Runtu wrote:
It's certainly different from my mission. We had at the peak around 270 missionaries in our mission. I can remember 2 missionaries having mental/psychological issues, and one of them was not allowed to leave and was pressured to stay. The other was suicidal and was sent home. I would guess around a dozen missionaries went home for health-related issues, which shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the living conditions in Bolivia. 4 were sent home for sexual behavior.
So, yes, what she's describing is a much higher incidence of such issues than we saw in Bolivia.
café crema wrote:It seems so odd, what you and your fellow missionaries faced in Bolivia was so much more traumatic, she's writing from Colorado, how awful can it be, yet the depression numbers for you were so much lower. Why the difference?
I won't speak for Runtu here, but I'll throw in my 2 cents. For one thing a foreign mission is a whole different story than a stateside mission. Passports are kept by the MP, you are in a country you are not familiar with, language and culture barriers make it much more difficult to simply get by without having to keep busy to either learn the language, customs or area. Top it off with a country that is poor especially in an area you are at and your problems quickly become more immediate, material and you have much less time for self introspection and are more concerned with the immediate state of being and just getting by followed by the preaching of the gospel.
Having served a stateside mission I can't emphasize enough how easy it is to find time for yourself, to just get into states of mind where you are going over things in your head and afforded the luxury of not having to really worry about things except for missionary work. It's a double edged sword when you don't need to worry about life circumstances, you are living fairly comfortably, and really the only pressing concern is missionary work. Suddenly your failure as a missionary and the missionary forced lifestyle are something that are constantly being reflected on. The problem is compounded when it's much harder to teach and or baptize people because no one wants to listen. Having served spanish stateside and doing about half my mission in english only wards/areas there is a big difference in the amount of people that will even want to talk about Mormonism.
I'm not saying stateside or foreign are harder than the other, simply stated, there are problems that each type of mission face and in my opinion stateside missions tend to allow the missionary the luxury of self introspection, self pity, etc in a far greater way than you would encounter in many poorer foreign missions. Add to that the ease of looking information about the church and problems by going to some public library and using their computers or simply buying your own stuff. Information is far easier to access stateside than foreign. I read nearly all the farms crap while I was on my mission and I wasn't, by any standard, a lazy missionary that was slacking off. It was just really easy to get and I had far different challenges serving stateside that afforded me the comfort of reading that stuff while eating lunch, before bed, during study, etc. When I was done with that I read the actual sources and pretty much lost belief towards the end of my mission.
