Something I didn't realise before my mission was how central the apartment is to the missionary experience. Missionaries spend a surprisingly large amount of time in the apartment, studying, planning, eating, preparing, and generally living in there.
So every area that has missionaries, has a missionary apartment. It's rented and taken care of by the church (via the mission office). The missionaries in the area change but the apartment stays in place. Even if both the missionaries move out, the apartment stays, keys change hands at the Ring and the two new people simply move in. The apartment is equipped with the basics: two beds, a desk or two, other furniture if there's space (I was never in an apartment big enough to have a sofa, but some apartments do have), kitchen stuff for four, basically. Usually there's also lots of extra bedding-stuff and towels.
You identify a missionary apartment by the amount of proselyting materials in there. We all had some kind of a huge cupboard or bookshelf filled with copies of the Book of Mormon in all sorts of languages. There's also brochures, passalong cards, videos and DVDs, papers of all sorts... And then there is also all the
stuff that previous missionaries have left behind. Those were always the really exciting parts of life for me. Whenever I got transferred, I found a time or a way to go through all the stuff in the apartment and see what was there (and put to use or take with me stuff that I really liked).
The coolest stuff I found in the apartments included:
-a really powerful speaker for us to plug out CD player in.
-a fishing rod
-a proper glass pint (that I *word for steal here*d as my water container)
-a bucketful of plastic toy soldiers
The people responsible for the 'real world taking care of apartments' were the apartment couple. Married couples who are members of the Church can go on a mission together when they are retired. They serve in so many different kinds of ways (while the young ones only do the whole talking to people, teaching the gospel thing). And one such way for a senior couple to serve is to be in charge of all the apartments in the mission. So they pay the bills and do all such stuff in the office, they send tips and materials to the missionaries to help them keep the apartments in shape, they come over to inspect the apartments at times, they help fix anything or buy new stuff if it's needed etc... And because they are missionaries (have badges and everything), they are really
cool. :)
The missionaries themselves take care of the everyday aspects of their apartments. Preparation Day (P-Day) on Mondays is meant for that kind of stuff: cleaning the apartment, doing the laundry etc... We had a list of what all needs to be done in the apartment, stuff for every day, stuff for every week, and stuff for once a transfer (like washing windows or cleaning the oven). I felt really accomplished in Norrköping in particular when we cleaned the windows and the blinds inside the windows. Cleaning blinds is such a hassle, but those blinds came clean, dang it! :D I was proud of that work.
I feel like I had a lot of apartment hassle during my time in Sweden. From my first area onward, it was always something. The first Sundsvall apartment was a tiny dingy little place with no major problems, just fifteen thousand little problems, and when I got there I was told we had bed bugs. Apparently this is not an uncommon problem anywhere in the world anymore. I had actually even listened to a
This American Life episode about it before my mission. These things just exist nowadays. Even in five star hotels. It's not a cleanliness problem. It's more of a... mobility problem. And missionaries move around a lot, so we can pick the eggs up from anywhere. One time we visited a student friend of ours and his wicker chair was crawling with bugs (he picked it up and threw it outside that instant). So understandably a number of missionary apartments have these bugs. They come out in the middle of the night and they suck your blood and lay eggs in your house. They can be killed with really hot or really cold, the room can be poisoned around the walls (the bugs actually hide inside the walls, so when they come out and step in the poison, they will then have time to go back inside the walls before the poison kills them, ideally) and changing sheets and vacuuming all the time helps curb the problem too by getting rid of eggs.
Eventually we moved to get away from the bugs (and did our darnest to not take the bugs with us to the new apartment). I have to admit here, I never experienced the bug problem. I may have been bitten once maybe, and even that was a tiny bite. But my companion was not so lucky, and her companion previous to me had it rough too. Maybe I'm just not tasty to bugs, who knows. I did see a bed bug one morning, and we caught it in a bag and kept it as proof/memento that there are real bugs. It was a tiny little one though.
The move wasn't just about bugs though. It was also about the giant black stain in the thick white carpet that had basically gone pretty nasty, and about the eternally broken light in the short corridor outside the bathroom (you couldn't see in the closets without the bathroom door being open), and the stinky shower drain, and the noisy neighbours, and the giant hill of death you had to hike up on your way back home, and the thousand other little things that made that apartment kinda low. But heck, I loved that little place. I lived there for six months, I started my mission there, it was
home. If I ever thought about going to live in Sundsvall, I'd check if that little apartment was available :3 (they started a giant overhaul of it when we left, so it'd be nicer by now). I have many fond memories of that place.
Not that the new apartment wasn't nice. It was. It's big, and spacious and light and just... beautiful. The move was tough and fun as moves are, there were all sorts of hassle with it of course, the toughest, I think, being that the people moving (us missionaries) didn't want to be spending time cleaning and packing and moving, we wanted to be out teaching people :P So we were doing it in drips and drops, here a little, there a little etc... I also remember that we were desperately out of boxes. We tried to get the zone to help us by giving us their order boxes after conference, but they sucked at that. So we ended up nicking boxes from outside a Chinese place :P (they leave the boxes out for people to take them).
Another major apartment overhaul thing that happened on my watch was the new wallpaper in Örebro. The problem with that was that it came as something of a surprise to us. We sort of knew what was going down, we went to pick the paper and all, but we didn't know exactly... So what happened is that early one morning the workers knock (while I'm in the shower - my companion was new in Sweden so her Swedish wasn't 100% fluent yet, and the Swedish worker men had less than that of English), so I rush out all dripping and attempting to be covered in a strange silky robe-thingie, to talk to these guys whose main point is "when can you be ready, all the stuff have to be in the middle of the room so we can work on the walls." So we pile all our furniture onto a big pile, and as we are about to leave (thinking "well, we can go to the chapel to do morning study maybe") and we say something about being back in the evening, the guy says incredulously "you're not going to sleep here tonight, are you?" and we said "...of course not... haha...ha..." and realised that we were screwed :P Luckily some members took us in for the couple of nights when our apartment was out of commission. But we hadn't realised we'd be roughing it, so neither of us had taken any extra clothes out or such (and pretty much all of the movables from the kitchen had been moved into the walk-in closet and blocked the opening of wardrobes and access to the chest of drawers). So it was a bit unpleasant. :P
The last major apartment thing I did was white washing when I left Gothenburg. White wash or shotgun is when both missionaries transfer out at the same time. If transfers suck, white washing sucks even more, whether you are on the leaving end or the coming in end. My companion was going home, and I got transferred to Örebro, so we had to prepare the apartment completely to be ready for two new sisters to come in (and we were told only a little later that it would actually be three sisters... oops!) So we cleaned and left food for them and tried to leave descriptions of how to get to places and descriptions of the important people they need to continue teaching etc... White washing really breaks the continuation of missionaries, so it's more troublesome than regular transfers to the people we teach.
But of course we couldn't let this amazing opportunity slip past without arranging for some surprises... :D So we didn't leave the incoming sisters any kind of instructions on how to get to the apartment. Instead we sent a friend of ours, an investigator from El Salvador to go meet them at the train station and guide them to the apartment :P And we also left something fun inside... Two fun things actually. First, we had found a bagful of plastic soldiers in the apartment, so I bluetacked them onto the wall in the shape of the word "Welcome" so that the greys and the greens were facing each other like about to shoot. And left a note saying it's a game, the side wins that has soldiers still sticking to the wall when the last one of the other colour falls.
The second surprise was more personal, aimed at sister G. We had both been companions with her, and sister J. (the one going home from Gothenburg) had even been sister G.'s trainer. And when sister G. had arrived in Sweden, sister J. had hidden pictures all over the apartment, that sister G. was supposed to hunt for and find. The pictures were little photo cutouts of another missionary, sister K. (they had done some photo printing but it had failed so they had ended up with a bunch of bad photos, so they cut out the good parts). Then I had been companions with sister G. and she had given me the photos of sister K. so that I would somehow use them to surprise sister J. but I hadn't (since I suck at this stuff). So when we found out sister G. was coming to Gothenburg after us, I pulled out the sister K. photos and sister J. hid them all over the apartment again, and we left a note saying "sister G., there are nine sister K.s. Happy hunting." :P
If this is not the first section you are reading, you must be waiting for the rules-bit :P And here it is: of course there are a lot of rules about the apartments. Apart from the "keep it clean" stuff, there is also "don't make your address publicly known", "sleep in the same room" and "don't let people in your apartment." Neither mormons nor non-mormons nor missionaries of the opposite sex are supposed to come in. Sometimes people we teach find it strange when they invite us over all the time but we never invite them to our place. It's simply because missionaries are not allowed to. On some strange occasions I was in a situation where members came to visit us. And there also was some downright rule-breaking when it came to that part about the elders.
I was side-stepping the "no opposite sex missionaries" -rule very slightly in many instances: we had breakfast at the elders' apartment (well, at the doorway, not really inside) before a long drive to a conference; the elders stopped at our apartment (again, at the doorway, not really inside) on their long drive to Stockholm - though one of them did need to use the bathroom (and then left the seat up! >:C ); the elders came to our apartment (inside) to pick up things we were going to carry to the woods for a bonfire activity; and the last one of all was the worst when we had lunch after District Meeting at their apartment. It was really rather pointless, like, there was no good reason to break the rules there (I'm pretty lenient when it comes to the "ox is in the mire, Bob" -rule-breaking
, when you do it out of necessity). They were going to shaft us with lunch, then said that we could come have lunch with them, and so we did. And we shouldn't have. When we got home we talked about it and both said "yeah, that was dumb." So it ended up being an obedience bonding thing. So something good came out of it I guess.
We did have non-rule breaking visits too, when other sisters came to the apartment. I was usually on the visitor side when staying over night in Stockholm before a conference, but a couple times we had other sisters coming to our apartment too, mostly the sisters from the south on their way to Stockholm for transfers. So there were tons and tons of sister missionaries and suitcases everywhere. It was pretty funny, it was my going home transfer, and we almost didn't find out that the other sisters were going to stay with us for a night, I noticed it by accident and had to call the sisters themselves to confirm: "are you going to come to Örebro tomorrow?" :P
Stumble!
