Finding Courage
When I met Sister Rorden I felt dwarfed by her height, but I saw kindness in her toothy smirk. She seemed patient enough with me when I snapped a picture of her sleeping on the night train, so I felt sure we would get along just fine.
When we arrived in Odessa, Ukraine, I couldn’t help but think that it looked like a dismal land of Oz. The warm, putrid summer air felt too thick to breathe. Window frames painted in bright greens, blues, and reds seemed garish against gray concrete walls. Dingy white dogs ran around on three legs and lounged in the doorways when it got too hot to move. The cobblestone streets were crumbling, halfcovered with asphalt and dotted with old women gathered on the corners selling fresh homemade rolls, black in the center with sweetened poppy seeds.
We took a breakneck taxi ride along the narrow streets, arrived at our apartment building, and began the hike to the fourth floor. Of course there was no elevator. My companion paused on the third floor to point out the broken window and the faded, brown stain on the floor. Pointing to it, she said, “Two weeks ago there was a huge puddle of blood there. I couldn’t walk around it. I got blood on my shoes.”
I looked at her, speechless. She explained that a drunken man had fallen into the window. I was relieved that no one had been shot. I gingerly walked around the stain and ran up the last flight of stairs to our door. I reached out and tested the doorbell. It made a sound like an angry bird.
“Home sweet home,” my companion said flatly. I surveyed the entrance, taking in the faded pattern of the wallpaper, the shabby rug, and the dust that covered everything. I walked into the bedroom and pulled apart the yellowed lace curtains. The view reminded me of some pitiable tropical place with multi-colored, rotting plaster buildings capped with rusted tin roofs and crawling with deep green foliage, nothing like the barren Siberian wilderness I’d pictured.
“This looks like Jamaica or something,” I thought out loud.
“Yeah, just like Jamaica. It even has cockroaches,” my companion interjected from the living room.
“Cockroaches?” I shuddered, searching the corners of the room and imagining that I could see them skittering along the baseboards.
A brand new missionary with too much fire and too little ability, I wanted to get right to work, but I was still unsure of how to go about it. I went to the living room to pester my companion about leaving the apartment already, but she lay face down on the couch looking utterly spent, her fragile shoulders moving up and down with every breath. I couldn’t wake her. I decided to focus my brimming energy on the grime that coated our apartment.
Every empty space was filled with the ghosts of missionaries past: duct-taped discussion booklets, stacks of plastic cup models, bags of worn out nylons—an assortment of missionary cast-offs that multiplied with each transfer. Surveying the piles of junk, I frowned, wishing I were on the street boldly proclaiming the gospel instead of being stuck inside sorting through trash.
Soon I found out that my first day wasn’t unusual. I flashed back to my life before the mission when I’d imagined myself endlessly knocking on doors and teaching lessons with my companion, nodding our heads in unison with pictures of happy families perched on our laps. Reality was much less enchanting. When would the real work begin?
One day in particular, we stayed home for the specific purpose of “perfecting” our first lesson. All day. I stared off at the balcony from my seat on the couch to avoid the gaze of a floppy-eared, stuffed dog whose felt tongue stuck out at me derisively. “I can’t take much more of this,” I muttered to my companion in desperation.
“Sister, we’re not leaving this apartment until this lesson is perfect.”
We had gathered up all the old stuffed animals left by our landlady and placed them on the couch as an audience to teach. I tried to make myself do it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t teach in the right way or speak Russian. Not to a motley pack of dolls, anyway. I didn’t find any motivation in their unblinking plastic eyes. I slumped down in my chair with my elbows on my knees until that started hurting. Then I lay back and perked my ears toward the noise that came from the street below. I wanted to be out there with my Book of Mormon in hand.
“We haven’t even been out of the house today,” I whined, covering my face with my hands.
“Do you even want to do this?” she shot back.
I shut my mouth reluctantly and leaned back to stare at the water stains on the ceiling with tears in my eyes. Truthfully, I didn’t, but I kept listening, becoming angrier and angrier. Finally I sat up, pointed at her, and said, “You’re just scared of teaching!” and quickly glanced away, wincing.
“How would you like to be me? I have a new companion who doesn’t know anything, and I’ve only been out for five months! What was President thinking?!”
“Well, you could at least try!” I became bolder in my anger. “You can’t learn how to teach a lesson by teaching freaking stuffed animals!” I threw the dog across the room to prove my point. I was freely crying now and my breath was short. “Why can’t we do what real missionaries do?!”
My companion then blurted out in defense, “Are you saying I’m not a real missionary? You think I’m a bad companion. Well, I am a bad missionary. I obviously can’t do anything right.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t agree, but I couldn’t make her understand my point of view either. At that moment I finally accepted that I was also afraid. I was afraid of missing out, of never doing the work I came to do. It was obvious to me that she was afraid of failing too.
“So what do we do?” I finally softened my approach and looked at her directly with my puffy eyes.
She sat down next to me, exhausted, and started to cry. “I don’t know!” she said shakily.
I inched toward her, unsure if she would mind my touching her, and finally put my hand on her back, noticing her ribs poking through the thin fabric. “I think we just need to go out.” Her shoulders tensed up immediately.
“We’re not ready. Don’t you understand?!” She let her face fall into her hands again, exasperated.
“Yes we are.” I stared at her, trying to wear her down.
“NO! If we go out now and teach, we’ll just mess someone’s life up.” She shrugged my hand off her shoulder, stood up, and started tidying the living room, picking up stuffed animals as delicately as if they were truly alive.
“Let it go,” I said firmly. “We’re doing the best we can. I think it’s better if we’re on the street than in here.”
“But what if we make a huge mistake? These are people’s lives!”
“Of course we’ll make mistakes. But the point is we won’t ever be perfect at this. Ever.”
She let the animals drop out of her arms and sat down on the pea-green armchair next to the couch, curled up into a ball. I went into my room and lay on my bed. There seemed to be no solution. I prayed and prayed until I fell asleep on my knees. When I woke up, it was past lunchtime. I felt horrible. I went into our tiny, cockroach-infested kitchen and made us spaghetti—well, the closest thing to spaghetti in Ukraine. The sauce was too sweet and the noodles always seemed a little slimy. When I brought it out to her, she seemed calmer. The redness around her eyes had faded. Her hair was up in a loose knot on her head and she was scouring the area map.
“What are you looking for?” I asked cautiously.
“The addresses of some members who haven’t been to church in a while.” She didn’t look up, but highlighted some number on a grid that I didn’t understand.
“Are you hungry?” I put the bowl down on the table.
“Sure, thanks.” She seemed a little too nonchalant.
I sat quietly and ate my spaghetti while she scribbled on the map, cut it along the confines of our area, and encased it in clear packaging tape. The whole process took about half an hour. The whole time I wracked my brain about how to ask her if we could go out again. I kept up a steady stream of prayer in my mind. When she seemed satisfied with the map and started on her now-cold spaghetti, I looked over at her and said, “I’m sorry.” It was all I could muster.
“What are you sorry for?” she said in between chews.
“I don’t think you’re a bad missionary. I’m sorry for questioning you earlier today.”
She looked back down at her bowl and wrinkled her forehead, trying to find the words she needed to say. “I’m sorry, too. I know we need to teach. I just get so scared. I don’t feel ready for it.”
“I don’t either,” I laughed softly. “I’ve only been out for a week. But we need to do it, right?”
“Yeah, we do.”
At that moment, the wall between us collapsed. We confessed some of our weaknesses and our fears. We realized that we had more in common than we thought. Underneath all our anxieties, we had the same goal—to share our feelings about the gospel with the people in Ukraine. Thankfully, we never taught stuffed animals again and, soon enough, we were standing on a busy street corner.
In my best broken Russian I enthusiastically greeted bewildered locals at the top of my lungs as rumbling trucks and hissing busses drove by. Grinning widely, I held my Book of Mormon close to my chest as I called out one of the few phrases I knew by heart, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” My companion looked over at me proudly and smiled. One woman answered and I panicked. “Sister!” I called her over, waving my arms frantically.
“Need some help?” She glanced quickly over at the woman who was thoroughly uncomfortable now.
I nodded and stepped to the side. “Thanks.” I turned my attention back to the streaming mass of people passing by the park and from the corner of my eye saw Sister Rorden leafing through the pictures in the front of the book, explaining each one in detail to the woman I’d just talked to. She looked confident and the woman understood. When she was finished, she wrote the woman’s phone number in a notebook and handed her an invitation to church. It looked so easy, and I ached to be able to do the same.
On the walk back to the apartment, when dusk settled in and the streets were nearly deserted, I told my companion how I’d felt about contacting with her. “You seem to talk to people so effortlessly. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be like you.”
She seemed surprised by my compliment and shuffled along in the silence for a while longer before answering. “You did a good job too. You are very brave. I think you scared that lady when you jumped out in front of her, though.” Her laugh broke through the night’s stillness.
“I did not!” I defended myself half-heartedly.
“I’ll name it after you—the Trone Contact. It’s very effective if you want people to stop.” She continued goading me with her wry sense of humor until we got home.
I tripped up the endless stairs, light as a feather, and reached the door first. “I win!” I shouted in my usual enthusiastic way and quickly opened the door. Then I heard something I was not used to hearing in our hallway. Running water. “Oh no!” I looked at Sister Rorden and her jaw dropped.
“Sister! What happened?” She waded into the apartment, water lapping at her feet.
“I did the dishes?” I said quizzically.
“Yeah, you sure did.” She laughed so loudly that the entire room echoed, and I joined in too.
Nichole Trone is a native Oregonian who grew up in the suburbs of Portland. She has traveled from St. Petersburg to Paris, but she always loves coming home. A recent graduate from Brigham Young University, she received her bachelor’s degree in Russian with a minor in editing. Nichole’s interests include cooking, reading, writing, hiking, quilting, gardening, and playing with her dog, Mollie. Someday she would like to renovate a farmhouse and have a large family, but for now she is content to blog about it.
