Interesting facts that didn't make it into my journal
After about a year, I stopped buying shaving cream. I'd shave using soap and water.
In Region VIII, fully flushing toilets are rare. The most common toilet is just a bowl with no tank or seat. When you're done your business, you dump a bucket of water in the bowl, and it washes everything down.
In Almeria, there was a kitten that would hang around our house and beg for food. We named it after a piece of modern art I drew on our chalkboard: Thwartations.
Shortly after being transferred to Dulag, I stopped wearing my glasses. It was the rainy season, and my glasses were constantly wet, either from rain or sweat. I could actually see better without my glasses. For the remainder of my mission, I only ever wore them to zone conferences and for the flights home.
Several years after my mission (2004 or 2005), I was standing in line behind a young couple in Safeway. The husband, who was obviously American by his accent, was talking to the cashier about what Safeway was like in the States. He seemed very familiar to me, but I couldn't figure out where I would have known this tall, red-headed American from. It wasn't until he had already left the store that I realized it was Elder Hughes, one of my companions in Isabel.
When I was in the MTC, a nice Parker pen showed up in our district's mail box with a piece of paper taped to it with my name on it. We had no idea who gave it to me, and I had never seen the pen before. I used the pen for my entire mission (you could buy refills for the ink). In Isabel, I was telling the story of the pen mysteriously being delivered to me in the MTC to Elder Hughes, and when I was done, he said, "That was me." He and I never met each other in the MTC. He had borrowed someone's pen for a moment, and when he was done with it, the owner of the pen was gone. He thought that the elder's name had been MacKenzie, so he looked at the list of missionaries at the post office and saw Elder MacKenzie, so he taped a note to the pen (it was nice, so he wanted to return it to it's rightful owner) and mailed it to me.
I was eaten alive by mosquitoes in the first couple of weeks of my mission. They weren't so bad for the remainder of my mission. Ever since I've been back in Canada, I'm immune to mosquito bites. I can stand in a cloud of mosquitoes and come away with no itching or irritation. They do bite me; I've watched them do it. But the bites don't itch.
Out of the nine places I lived in, only three had actual showers rather than just a bucket of water that you dipped water out of. Neither of these showers had hot water. They were in Isabel, Almeria, and Calbayog.
I once had so much Pintora Bubble Gum (gum that dyes the inside of your mouth) that I had blue poop the next day.
To this day, my mutilated big toe frightens small children.
One night in Albuera, Elder Roberts and I were walking home. It was a dark, rainy night. As we were getting close to our house, the only light was an outdoor fluorescent light a couple of blocks away. A combination of the dark, the rain on my glasses, and the light in the distance blinding me to anything close up resulted in me walking face-first into a gate.
On the way home, I flew from Hong Kong to San Francisco. The plane left Hong Kong at 11:30 in the morning. It arrived at San Francisco at 8:30 that same morning. Flying across the International Date Line is weird.
Somehow, this story didn't make it into my journal.
In my first area, the women who ran the store close to our house called me Elder Cheeks-So-Rosy because I have such a red complexion, especially in extreme heat. Another common name was Elder Ma15. Filipinos have a hard time pronouncing MacKenzie properly (they don't have the letter Z in their alphabet, and they never pronounce the letter E the way it's pronounced in my name), so they would say the Makinse, which means "will turn 15." They would usually follow this up with "diri pa makatorse", which means "not yet 14." In Borongan, we made ourselves zone T-shirts, each of which had our last name and a number on the back. I had them just put "Mac" as my name, and then I chose the number 15.
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