In or around Octo­ber 1993 I arrived in Chile to begin my mis­sion­ary expe­ri­ence. Arriv­ing in a South Amer­i­can, for­eign coun­try for me was a wide awak­en­ing. The San­ti­ago Chile air­port was old and run-down (they later rebuilt it and when I left Chile 2 years later it was a beau­ti­ful, new build­ing). Things were instantly dif­fer­ent there as well. For exam­ple, I recall going to the bath­room and find­ing a man out­side the bath­room door sell­ing toi­let paper. He was tear­ing 2-ply toi­let paper apart and mak­ing 1-ply and then sell­ing sheets of it. I learned then that Chilean pub­lic bath­rooms don’t come with toi­let paper. You are expected to bring your own. Mov­ing on…

The trip was very long. We had flown from Salt Lake City, to Orlando. Then, after a 2 hour lay­over, we flew to Miami where we had a 5 or 6 hour lay­over. We then flew the red eye for 8 hours to Chile and arrived in the morn­ing. I think we may have stopped for a short-while in another coun­try as well, but we didn’t get off the air­plane. After a 9 hour lay­over in the San­ti­ago air­port, we flew to the south­ern Chilean city of Osorno and from there pro­ceeded to drive in a mis­sion van to the home of our mis­sion pres­i­dent, El Pres­i­dente Hugo Arostegui. After meet­ing our mis­sion pres­i­dent and his fam­ily, we show­ered and sat down to rest for a cou­ple of hours from our long 2-day jour­ney. At long-last, very hun­gry, we sat down for a spe­cial din­ner with our President’s fam­ily and his two assistants.

Not sure what to expect, we politely sat down and waited to be served. To our cha­grin, each of us received a sea-urchin, with a hole in the top, cov­ered with some light tossed salad and grated cheese. The smell was awful, but not want­ing to offend any­one on our first day in town, we each dug into the meat of the urchin. The taste was awful as well — some­where between raw, slimy sea­weed and rot­ting fish as I recall. After a few large bites the mis­sion pres­i­dent and his wife began to laugh and laugh. It was at that point that we real­ized they had only been eat­ing the salad on top of the urchins. The whole thing was a joke and we had clearly been had. Very relieved and with smiles on our faces, we waited for the urchins to be removed and the real food to arrive. After the joke din­ner con­sisted of an amaz­ing meal with bar­be­cued ribs, corn on the cob and other deli­cious eats.