Digging up old ghosts

A friend from the ward called and asked me to help out at her daughter's school on Wednesday. They were doing a reenactment of Immigration at Ellis Island and were trying to help kids understand what it would have felt like to live through that experience. They had kids dress up like immigrants from that era and grouped them into families, gave them passports and fake identities and a few of us volunteers pretended to be immigration officers. We were told to only speak in our foreign language--the point was for the kids to feel the confusion that immigrants felt. We were supposed to ask questions, and pick who to let through and who to deport.

It really didn't matter what I asked or said to these kids because none of them could understand a lick of Bulgarian and probably had no idea such a country existed. I started out just asking what's your name, where are you from, etc. The kids had no clue what I was saying. Half way through, I caught myself saying to a group of six year olds-- "What do you think you are doing here, you slimy cult followers? What right do you think you have to come to our country and tell us how to live?" At that point I realized I was having a cathartic experience...remembering the harassment I experienced on my mission.

Bulgaria wouldn't give us Visas so every month we had to leave the country and come back in again. The closest border was Yugoslavia (Serbia) so the mission Pres would drive us to the border, let us out and we would have to walk out into "no man's land" which is a strip of land between the Bulgarian and Serbian borders. Then we'd turn around and show our passports to come back in. The guards there hated us and would harass us and sometimes tell us they wouldn't let us back in the country. They of course did but sometimes would make us just sit there trying to scare us.

Police would also bang on our apartment doors sometimes and ask us what we were doing there, Always inspected documents, etc. and basically tried to intimidate us. We used to joke that they were just trying to keep track of our birthdays because that's one of the questions they always ask among hundreds of others.

Right before I left, we got a new mission president and he was determined to stop the harassment. At the time, Bulgaria wanted to join the EU and of course religious harassment is not looked on favorably. Pres. Stephens asked the missionaries to report every single incidence of harassment and then he began to file claims. According to Pres. Stephens, Bulgaria became one of the top in the world in religious persecution that year because of all of the claims. The harassment stopped after that.

Anyways, it was an interesting re-living that this week.