Now a few words about the special species of creature called sister missionaries. And I can say this stuff because I was a sister missionary :P
So the mormon culture background you need to know here is that boys generally go on missions at the age of 18, and come back as men at 21. Girls have to wait til 21 to go on missions - if they want to go. Not everyone does, and no one has to. So what happens is that you grow up with your brother's friends and do the whole silly boy-girl thing when you're kids, then all of a sudden they all disappear on their missions when you all hit 18. And the only people around are the people who are younger, and the people who are older and returned missionaries. In the age-group 18-30 (YSA=Young Single Adults) the biggest buzzword is marriage. Everyone wants to get married, because that's what we believe in, eternal families. So it can be a cause of stress. So to many girls the choice when they get around 21 becomes "mission or marriage?" Many girls know from really early on that they really want to go on a mission. To some it's really obvious that they really really don't want to go. But then there are some undecided ones that need to decide. Sometimes things happen (a relationship ends, life doesn't start formulating in any clear direction, a lightning bolt from God hits you in the head and tells you to go on a mission) that makes a sister go on a mission. So the reasons they are out are many and varied. (I'm in a slightly different deal being a convert.)
There aren't a whole ton of sister missionaries out there - Sweden has around 12-16 (compared to about 90 elders). A mission is considered a priesthood duty and as such sisters aren't under such duty, but they still make a valuable contribution to the work, and they also grow (become men?) during their missions. So I wish a lot more girls would go on missions :)
There is this mission culture thing/myth about there being these... characters. Supposedly there is the Cool Sister and the Baking Sister and the Strict Sister etc... you get the point. The one that gets mentioned most is the Baking Sister, because it's funny (though you don't really want to be that... The baking sister bakes a lot, and it's derided quite a bit). I think I may have been the Cool Sister. I don't know. Most times these things don't work. Albeit with one companion we did assign all the sisters in the mission a Disney princess. This was suprisingly hard. I was Tinker Bell :3
There weren't many special sister things going on in Sweden because we are so scarce. Every zone I was in bar the last one had only one companionship of sisters. So we hardly ever get to go on splits, or have any specific sister things. They tried a little of the sort (a weekly text message shary thing), but I'm not that into all the girl stuff anyway, so... <_< We did have one sisters' conference (except that the mission was told it's not allowed to have a sisters' conference, so we called it "sisters' training meeting") where all the sisters in the mission got together in the mission home and we had training and a testimony meeting and all this. It was actually quite good. Albeit, when my District Leader asked me later "how was it" I described it la: "it was cool, it was an MTC reunion for everybody..." "except you," he finished the sentence, and I had to agree, except me, since I went to the MTC in England, not Provo, and therefore came to Sweden alone. In there we also did a clothes swap.
See, missionaries leave a lot of things behind in their apartments when they die (=go home). Because you can't put everything in your suitcase, and honestly you don't even want all of your clothes, you've been wearing them for 18 months solid :P And it's not that easy to find clothes that fit the sister missionary description, so it's pretty nice actually to leave things behind for living sisters to use. But it does take up space in the apartments, and technically you're not supposed to do that, you should give them to recycling or throw them away. But we don't. So we all brought the clothes from our apartments to the conference and swapped. And all that was left over sister Anderson took care of. :)
Y'see, the sister missionary dress code is professional, modest and conservative: skirts or dresses (must cover knees), blouses and the like (must cover shoulders and everything down from there), shoes with low heel or no heel, plain colour tights (though they are not mandatory from April to October). This is the working attire, unless taking part in an activity (like gardening?) where you have to wear scruffs (what people would call P-Day clothes). So sometimes, depending on the fashion, sister missionary style -clothes are hard to come by in shops. Here I must admit: I still dress a bit like this >_> I just got so used to skirts being the working attire, and it's just
comfortable now that after trying to wear trousers and thinking "hmm, why?" I decided there was nothing wrong with skirts forever :P And I really like the look. :) To quote an Oscar Wilde character: "I may be at times a little over-dressed, but I make up for it by being always over-educated.
"
But. To my point. There is something funny about sister missionaries.
So the cliche stereotype is this stupid sister missionary who has no common sense. For example, a story, not from my mission but from the Minnesota mission: (This is a mormon-myth that turned out to be true! I met a guy who was in the mission and had to deal with the damage.) Anyway, story goes that it is Sunday evening, and the two sisters are driving, and they are running low on petrol. Because it's Sunday, the Sabbath day, you shouldn't go shopping, you should prepare on Saturday for anything you might need on a Sunday (unless the ox is in the mire, is how I see it anyway). So they run out of petrol but they don't want to break the Sabbath day by buying petrol. They have some bottled water. So they kneel and pray outside the car, and pray that God would turn the water into petrol. They pour the contents of the bottle into the tank, and start the engine. Which of course breaks the entire car.
The question "how the heck could you do that?!" comes to mind when hearing the story. It's an infamous example, and I found it easy to judge - until I became a sister missionary. Because after a while... I noticed a change. A change in my IQ and in my common sense. I talked about this with some of my companions, and some of them had also observed this change. You get dumber when you wear a badge that says "sister". O_o After talking about it with some elders too (who said the same thing happens to them), I conclude that there is something about the missionary badge that does something to your head. Well okay, it's not the badge itself, it's the calling, the job that we do. You go from being a care-free young person with no worse concerns than exams and videogames, to a missionary - a missionary who represents the Lord in a large place with a ton of other people's happiness and schedule and spiritual concerns taking precedence, having to keep tabs on your own and your colleagues well-being and organisation, while also not forgetting the members or the other people in the mission organisation. It's a big change in terms of things to worry about. It's a hard transition.
So no wonder things, which aren't directly related to the mission, start to fall out of your head. I noticed that aside my IQ dropping, I also started to forget all the cool things I used to be able to talk about: art, copyright, internet memes, books and movies... All was being placed in temporary storage out of the way to make space for the things of the now, the missionary things. And I guess that's the right way to do it. So now I'm unpacking all my cool things and slowly putting away the missionary things from my head (addresses of people we teach, how many siblings my companion has, the schedule), and as I do so I see what kind of things I acquired in my head that have application beyond the mission. Same way as there are things I learnt in school and university and at work and in kiddie-league that are for life, there are things like that, life lessons, I gained from my mission.
And in the future, I will be merciful to the missionaries who are serving where I live. I'll understand "their heads are full of other things, so they can't remember to be smart about things" and I'll be able to help them - when the opportunity arises - instead of judging them.
Although I will poke fun :)
I feel like in many aspects I was not a typical sister missionary (and I'm sure all the sisters in the world feel like that), but one thing in particular that I feel I was different is in my approach to the elders, the mister missionaries. The mormon culture stereotype/expectation that I've been picking up (with my radar that detects mormon culture nuances) from comments and side remarks and the like, is that sisters find elders annoying and immature, and that there is some kind of competition constantly on between them. And I didn't do this. First, I'm all about sharing and collaborating, and find most games and competitions a lesser form of passing the time than, say, collaborative efforts and projects. Secondly, the elders are the most mature and fun 19-early-20s aged men that I know of.
But I may have the convert-bias at play here. I did not grow up with these boys or boys like these) through Young Mens and Young Womens, they are not like my brother. And it's guys like these that are the reason I joined the church. I probably didn't realise the importance of what they were doing at the time, but in hindsight of a few years of blessings from my membership in the Church, I see them in a very different light now. I revere the calling they held and respect and love them for the work they did. So it's not difficult to extend those feelings to the other missionaries who served around me, before after and during my mission.
Lastly, I have observed another strange sister thing (and this actually applies across the church) is guilt. How ever well a mormon woman does something, she doesn't give herself credit for it. She can juggle fifteen thousand things, save the world while taking care of her home and having a successful career and leet quilting skillz - and still put herself down over something. It seems that in our quest for perfection, we forget to appreciate the steps taken in the right direction because of the longness of the road ahead. You can often catch sister missionaries feeling rotten or guilty over something they did (or more often didn't do), even though everything around witnesses that they are doing a good job, magnifying their calling, doing their best. Which is all that is asked of them. But somehow that divine nature inside of people, that tells us in happy positive chirps "you can do better, you are a shiny star, and you just keep working and keep going forward and you'll be even shinier" gets these girls stressed and thinking that it's not good enough.
There is a painting by James Christensen, called The Responsible Woman that expresses this well. It is sort of an ode to all these women who are doing it all and managing their lives and times, being an example and a leader.
http://www.christcenteredmall.com/stores/art/christensen/the_responsible_woman.htm
As an awkward end to this part that I don't know how to end, a thing I found in one of the apartments (and kept): a pillowcase that gives advice to sister missionaries. SisterMissionary Pillowcase
Stumble!