Slovene Sunday - Threatened with a butter knife

When I first arrived in Slovenija in 1999, the town I was assigned to was called Velenje. Velenje was, and probably still is a mining town, and drew the kind of people who would consent to mine for a living. It was a town full of Bosnians - the actual Slovenes lived on the edges of the city, in the wealthy and established neighborhoods, in the hills. The city proper, with all the high rises, and businesses, and people and schools - that was very Bosnian. It was a great place to start, as far as the language was concerned - I thought I was hearing regular Slovene, and was surprised at how simple it was, and how much I understood; really I was hearing the simpler Slavic language of Bosnian, or Slovene spoken by a foreigner like myself.



Velenje was a neighbor to the city of Celje, through a tight and winding canyon, a bus trip of about 30 minutes. Because of the tight valley Velenje sat in, it indeed felt pretty isolated. My very first companion, Elder Kelly, did not like to stay there, and tried to wrangle our schedule so that we spent as much time in the larger, more populated, more open city of Celje as possible. Celje had the church building, and it had other elders, and members that Elder Kelly was familiar with and liked. I, however, was new, and was determined to serve the people in the area I was assigned to. I was kind of a nag, I guess, in my regular passive-aggressive way, using my wide-eyed naivete to inspire guilt (or a desire to be a good example) in my companion so I could keep the rules more easily.

One cold February evening within the first week or two of my arrival I managed to make us be in Velenje for the evening, instead of Celje, just hanging out at the McDonald's. With no other elders to waste time with, and no members at ALL to talk to, we were faced with the most daunting missionary task of all - tracting, going from door to door, and asking people on their own doorsteps if we could share our message with them. Up to this point Elder Kelly had managed to keep us from doing too much of that, especially at night, but I thought that tracting was what missionaries were SUPPOSED to do, that that was what we LIVED for.

Unenthusiastic, Elder Kelly said that if we were going to do this, then I had to pick the place we would tract. I smiled, and pointed to the tallest building in the city, an apartment complex right in the center of town, tall enough to keep us busy for the whole evening. Elder Kelly said OK, so we headed on over there in the chilly darkness. I was excited, but dreading it, too, as I was still so new that I didn't know how to do this right. Elder Kelly had up to this time not shown me any good techniques, and I was still so rough with my grammar. But in we went, and up, up 35 stories to the very top floor.

Velenje, I was told, was one of Tito's pet projects, and communist city to a T, designed to be completely self-sufficient. As such, it had many other hallmarks of communism too, the most obvious one being that all the apartment buildings, or bloki, were dark, minimalist structures, of the 70's entirely. Everything about them looked 20 years old, even if they were new. This tallest of all the bloks was no different, oddly dark to the extreme, and quite uninviting. I took a breath and began.

We rang the bell at the one door on the 35th floor and were turned away, and went down to the 34th floor. There were more doors here, and the first two also turned us away. The next door had a nameplate with a very Bosnian name on it, Mustafa Musarbasic. When we knocked, a voice from inside called out for us to wait, and soon the door opened to show a tall, gangly man, longish greasy gray hair. As he stood and listened to Elder Kelly talk he weaved back and forth a little bit, and he looked slightly tired. He said no at first, and then when Elder Kelly thanked him, he changed his mind and invited us in. We walked into his dark apartment, lit only by a candle on the coffee table. I really didn't understand a word of what was going on, so I sat on a low chair across from Mustafa, smiling in the dark and trying to exude happiness. Every once in a while the candle flame guttered, and Mustafa would take a butter knife and move the wick so the flame wouldn't go out. For some reason he never turned on the lights. He was very quiet and agreeable, and when Elder Kelly offered him a Croatian copy of the Book of Mormon, he took it and said he'd read it.

We'd spent, I'm guessing, much time in there with him just chatting, so by the time we excused ourselves to go, it was time to head home. We had the promise of another visit with him in a few days time to find out what he thought about what he'd read, and I walked home in the dark and cold very pleased with myself. People had been whispering that Velenje was a lost cause, that the previous elders has ruined the image of the church there, and that no one in the whole town was interested in the church, and then I arrive, and within one week have a second appointment all lined up! New blood COULD refresh the old and reigning apathy! THAT'S what I was here for! Just my presence could jump-start the work here!

Elder Kelly didn't tell me there had been three empty bottles of wine under Mustafa's side of the coffee table.

We returned to Mustafa's apartment a few evenings later, and this time he was a different kind of drunk. Now he was loud and ebullient, and moody as heck. One minute he was smiling in a loud voice, and the next he was... well, I couldn't understand him, but I felt very threatened. Again we were sitting in the dark, with only the tiniest flame within the puddle of wax on the plate on the table,and Mustafa was wielding the butter knife with much more gusto than before. At one point he kept pointing to me with it, and then waving for me to come nearer. I looked to Elder Kelly, who translated, very unhelpfully, the Mustafa couldn't see me in the dark and to come sit nearer to him. I hugged my missionary bag closer to my chest and said the first thing I could think of, "Jaz sem v redu tukaj." I'm okay here.

I understood Elder Kelly to ask if another night would be better, and Mustafa fixed on the word better. "You think you're better than me?!" it translated to. Elder Kelly told me later that Mustafa then said he would tie me up and kill Elder Kelly with the knife in his hand. Luckily I didn't understand anything, and Elder Kelly kept a very calm tone. Mustafa's mood shifted and he became the host, inviting us to see something in another room. Wide-eyed, I clutched my bag, and ran through it's contents in my head, to see if I could survive if I had to run out of there quickly. I was SURE when Mustafa opened the door to another room it would have a decaying corpse in it, and braced myself for the worst. What was inside was very unexpected - a neat and tidy child's room, with a Lion King poster on the wall. I was informed later that the room was for Mustafa's son, but his mother had taken the child away, and Mustafa hadn't seen him in a while.

I was still standing there, opening my eyes as wide as I could, like it would help me understand the dialogue any better, still holding my bag in front of my heart. The front door was behind us, and Elder Kelly began pushing me subtly backwards, all the while telling Mustafa what a nice time we'd had, and thanks for his attention. Then we backed out the door and made for the elevator. Walking home I was filled in on what had actually gone on in there, and I felt let down by it all. All I wanted was to go home to Utah, to be safe, to not have to walk around in the dark and not understand what the drunk people were going on about. I wanted to not have to talk to a drunk person ever again. I wanted to know what I was doing. I wanted to go home.