Chapter 11
In Any Other Country
In early October 1968, Isabel Santana was in her second year at Benemérito de las Américas. The Church school now had twelve hundred students—more than twice what it had when Isabel arrived there—and an expanding campus with a new auditorium-gymnasium, a small grocery store, two shop buildings, a reception center, and thirty-five more residential cottages. When President N. Eldon Tanner came to Mexico City earlier in the year to dedicate the new buildings, the Tabernacle Choir had also come to perform at the service.
Isabel and her younger sister Hilda had adapted quickly to life at the school. Isabel was naturally shy, but she refused to let her shyness get in the way of her education. She made a close friend, learned to navigate the cultural differences she encountered, and did her best to talk to people she didn’t know.
She also established herself as a diligent student. She regularly sought the advice of teachers and administrators at the school. One of these mentors, Efraín Villalobos, had attended Church schools in Mexico as a young man before studying agronomy at Brigham Young University. He had a good sense of humor, and Isabel and the other students at Benemérito found him to be very relatable. Far from home, they looked to him as a tutor, guide, and father figure.
Another teacher who inspired her was Leonor Esther Garmendia, who taught physics and mathematics at the school. During Isabel’s first year, Leonor had asked her students to raise their hands if they liked math. Many hands went up. She asked who did not like the subject. Isabel raised her hand.
“Why don’t you like it?” Leonor asked.
“Because I don’t understand it,” Isabel said.
“You’ll understand it here.”
The work in Leonor’s class was not easy. But sometimes she would give the class an assignment and then ask each student to come to her desk to work out math problems with her. Before long, Isabel was able to figure out the problems in her head—an ability she never thought she would have.
Like many of her classmates, Isabel balanced school with work responsibilities. The Church covered most of the educational costs to keep tuition low. To pay the rest, some students cleaned buildings or worked at the school’s on-site dairy. Isabel had found a job as a telephone switchboard operator for the school. Hour after hour, she sat in a narrow phone box and connected calls across campus using a switchboard with pins and numbers. The work was simple, and she often brought a book to help pass the hours.
At the time, university students across the globe were protesting against their governments. In Mexico City, many students took to the streets to demonstrate for more economic and political justice. They also resented the influence of the United States on Mexican leaders. In the students’ minds, the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union was an opportunity for powerful nations to dominate their smaller, more vulnerable neighbors.
Complicating matters, Mexico City was preparing to host the Summer Olympics—the first Olympics ever held in a Latin American country. Tensions reached a peak on October 2, 1968, ten days before the Olympics, when Mexican armed forces fired on demonstrators in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square, killing nearly fifty people. In the weeks that followed, authorities arrested leaders of the student movement while both the government and the media tried to downplay the brutality of the Tlatelolco massacre.
Benemérito was close to the bloodshed, and Isabel sorrowed when she learned about the killings. But she felt safe at the school, where most students and teachers did not get involved in political protests.
One afternoon, though, a man called the school and threatened to steal its buses. Isabel was scared, but she didn’t panic. “Who is speaking?” she asked.
The caller hung up.
Unsure what to do, she inserted a pin into the switchboard and called Kenyon Wagner, the director of the school.
“Isabel,” he said, “we are going to take care of it.”
The call turned out to be an empty threat, and Isabel was relieved that nothing bad happened. Benemérito had become her oasis, a peaceful place where she could study the gospel and get an education.
While she was there, she knew she would be protected.
On the morning of November 10, 1968, Henry Burkhardt gathered with some 230 Saints for a district conference in Görlitz, a city on the eastern border of the German Democratic Republic. The three-story building where they met was falling apart. Exposed brick could be seen around the windows where the facade had deteriorated.
Suddenly, joy rippled through the meetinghouse. Apostle Thomas S. Monson had shown up at the conference, surprising the Saints. In the seven years since the Berlin Wall went up, they’d had few chances to meet with a general authority.
Elder Monson had recently been assigned to supervise the German-speaking missions, and Henry, as the leader of the Church in the GDR, was eager to work with him. At forty-one, Elder Monson was just a few years his senior. But he was an apostle—and that really set him apart in Henry’s eyes. What would he be like? Would they get along?
These questions vanished almost as soon as Elder Monson walked into the meetinghouse. He was down-to-earth and engaging. He couldn’t speak German, and Henry couldn’t speak English, but they became friends.
The conference began at ten o’clock. The Saints in the congregation were smiling, clearly grateful for Elder Monson’s presence. A few of them were sure to be informants—Church members who reported to the government on the words and actions of their fellow Saints. Henry thought he knew who most of them were, but he did not try to stop them. He would much rather have the government get reports from Latter-day Saint informants who told the truth about the Church than from less sympathetic sources.
He resented the many restrictions imposed on him and other East Germans, though. Leading the Church under these conditions continued to keep him away from his family six days a week, and now he and Inge had a second child, a boy named Tobias. Every time he had to deal with government officials—which was often—they tried to convince him of the benefits of communism. He could not see them. When he thought about conditions in the country, and a system that enticed Saints to report on other Saints, he would ask himself, “How is anything like this possible?”
Elder Monson was visibly moved by the conditions in the GDR as well. When he rose to address the Saints at the conference, tears filled his eyes. He tried to speak, but his voice faltered, choked with emotion. Finally he said, “If you will remain true and faithful to the commandments of God, every blessing any member of the Church enjoys in any other country will be yours.”
For Henry and the other Saints in the congregation, Elder Monson had just promised everything they longed for as Church members. But so much had to change in the GDR for the words to become reality. When Church leaders had proposed creating a stake in the GDR, Henry had rejected the idea, worried it would attract unwanted attention from the government. And temple blessings had been out of reach since the GDR tightened its borders. Every time Saints sought permission to go to the Swiss Temple, the government denied their requests.
Still, a marvelous spirit filled the room. Elder Monson blessed the Saints, and they closed the meeting with a fervent hymn:
Around this time, in the West African nation of Ghana, Joseph William Billy Johnson was sure he had found the true gospel of Jesus Christ. Four years earlier, his friend Frank Mensah had given him a Book of Mormon and other Latter-day Saint books and pamphlets. Like its neighbor Nigeria, Ghana had no congregation of the Church. Frank had wanted to change that.
“I feel you are the man I should work with,” he had told Billy.
Since then, they had organized four unofficial Latter-day Saint congregations in and around Accra, the capital of Ghana. Having contacted Church headquarters, they knew about the Church’s reluctance to send missionaries to western Africa. But LaMar Williams and others had encouraged them to study the gospel and gather with like-minded believers. When they learned that Virginia Cutler, a professor from Brigham Young University, was in Accra to start a home economics program at the University of Ghana, they started a weekly Sunday school with her.
Billy loved sharing the gospel. He worked in the import-export industry, but he wanted to quit his job and devote more time to missionary work. His wife did not share his faith. “This church is so new,” she said. “I don’t want you to resign.”
But Billy was anxious to preach more. “There is something burning in me which I cannot hide,” he told her.
Religion had long been important to Billy. His mother, Matilda, was a devout Methodist, and she had raised him to have faith in God and to love His word. At school, Billy would often find a private place to sing hymns and pray while the other students played. One of his teachers took notice and told him he would someday become a priest.
As Billy got older, his faith was affirmed by remarkable dreams and visions. Shortly after Frank Mensah introduced him to the restored gospel, Billy was praying when he saw the heavens open and a host of angels appear, blowing trumpets and singing praises to God. “Johnson, Johnson, Johnson,” a voice called to him. “If you will take up my work as I will command you, I will bless you and bless your land.”
Not everyone had accepted Billy and Frank or their beliefs, though. Some people had said they were following a false church. Others accused them of not believing in Jesus Christ. Their words hurt Billy. Wondering if he had been led astray, he began to fast. After three days, he went to a room in his house where he had hung portraits of the presidents of the Church on the wall. He kneeled down and prayed to God for help.
“I would like to see these prophets,” he said. “I want them to give me instructions.”
That night, as Billy slept, he dreamed that Joseph Smith appeared to him and said, “Very soon missionaries will come. Prophet McKay is thinking of you.”
Another man also approached him and introduced himself as Brigham Young. “Johnson, we are with you,” he said. “Do not be discouraged.” Before the night was over, Billy saw every latter-day prophet down to George Albert Smith.
Billy’s desire to devote more time to sharing the gospel soon led him to quit his job and move to Cape Coast, a city southwest of Accra, where he planned to farm and start a new congregation. His wife did not support his decision, so rather than move with the family, she divorced Billy, leaving him to care for their four young children.
Billy was devastated, but he found support in his mother, Matilda. She had her own doubts about Billy quitting his job and moving the family to Cape Coast, wondering if he could be successful in a city that already had many churches. But Billy was her only living child, and she depended on him for her well-being, so she went with him.
Matilda now shared her son’s faith. When Billy had first told her of his new beliefs, she had not taken them seriously. But after seeing how those beliefs changed him and the people he taught, she realized that her son had found something special. She knew she and many others would be blessed when the Church came to Ghana, and this knowledge gave her courage.
Once the family settled in Cape Coast, Matilda cared for Billy’s children while he established his new congregation. She also gave him moral support and encouragement, lending a hand when she could to strengthen the congregation.
“No matter the circumstances, no matter the future,” she affirmed, “I am prepared to fight an honest battle for the Church.”
After releasing their album with Stan Bronson, the singers of the Songjuk Orphanage soon found themselves performing regularly at military bases and on American and Korean television shows. Everyone, including the president of South Korea and the U.S. ambassador, seemed to love the choir of little girls.
Hwang Keun Ok enjoyed working with Stan and the singers. The group had a positive effect on the girls. For one thing, participating required that they complete their homework on time. But more than that, Keun Ok was pleased to see the girls gain a sense of self-worth from their singing. As the group’s fame increased, she and Stan remained encouraging, gently guiding the singers through each practice, performance, and recording.
They wanted to help the girls at the orphanage both now and in the future. While on leave the previous year, Stan had talked to people in his hometown about buying each girl a new coat or doll for Christmas. He then asked a Korean-speaking friend to dress as Santa Claus to deliver the gifts. Later, he and Keun Ok considered asking people in the United States to provide monthly financial support for the girls.
Once Stan was discharged from the army, he set up a nonprofit organization in Utah. He also spoke at firesides, gave concerts, and sold albums to raise awareness of the girls and their financial needs. Before the organization could operate in South Korea, though, it needed a license from the government. The South Korean government had restricted foreign organizations from doing social work within the country. Fortunately, Keun Ok was able to use the popularity of the singing group and her connections in the government to secure a license for Stan’s organization.
While setting up the nonprofit, Stan read an inspiring book titled Tender Apples about a Latter-day Saint woman who helped at-risk children. He and Keun Ok liked the title, so he contacted the author, who agreed to let them call their organization the Tender Apples Foundation. Keun Ok converted a room in her two-story home in Seoul into the Korean office for the nonprofit organization, and Stan worked there when he was in Korea. Before long, the singing group took the name Tender Apples as well.
One day, a few of the girls giggled as they brought a dictionary to Stan. Having sung at Latter-day Saint meetings on an American military base, they knew Stan was a member of the Church. But like most Koreans, they still did not know much about the Church or what it taught. When they looked up “Mormon” in the dictionary, it defined the word as a “strange-behaving people.”
“Well,” Stan asked the girls, “do you think I’m strange?”
“Oh no,” they said.
“Do you think Miss Hwang is strange?”
The girls gasped. None of them knew that their superintendent was a “Mormon” too.
Stan told Keun Ok what had happened. She knew it was only a matter of time before the orphanage’s Protestant sponsors learned about her Church membership, and she braced herself for their response.
She didn’t have to wait long. Once the sponsors found out that Keun Ok was a Latter-day Saint—and that some of the girls at the orphanage had become interested in the Church—they gave her a choice. She could either leave the Church or resign her position. For Keun Ok, that was no choice at all.
She gathered her things and left the orphanage. Several of the older girls who had come to love Keun Ok soon followed after her, carrying their few possessions with them. When they showed up at her door, she knew she would have to find some way to care for them.
In Utah, Truman Madsen had nothing but good news for his committee researching the Church’s origins. Throughout the summer of 1968, historians had sent him updates from their research trips to the eastern United States. Thanks to the funding from the First Presidency, they were able to scour libraries and archives, locating historical documents and confirming important dates and facts.
“It has been a great summer!” Truman declared. He was confident that Latter-day Saint historians were now better prepared to respond to Wesley Walters’s claims about the First Vision.
One of their most significant discoveries that summer was strong evidence of religious revival near Joseph Smith’s home in 1820. Milton Backman, a professor of history and religion at Brigham Young University, observed that Joseph Smith had described the religious excitement in general terms, without identifying any specific locations. This led Milton to believe that Wesley Walters had focused his research too narrowly on Palmyra. After spending weeks combing through historical records in western New York, Milton discovered that a “cyclone” of religious fervor had indeed passed through the region around Palmyra in 1819 and 1820—just as the prophet Joseph described in his 1838 First Vision account.
Over the next few months, Truman and other historians worked on articles about their findings. He wanted to publish all the research together in an issue of BYU Studies, an academic journal published by Brigham Young University.
At the same time, Hugh Nibley continued studying the papyrus fragments from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When the Church acquired the artifacts, many people were eager to learn what they revealed about the Book of Abraham and its translation. For more than a century, after all, some people had cast doubt on Joseph Smith’s interpretation of the three “facsimiles” published alongside the Book of Abraham. Reproduced from illustrations found in the papyri, these facsimiles were almost identical to images on common Egyptian funeral scrolls that seemed to have nothing to do with Abraham or his times.
Early analyses and translations of the fragments confirmed that they were funerary texts from centuries after Abraham’s day, and neither the Church nor Hugh disputed this finding. Yet Hugh believed further study could shed more light on the papyrus and the prophet’s translation. In more than a dozen articles published in 1968 and 1969, he drew on his knowledge of ancient cultures and languages to advance several theories about the Book of Abraham and its relationship to ancient Egyptian religion and culture. He noted, for instance, that some of the strongest evidence of the Book of Abraham’s authenticity was its resemblance to other ancient temple texts and millennia-old traditions about Abraham that Joseph Smith was unlikely to know anything about. Hugh’s writing also attested to the book’s powerful insights into priesthood, temple ordinances, and the plan of salvation.
In the spring of 1969, the research conducted by Truman’s committee appeared in BYU Studies. The issue presented the most up-to-date information on the First Vision and provided solid historical support for Joseph Smith’s testimony. Leonard Arrington and James Allen, two members of the committee, summarized the existing articles and books published on early Church history. Milton Backman penned an article about his research into religious activities near Palmyra. And Dean Jessee, an archivist for the Church Historian’s Office, prepared an article about Joseph Smith’s First Vision accounts. Other articles treated similar topics. Aside from their value in defending the faith, Truman believed the essays showed the value of Saints working together to gain a more complete understanding of the history of the Restoration. He noted that many Church members had letters, diaries, and other documents in their possession that could be of immense use to historians.
“There are vital tasks of gathering, researching, and interpreting which are too vast for any one mind, or any one hundred minds,” he wrote in his preface to the BYU Studies issue. “They must involve us all.”
In the German Democratic Republic, meanwhile, Henry Burkhardt was overseeing several changes for the Saints under his care. After Elder Monson’s visit to Görlitz, the First Presidency had created a mission in Dresden, a major city in the GDR, and called Henry to be its president. A short time later, Elder Monson returned to the country to organize the mission, ordain Henry to the office of high priest, and set him apart in his new calling.
Henry’s wife, Inge, was called to serve alongside him. Since meeting the Burkhardts, Elder Monson had been troubled that the couple saw each other for only a few hours a week. “What you are doing is not all right,” he had told Henry. Now Inge, as a fellow mission leader, traveled regularly with him around the country and at times attended to duties in the mission office.
Henry preferred to travel alone, however, when he thought he might encounter problems. The government was still monitoring the activities of the Saints, but it had become less suspicious of the Church after Henry, an East German citizen, was called as mission president. As long as the Saints did not hold unscheduled meetings, print or mimeograph any Church materials, or act without caution, the authorities left them alone. They were free to hold sacrament meetings, go home teaching, and gather for Relief Society, Sunday School, priesthood, and Primary meetings.
Henry tried to be cautious. Many Saints in the country were worried about losing contact with the broader Church, and they longed to have more printed Church materials. Sometimes the government allowed the Saints to import large numbers of print materials, like hymnbooks and scriptures. But usually, Church members had to make do with what they had. To accommodate restrictions against printing and mimeographing Church materials, Henry enlisted trusted volunteers who made copies of the manuals with typewriters and carbon paper.
Doing so was not breaking the law, so Henry felt justified in making and distributing the manuals. But the practice still worried him. Laws restricting religious freedom were not always written down or evenly enforced throughout the country. Henry knew all too well that Stasi officers did not need a reason to arrest him. If the wrong officer found him with foreign Church manuals, Henry could easily end up in serious trouble.
Even though conditions in the country were not ideal, the Church carried on. Remarkably, forty-seven people had been baptized in 1968. At the time Elder Monson set up the Dresden Mission, there were 4,641 East German Saints in forty-seven branches and seven districts. The Saints were attending meetings, doing home teaching, and holding Church activities when possible. They even held a “Genealogy Week” and submitted fourteen thousand names for temple work.
As Henry reflected on his new calling, he committed himself and his family to all it required. “It should now be our job to work with all our might to build up the Church,” Henry wrote in his journal. “Together with Inge, I hope to master all tasks and overcome my own weaknesses as well.”