BEING PREPARED IN ADVANCE

In a recent post, I mentioned how a fire in an apartment in Brazil was somewhat instrumental in preparing me for fighting a small house fire just a week ago.  No life or limb was in danger during the recent episode, but the quick thinking (due to the previous experience) may well have preserved a structure a saved alot of hassle.

The opposite was true of a very serious event that occurred in Brazil that I am certain would have taken my life.  I was prepared to react to that one by a previous non-life threatening event that occurred a year before my mission.

I was working in Belllingham, WA for the local city water and sewer department as a summer job reserved for those who were attending college.  I had just finished my first year in engineering and was actually saving and preparing for my mission.  It was the best paying job in the entire town - nearly double minimum wage.  I was working three jobs (one full, two part-time) and was just wiped out most days.  My job for the city was to paint and maintain all sorts of equipment and infrastructure.  I really enjoyed that job.  Every day was different and new.  I have to have new experiences or I get bored easily and my mind wanders to other engaging pursuits.  My favorite day was going up to a pipeline area where our potable water came from, high up near Mt Baker, and deconstructed a beaver dam that was threatening the pipeline.  Other fun chores were going to the fresh water intake on a large lake that supplied the potable filtration plant and looking for dead bodies of water skiers, etc that would die, submerge, bloat, surface and then float to the intake at the lake's outflow.  Gross!  The veteran employees called them DBs.  Thankfully, I was never a witness to one of those that summer although they averaged around 1 a year that they would find there.  One thing that was close to that - but never left me in danger was one of the few days when I did not make it out with the rest of the crew.  I was asked to stay behind and accomplish some task for the manager.  It was just he and I behind that day besides a few other folks managing the computers for plant systems.  All of a sudden we had a code red (probably should have been a code yellow or brown, now that I think of it...) - one of the sewage pump stations was down.  That might not seem like a big deal, but it was.  If we did not get out there in the next 30 mins and get it back on line, there would be black goo bubbling out of peoples' basement toilets - or overflowing into a waterway - and bad publicity for the city.  We hopped in the nearest truck and headed out to the pump 20 mins away.  When we got there, we noticed the fiberglass lid was open.  We put in our CO/CO2 meter and got some bad readings so we put down our air pumps and evacuated the area - giving it a fresh charge of air.  It soon was safe to enter.  My manager went down the hole, with me on watch (radio with direct contact to emergency personnel if things went bad and we needed a rescue).  I was under strict orders and training to not attempt a one man rescue - those situations often end in two DB's when the responders are finally called in to haul corpses out.  As my manager headed down to the bottom of the 30 foot shaft, he noticed the rungs had soot on them near the bottom.  He got to the pump chamber at the bottom and noticed some of the glass on the guage faces had been broken out.  I had zero previous experience in this situation, but I yelled down the hole, "Bomb!!  Get out of there now!   My manager must have believed me or was just coming to the conclusion himself.  He didn't say anything to me - he just came flying up the shaft in about 3 seconds without a rest on the way up.  He asked me what I meant - I did not know why I had said what I said and convinced him this was serious.  He was shaking while he radioed on our emergency equipment for Fire and Bomb Squad.  Later, over the next couple of weeks, there was one or two other similar incidents that we did not even respond to and we just sent the emergency services out to investigate - and they had their suspect on a watch.  They caught him and put him away for felony vandalism - a former city employee who had been let loose for anger management issues....  The black residue was a partially combusted explosive device that he had dropped down the hole attempting to make the city look bad.  Nobody's lives were ever in any real danger - we followed protocol.

Fast forward to Natal, Brazil in 1988.  I had been there about four months and was just made a District Leader in a remote area outside the city.  Every Monday night, after P-day, we would phone the ZLs to let them know of our District's weekly activities.  We had no phone in our house, so we walked to the phone down at the corner store.  They were called an "orelhao" or "big ear" that provided a place for the phone to be out of the elements - but were not enclosed like our North American phone booths are.  We used little lead tokens called fichas (kind of like our "Forever" stamps that do not change value) in the telephone, since inflation was always changing the value of the money.  You would buy the fichas at the current exchange rate and you always had a few on you for emergencies since money did not work in the phones.  As we approached the phone, I noticed someone loitering and frantically doing something by it in the dusk - but I paid no particular attention to what it was.  I was talking to my companion, Elder Pereira.  Elder Pereira was my Companion for around 4 months.  There is nothing remarkable about that - other than Elder Pereira had 19 or 20 companions during the 23 months he was in the field.  His average tenure with a companion was around 3 weeks.  Sometimes it was just days.  Other tenures were on the order of several weeks.  I did not know about his history until later when word got around that I had survived that long - beyond the odds.   I always say this is what led the President to call me as an assistant in the Mission Office - I just took whatever difficult situation was thrown at me and just dealt with it....

 This Elder was unusual.  Very diminuitive build - he ate like a mouse and the other Elders' food would often go missing - not that I cared other than for planning purposes and it was hard to keep the peace when a filcher was afoot.  Twelve eggs divided by six days = 2 eggs per day in our fridge.  Some days my breakfast would come up short.  I really don't care about that kind of stuff.  If someone is truly hungry, they can have whatever is mine.  We will go hungry together if there is really a need.  Elder Pereira raised himself on the streets of Rio - and as a young kid would sniff model glue to get high and escape the horror and pain of not having parents and a loving support structure.  It really put any of my own problems in perspective - which were virtually nil compared.  He joined the Church a few years before his mission and had no real depth of gospel experience - although I thought he was fine enough.  He had emotions and needs just like everyone else - but it was hard relating to him.  I was patient - just as I always am when people get weird on me.  I just slog on when others would walk away or complain (oddly I am far less patient on far less important things....).  Anyway, the thing that would drive his comps crazy about him, were falling asleep in the middle of discussions, food disappearing, just general lack of engagement in the work that we were engaged in.  I am a very driven person - so we were on opposite ends of the spectrum.  When I began to understand his story - and that he was not buying food in order to send the saved money home to support his indigent family - I had much compassion for him and I was able to stay my tongue much more.  His home ward was sending the $110/month stipend to him so he could be on the mission.

Back on track - so we got to the phone as the person that had been there previously was disappearing around the darkened side of the store.  I walked up to the phone, picked up the receiver and, as I was raising it to my ear, I noticed something glistening in the light from the street lamp.  I immediately went to put the receiver back on the catch it rested on and stepped back and out of the way as I announced to my companion, "Its a bomb - step back".  I had no comprehension of what I was saying - but placing the phone back on the catch (and not dropping it - or pulling it fully up to my ear), saved my life.  I am certain of it.  I had never heard of a bomb being attached to a phone, had not thought about the experience the summer before in Bellingham - it was not my thought and impulse.  I am sure there was an intervention from heaven - an impulse that was not from me.  After I settled down - we approached it and examined it from the side.  It was a device that used a 4" diameter speaker magnet to attach it to the steel base of the phone.  A 2" pipe was brazed to a 1/8" thick plate that the magnet was dually glued and magnetized to.  One end of the 2" pipe was threaded and capped.  In the capped end of the pipe was drilled a 1/4" hole with a short thin-wall pipe attached.  On the end of the short piece of pipe was attached a blasting cap.  On the base plate, a rat trap had been brazed. 

When the phone receiver was picked up, there was some heavy duty fishing line that went to an exacto blade that was on a pivot.  When the exacto grazed the line that held the rat trap back (resisted the strong spring), the line would fail, sending the rat trap (that had a 1/2" square plate brazed onto it) smashing into the blasting cap.  That explosion would then ignite (through the short tube) about 1/2 cup of blasting powder that was in the end of the 2" capped pipe.  That was behind some tamped/waxed toilet paper that acted as some wadding.  Directly forward of the wadding were 7, 1/2" diameter ball bearings, followed by some more waxed wadding.  Had I not had that impulse to call it a bomb and not raise it to my ear fully - it most likely would have ignited and send those balls ripping through my lower abdomen.  It would have taken around 1 hour to get to the nearest hospital in downtown Natal which probably would not have had the resources to treat me - and I expect I would have died.  At that point (a month previous) - I had just gone through a week of hell where I had lost 35 pounds as my body slowly succombed to e-coli (I will blog that one later).  This was the second serious attempt on my life in Brazil - and I began to wonder if I would make it back alive.  This was a raw, mysterious land where life was not as valued as it was back in the worst of conditions in the States.  I had to learn to operate on faith or I would never know the joys of being a married man - or of having kids and all those adventures.  I HAD to survive this experience in order to accomplish the rest of my non-mission, mission.

So how did we find out how the bomb was constructed - and what the guts of the bomb contained?  Well, Elder Pereira was enthralled with it and decided to put his fingerprints on it.  Brazil was then a police state - everyone is fingerprinted including Elders (like me and Elder Pereira).  If it were not dismantled properly and disposed of, he might be implicated as the one who had built it.  I was very irritated with him for not listening to me to leave it alone.  As dumb 19 year olds go, we did the best we could and removed it from the phone and I took it back to the house and we carefully took it apart and buried the remains in the back yard - after we ignited the powder on the kitchen floor and smashed the blasting cap between two large rocks, of course.....  Redneck fireworks!  We locked our slatted shutters the best we could for weeks after that - in an area where we had had garments and t-shirts stolen off our drying lines by people who had penetrated our fenced compound - we did not want whoever it was trying to do further mayhem.  We never did come to a firm conclusion as to whether that was intended for us (by a pastor of a church we had shut down by baptizing all their members) or whether it was intended for a drug dealer or someone that used this phone regularly.  Or for us - who used that phone religiously around 9:30pm every Monday night.  Was that person I saw working on it frantically trying to get it hooked up for us - or was he trying to frantically remove it when he saw we were coming and its intended victim was not the next one to use the phone.  I saw no evidence that it was in a partially discombobulated state and it appeared fully functional - so I lean towards it being for me or my companion in order to stop the work in that area.  We were building a new chapel across the neighborhood for Ramo Potengi - so there was some opposition to the "new guys".

No doubt, some dog will confuse the stuffing out of his owner when he digs the rusting bomb remains up in the back yard sometime in the future.....

So the moral of this wild (and true) tale is:  God will sometimes prepare you in unusual ways for future events in life so that you are able to react properly and avert disaster.  That includes physical, as well as spiritual events.