What Not to Do

I've learned a lot of things in my time living in Queretaro, and in my cross-cultural experiences prior to that. I was thinking the other day about some of the funny things that I've done, trying to be creative or have fun, that just didn't turn out right!

Creativity is a valuable commodity as a missionary. Unfortunatly, I don't excel in that, although when someone has a creative idea I'm able to help carry it out efficiently. So I guess that's my gift instead of coming up with the creative ideas. I just want to share with you some of the things I've learned NOT to do over the past few years!

When being a guest teacher in a 3rd and 4th grade sunday school class in the US, it's a good idea to refrain from bringing your spanish-english Bible to teach out of. Why? Well, on the front of the Bible it says, "Holy Bible - Santa Biblia." To me this is completely normal. However, to english-speaking children, "Santa" only has one meaning... and it's not "holy." I was horrified to hear "Our teacher has santa on her Bible," coming from the students after class, especially since I know that most or all of the childrens' families don't do santa clause for Christmas, and definitely don't want their kids learning about santa in sunday school! Oops!

Be careful about the seemigly harmless materials you use while doing games for college students. I was in charge of games for one of our college group meetings one night, and I had been thinking about a game where there are two teams each lined up and each team has an object such as a water baloon or a wet sponge and must pass the object down the line of the rest of the team members using only their knees. (The object get placed between the knees of the first person, standing upd, who then passes it to the next persons' knees, etc.) Well, since it was November and cold out, and we'd be indoors, I wanted to choose a not-wet object to play this game, but something in a shape that would be hard to pass from knees to knees. I chose a banana. Never, under any circumstances, take a group of college students and tell them to put bananas between their legs. I was horrified once I saw the first people place the bananas and everyone started laughing... My bad...

When doing games for groups of adults, pretend you're doing games for Junior Highers. I've had two bad experiences with adults and games...
The first was in Honduras, a group of young adults went to check out a campground for a youth camp, and afterwards we all decided to have a nice friendly game of frisbee football. The score was somewhere around a lot to zero, and it was getting late, so Michelle - who was the person in charge of the whole camp thing - wanted to end the game and said that the next team to score a goal would win. It ended up that the team I was on (score of zero) actually scored a goal, therefore "winning" after Michelle's new rule to end the game. On the opposite team were several guys between the ages of 24 and 26. They absolutely threw a fit! They were so adamit about needing to win (and they HAD scored like 10 goals, WAY more than my team!) and were so outraged that Michelle had made that new rule and the lousy team won... I had NEVER seen young men act like such little kids in my entire life!! It set a bad tone to the drive home too, just because they HAD to win, and even when we said that they actually won because they'd scored so many more goals that us, they STILL wouldn't let it rest!!

The second incident with adults and games happened about 6 weeks ago at Horizonte. Phil and I were leading games for a group of about 60 adults. I made a "bingo" game where everyone has a sheet with 16 boxes on it, and each box has a characteristic (like "someone who has been to South America," or "someone who was born in the same month as you.") You must find a person with that characteristic and have them sign that box for you. The first person to have all the boxes filled and come to the stage wins. Sounds harmless enough. I purposely picked things that I was 100% sure would be present at the event. I got "someone born in Veracruz" (I know at least 4 people born there, that were at the event), "someone with a drivers' license from a state other that Queretaro" (if no one else, mine's from Oregon...), and so on. However, I made a little mistake. I put "some who uses contact lenses." Those are moderately common here, and I know several people who use them... but none of them came to the event. Soon, most people had all the boxes filled except the contact lens one, and everyone got upset because there was no on who had them. I said no one wins then, the game's over. That caused an uproar "We just did ALL THIS for NOTHING?!?!?!" The purpose of the game was actually to meet people you didn't know before, but whatever... I yelled, "Ok, the next person to bring a black watch to the stage wins!" Someone right below the stage pulled off a black watch, tossed it to me, and I pronounced her the winner. There were about 10 people who got rather angry and came to talk to me about how I was rediculously unfair and how they were really the rightful winner. Phil and I were absolutley agahst at the reaction to a simple little game!!

This is getting long, so I'll stop for now. I hope you enjoyed a few stories about attempts at good going wrong! :)