Kidnapped By A Famous Trans Pole Dancer!

Hello all!

This week was jam-packed with events such as a huge English conference for Mongolian English teachers that the church was hosting, a missionary English conference, and even a Vocal Point concert for missionaries, investigators, and church members. It was so cool! My companion and I also got to go to a random birthday party and we actually ate Chinese food for the first time, not the fake American Chinese food. Oh, and there was a HUGE festival happening in the large square in front of the big Genghis Khan statue.

Sorry for the long email, but I promise it's worth it. Now for the story... On Wednesday of last week, we got out of English class and waited for the elders we are serving with to finish their class. We went downstairs, and in their class, there was a woman who recognized my companion and immediately started talking about being sent to English class to find my companion. Weird, right? Well, she ended up asking some questions about the church, so we were like, "Cool, a possible new investigator."

We got a dinner invite the next day for dinner on Saturday. Skip to Saturday, we didn't really know where we were going to eat, and since the woman was picking us up, we did not have much control if things were weird. So we were kind of on our guard. I even sent a text to our elders, telling them to call us by a certain time if we had not sent a text of anything.

We got into a black Mercedes with SUPER tinted windows, and they started driving. The guy who is driving looked like he could lift an elephant if he wanted to; he was super muscular and really short (like 5'4"), and the old lady was wearing really expensive clothes. So we kinda figured they would take us to a nice restaurant in the middle of the city and eat there. After 15 minutes of driving, we could see mountains, and we realized we were way out of our area. We told them we needed to turn around and we weren't comfortable driving this far out.

Up to this point, I really did not know what was going on because I only know a little Mongolian, and the woman who was speaking had a very weird accent. All of a sudden, while my companion was asking them to turn around, my companion started getting very serious and very concerned, so she started texting the mission president and calling him too. I have no idea what's going on, but I could feel that the Holy Ghost was not there; it was a very weird feeling. I started to text President Namgur as well. Once we got President Namgur on the phone, he was able to convince them to let us out of the car. From there, we quickly ran into a coffee shop and assessed the situation and what we needed to do now (AKA cried a little and tried to calm down).

We hailed a taxi back and stayed in our house for the rest of the evening. My comp told me what the woman had said in the car while we were sitting in the coffee shop.

She also informed me that the woman was transgender, and usually I would not give a crap about that, but this person was the first openly transgender person in Mongolia and was very famous for sleeping with politicians and pole dancing. So we were getting kidnapped by a really famous person who probably had a lot of connections in the government and could easily get away with murder. Yay. And the pole dancer was in his 70s as well.

Anyways, the recap of the Mongolian conversation, according to my companion, Sister Kartchner is this:

we were asked if we could pole dance, and when Sister Kartchner said no, the old man said jokingly, "why did we even bring you then"...

while referring to the driver, the old man said that the driver wanted American women to play with (both my companion and I are obviously American with how we dress, the way we act, and the way we speak)

told us that they were taking us up to a mountain to kill us. He said that three times. He even asked me if I knew what the word алах (aa-th-aah, to kill) means. And all my MTC buddies know that that was strangely the only Mongolian verb that actually stuck with me. (Whether that's a small blessing from God, I'll never know, but I was thankful for it nevertheless because that was the only word I understood in Mongolian)when we started calling and texting frantically, they started to ask where we were from and which cities to try and calm us down. They even told us to relax. (We lied about where we lived, obviously)

So anyways, we got home, and President and Sister Namgur came over to give a blessing to be less paranoid about our situation and to check up on our emotional health, which was pretty sweet of them.

For anyone who has actually finished reading my email instead of skipping over it, thanks, and so sorry for the long email.

Here are some pictures from this week; unfortunately, I did not get a picture of the old man pole dancer, but if I did, he would have gotten a special little shout-out in my pictures.