Kissing the Feet of Judas

Before fixing problems it is important to accept that there is a problem. For this reason, I have written about my experience as a missionary with a mission president who the FBI found in an investigation could have been tried for attempted murder for how he treated the female missionaries. * * * * “I’m going to marry Lily,” said one of two male Resident Hall Assistants in the congregation I attended my first year at Brigham Young University. Through her laughs my Resident Hall Assistant replied, “You’ve really got something coming if you think Lily’s going to marry you.” “What do you mean?” he responded. “Haven’t you heard her announcing the months till she’s old enough to go on a mission? She started at 36 months to go! Do you really expect to wait about 5 years to marry her?” she said. *** When I finished counting the months ‘till my waiting was done, I met the man I would call Presidente (Pdte) Dagger. I felt his firm handshake and I noticed him squint his beady eyes in the hot desert sun. Nothing else about that first meeting really stood out to me, except he told us that one of the first rules of the mission was that we were not under any circumstances to tell our parents about our health. On the bus, I was looking through my Spanish Hymn Book and the title “Sanctuary of Liberty” stood out to me. I was so excited to be a messenger of peace to a country who had experienced the indescribable feelings associated with their leader’s dictatorship for so long. As we bounced along on the bus my trainer showed me pictures to pass the time. When she came to a certain picture of a pair of female missionaries she paused and said in a hushed voice, “This was taken during the period of darkness in the mission, when there were no female missionaries sent to the mission.” The morning after our arrival in the town where I would be stationed with my trainer, I met the other two female missionaries. One was tall with dark hair and the other was short with brown hair. They each embraced me and kissed me on the cheek. I noticed the luminescent nature of their eyes. The tall dark haired missionary had what I believed to be an unusual mixture of light and pain in her eyes hidden behind a fake smile. While in their apartment she told me she had recently returned to the mission after having her second stomach surgery. She proudly asked me if I wanted to see her battle wounds. After our religious study we went to the beach that morning and I was shocked to find out that we would have to leave the beach in order to be at lunch at 1:00. I expected to have the whole day off from missionary work. My entire life I had been told that missionaries in our church get a day off every week to prepare for the rest of the week, have fun, and rest. However, missionary work in this mission meant knocking on doors looking for people willing to listen to our message until 10:00 at night without rest, relaxation, or fun for a matter of what was supposed to be a year and a half for the women and 2 years for the men. About a week later, I had a dream during the night that a woman we had taught named Cora was hanging herself. In the morning, there was an urgent knock on our door from a woman named Kara who was Cora’s best friend. Confirming my knowledge from the dream Kara told us her friend Cora was having suicidal thoughts and asked us to come visit her. I told my trainer about my dream and agreed that it was urgent that we see her. My trainer said that Pdte. Dagger would say that since she was not interested in getting baptized, we have no reason to spend time talking with her. Later that day we were at a missionary gathering and the short brown haired female missionary and I were in another room speaking with the leader over a group of six missionaries. My new short brown haired friend asked why there was so much sadness in my eyes. I told the two other missionaries about the situation described earlier about my suicidal friend. Our leader spoke with my trainer about the story in the Bible of the Good Samaritan. Even after the lecture from the Bible, she was unwilling to speak with Cora but my trainer accompanied me to speak with her. Cora was pregnant and the father of the baby had deserted her. A cloud of despair had overtaken my friend Cora and she intended to take her life that day. Speaking with Cora helped her recognize reasons to live. Over time, Cora started to have sparkles in her eyes as we met to talk and her face started to shine as she changed her perspective. I did not realize at that point in my mission that Pdte Dagger had as little respect for my life and for the lives of the other female missionaries as my trainer displayed for Cora. I knew something was very wrong in the mission amongst the female missionaries but I could not quite figure out what. I went on with my service while trying to piece together warning signs around me. We came across a family whose father was an alcoholic. The parents of this family were interested in changing their lives to join the Church. One day when we went by, they looked particularly distraught. He showed us some bruises and said, “Look what my wife did to me!” She had beaten him with a piece of wood because he came home drunk again after he had promised to stop and accepted a date for baptism. When the day of the baptism came, I told our alcoholic friend I felt he wasn’t quite ready and that he needed to prove to God that he really had changed. He also needed time to kick his addiction. He refused to listen to me and was baptized anyway. The next Sunday he and his wife did not come. The pattern of baptizing people who never stepped foot in the church again was a pattern in the missions in this country. Baptism is supposed to be a gate to eternal life. One of the leaders of the church by the name of President Gordon B. Hinckley said that baptism is a door but it is not supposed to be a revolving door like it was in that country. The revolving door syndrome made some of the missionaries feel like a bunch of gerbils with our foot caught in a wheel. After about a month transfer time arrived. Transfers are times when the mission president is supposed to decide if there are changes needed regarding where all the missionaries are located. On my second transfer day, the tall dark haired female missionary was leaving our town to go to another, so the four of us spent some time together. As we walked by a certain house she said to my companion (who was no longer my trainer but another missionary), “It’s important for you to pass on to missionaries for as long as it can be passed on that no missionaries should go near that house. There were three female missionaries who attempted suicide while living in that house.” It was the house that the missionaries had lived in previous to the one the other pair was currently living in. Over time in that area I heard comments from the local leaders about the importance of taking care of myself physically and emotionally because they had problems having to drag the female missionaries out of the ocean because they were attempting suicide. (I found out years later that drowning in the ocean was the most typical way for women to commit suicide there.) While I was there on my mission, I had started having to deal with a multitude of health problems. For example, my back was hurting; I often felt dizzy and lightheaded; I could eat large amounts of food and feel completely full and my stomach would be empty a few minutes later; and I had seasonal allergies so my nose ran constantly. I had to carry tissue with me everywhere I went. Often when my companion and I would teach discussions, I would put my head down on the arm of the couch and rest until it was my turn. Every time it was my turn to teach, I would sit up and then rest again while she spoke. So on this same transfer day mentioned previously, I called Pdte Dagger and asked if I could go see a doctor or rest. I told him that I felt that if I went out the next day in the condition I was in that I would pass out in the street. Pdte Dagger told me that by no means could I go see a doctor or take time to rest. He said, “If you pass out in the street, then just get up and keep going.” The next morning as we were preparing to leave my conscience told me not to go. However, despite my misgivings, I felt extreme pressure to go out, so we walked to the door and neither of us had the key to the door. In that country many of the doors are locked from the inside, so a person must have the key to leave their house. It was a great miracle or synchronicity that we could not find the key that morning because I really needed to take the day off to rest. Although I took the time to rest that day, my health became progressively worse. A few days after the day we were locked in, before I went to sleep I prayed that God would send an angel to comfort me. I noticed from my study of the scriptures that often when the people in the scriptures were in prison or experiencing extreme suffering God sent them an angel. In the morning, my companion called and arranged for a female member of the church to come sit with me while I slept and she left with Kara, Cora’s friend to look for people to teach. I did not notice my companion leave and was unaware of the arrangements she made to go out with someone else. When I opened my eyes that morning I saw the woman’s three-year-old son standing next to me running his fingers through my hair. He had the most brilliant smile and did not leave my side all morning. God sent me a most glorious angel that morning- a young earthly angel. After a few weeks, I was transferred to the same town as the mission president to be with another female missionary who could barely walk. I could barely walk because I felt so weak and so dizzy. She could barely walk due to knee problems. Soon after my arrival in the new town with Miss Hobble we went to a house to eat lunch with a family who were members of our church. Before we sat down to eat after watching us walk in, one of their sons asked how our mission president was treating us. I was delighted by his insight into our situation. After we told him our predicament, he explained that he had been in a similar situation ten years earlier. His mission president would not allow him to rest, see a doctor, or leave the mission to return home; so he got in a fight with one of his leaders in order to leave. Miss Hobble and I went to an activity where many of the women from the congregation were gathered together to socialize. The oldest woman there embraced me gently and ran her hands from the top of my shoulders to my hips. While doing so, it felt as if every joint in my back popped. She was too old to hear it but it was alarming to me. Word spread among the women of the church in the congregation where we were stationed about our predicament. After hearing from the women, a local leader came to speak with us directly about the problem. After speaking with us, he went to speak with a high ranking local official who said, “the situation is too out of control to be true.” So the local leader returned to us and said, “I can do nothing more for you, you will just have to kiss the feet of Judas.” I called Pdte Dagger and asked to speak with him in person. During our face to face conversation, I asked to go home and was denied. He told me that with all the success I was having as a missionary if I was complaining about something then I needed depression medication. I had already figured out that Pdte Dagger was the source of the pain and fear in so many of the female missionaries eyes. During that conversation I understood much better his motives. He started screaming at me at the top of his lungs saying that I should be willing to die there. In that moment my eyes were open and I knew exactly how bad it really was. I realized that the attempted suicides were tied to his abusive and controlling behavior. I also realized that the “period of darkness” where no female missionaries were sent to the mission must have taken place right after the three attempted suicides because the church wanted to prevent more attempted suicides but didn’t know why they were happening. During that conversation with Pdte Dagger I told him what he was doing was abusive to the point that it was illegal. I also told him that until he sent me home he had me in a foreign country against my will and I would do everything I could to fight against him. I walked away from that conversation and tore off my nametag and my skirt and put on my jeans. One of the male missionaries and his companion came over to visit us and told us that the missionary leader with a jurisdiction of 20 missionaries was training a new companion that just arrived to the mission. He also told us that this zealot of a trainer was not letting him eat more than once a day because he said there wasn’t enough time to eat. My companion Miss Hobble and I felt sorry for the new missionary and decided to go to the next missionary gathering to take him some food. Pdte Dagger had asked the trainer to make the meeting about Suffering in Silence and preach essentially that we should be willing to die for the cause. He showed a video about a horse that is being trained by his master in the Arabian Desert to only drink water when the master allows him to drink. After the video he said, “What would happen if were all as obedient as this horse?” I replied calmly and resolutely, “We would all be a bunch of dead horses.” An argument ensued with him spouting scripture. For my reply, I stood and said, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you? He that defileth or destroyeth the temple of God him will God destroy!” (Corinthians 3:16-17 adaptation). My companion and I left the room but were forced to stay in the building for a discussion in private with the missionary trainer. After he began his scripture discussion Miss Hobble let out a blood curling scream and hit the floor. The hungry trainee dropped to the floor and with his previous training as ski patrol assessed the damage in her knee. While the trainee was touching Miss Hobble’s knee his companion was screaming about how he wasn’t supposed to touch women. The trainee told me Miss Hobble’s ACL had torn and she needed to go to the doctor to have surgery and to get some pain killer before she had a heart attack from the pain. I told the trainee I was too weak to go by myself because I was likely to pass out on the street at any given time. He didn’t speak enough Spanish or know where he was enough to go alone to get help. I also explained that if he came with me he would be sent home and dishonorably released for going somewhere with a female. The trainee said he didn’t care about the dishonorable release because he knew her life was more important. So we were walking away together and his trainer was screaming his lungs out at us. In response to his screaming, I started screaming back at him until I convinced him that it would be his fault if his companion was dishonorably released. Miss Hobble was sent to a clinic in the south and I was transferred. (Author’s note to the reader: I went into more detail about what happened with Miss Hobble because it was as dramatic as an action movie that I experienced first hand. I had the most details about her release but almost all of the releases with ill female missionaries were just as dramatic as her escape from the mission.) The short brown haired female missionary from the first town I was in, heard about my transfer and came over to visit. Pdte Dagger had placed me with another pair of missionaries and told one of them to watch me and report to him about everything I did. When my guard was in the shower the short brown haired missionary, her companion, and the woman we lived with sat down at the table and I hurriedly scribbled down as much information as I could about how the female missionaries had been treated to take home with me to the leaders of the church. The husband of the woman we were living with had taken and paid for three female missionaries to the emergency room so they wouldn’t die in their house. Before Miss Hobble went to the South the local leader of the congregation we were in had sent me to the doctor and agreed to pay for it out of the congregation funds. I told the doctor that my mission president wanted us to die to prove our faith and he looked at Miss Hobble and back at me and his eyes popped wide with fear and concern. I told the doctor I was fighting to go home as soon as possible in order to let the leaders of the church know what was going on. He said, “You can’t go home now. You have to stop fighting. Your body is too weak to make the flight.” He gave me some muscle relaxants and told me I had to rest for about a week and then I could go home to help everyone else. After a week of rest, my guard called Pdte Dagger and made up a story that I had hit the woman we were living with. Knowing that the man we ran into in my previous area had been sent home for getting in a fight, I did not confirm or deny the accusations so that I could return home to get help. Upon my return, I told about the abusive experience I had been through and I was told that I was going to hell for speaking of a leader of the church like that. I was also told soon after returning, that the high ranking official in the church I wanted to write the letter to would not care. Others before me had tried to speak with him about the health of the missionaries and he said, “There are so many problems in the missions that we don’t have time to care about the health of the missionaries.” One of the female missionaries I spoke with while investigating afterwards explained to me that her doctor told her the amount of Prozac he had the missionaries take as a placebo for physical illnesses was quite extreme. Other female missionaries who returned before me tried to speak with their leaders and families about the situation but were run out of the church or out of their homes unless they kept quiet about it. I left Utah and went to visit relatives near the Mexican border to escape the persecution I experienced for standing up to my mission president. I wrote a letter to high ranking officials in the church and let them know what was going on. I found out after sending the letter that Miss Hobble had been in a clinic for four months while her knee healed. Pdte Dagger was expecting her to return as soon as her knee healed which would have put her in the same position again. However, as a result of my letter to the church, Pdte Dagger was told to terminate her mission. Nine years later I heard of another mission experiencing similar problems among the female missionaries and decided that the church had not realized from my letter that they needed to change the system to prevent those kinds of situations. So I spent a year preparing a letter that took as much effort as a master’s thesis. Based on their response to my letter it was clear to me that they had not understood the gravity of the situation and the degree of abuse involved despite my best efforts. However, I didn’t know what else I could possibly do about the situation. Around this time, President Gordon B. Hinckley came to me as an angel after sending the letter. He was dressed in white and had a white cane. He did not say anything but he looked at me as I lied in bed for quite some time. I knew the message was in the cane since angels do not require canes. Later, I recognized that the cane was a reference to the staff on the movie Rise of the Guardians and that he was pointing to important concepts in that movie. In the movie Rise of the Guardians, Pitch Black has a plan to take over the world by taking out the lights of all the children. In reality, there are those who are working to remove light from the hearts of the children. Pornography and sexual interactions outside of marriage destroy the conscience but that is a topic for another time. It is critical that people join together to stop those who are trying to take out the lights of the world. There was no light in my mission president and he brought extreme sorrow to many around him. After 14 years had passed since my mission, I called the FBI and asked them to do an investigation to help the leaders of the church understand how serious the circumstances were in my mission. The FBI found that Pdte Dagger could have been tried for attempted murder for how he treated the female missionaries. No one, other than myself and the FBI, knows this story to the extent that I do because I spent time investigating the situation before I left the mission field and after I returned in order to seek help from the leaders of the church. If I were to go through it again, I would have gone to the FBI upon my arrival many years earlier; this would have resulted in Pdte Dagger’s imprisonment for many years- if not for life. However, there was so much pressure against resolving the issue that I folded under that pressure until it was too late.