on the airplane. You see the Andes Mountains rising in the background through the airplane windows. You hear the people speaking very quickly in a unique accent, and you don’t understand it. It was a feeling of both exhilaration and challenge with a little bit of doubt, but you know that so many people have done it in the past, so you can do it too. • When I got to Santiago and stepped off that airplane, I couldn’t understand a single thing anyone was saying. It took me months to really communicate, listen and understand. It took me a few more months to actually converse and be comfortable. • Once you get there, you go to the mission home, which is in a really nice neighborhood in Osorno, and meet the mission president. • The first night I went out with other missionaries, we walked to this house and
shared our message. It was amazing. The family was so receptive and wanted to hear the message. The other missionaries were so good at what they did. It was exhilarating to see what they did and know that someday I would be doing it, too. • You get paired up with a companion. A companion is another missionary. Usually there’s a junior companion and a senior companion, so they pair up people who don’t know what they’re doing with someone else who does. You’re together for protection, so if anything were to happen, you’re with someone else. It’s like a buddy system. • We lived in what’s called pensiones. Those were either houses of members of the church down there or someone who we rented the house from. We’d live in the pensión with a companion. We’d do all of our missionary work, service, preaching, baptizing –– all of the stuff we do as missionaries –– together. • You go through many companions throughout the mission because we go through many different places. You spend maybe a month or two in one place, and you’re off to another place and you spend a month or two there. Maybe three or four months in some spots. Sometimes it’s fast. Sometimes it’s not. You never know. They keep you on your toes. You’re always going to different places and are paired with different people. • I started out in a small town called Loncoche with an American companion. He trained me how to do what they do down there as a missionary. He was wonderful. He helped me out a ton. • After that, I got a native speaker as a companion, and he was great too. We didn’t get along too well all the time, but he taught me a lot. He kind of laughed at my Spanish, which I didn’t like because I wasn’t very good at it yet, but he wasn’t trying to hurt my feelings. • In these rural parts of Chile, they burn
