Chapter 26
I Want to Serve
The day after the explosion in Huaraz, doctors transferred Manuel Navarro to a clinic in Lima. There he was greeted by his mission president, Enrique Ibarra, and received a blessing from Elder Charles A. Didier, a member of the area presidency. In the blessing, Elder Didier promised that Manuel would soon leave the clinic and return to the mission field.
After attending to Manuel’s other injuries, doctors turned their focus to reconstructing his injured face. Shrapnel had cut his cheekbone and severed the optic nerve of his right eye, requiring the eye’s removal. His parents, who had come to Lima, broke the news to him. “Son,” his mother said, “they’re going to operate.”
Manuel was shocked. He felt no pain in his eye and, until now, did not know why it was bandaged. His mother comforted him. “We are here,” she said. “We are with you.”
With full financial support from the Church, Manuel underwent three operations to remove his eye and repair its damaged socket. It would be a long recovery, and members of his extended family thought he should return to his hometown once he was released from the clinic. But Manuel refused to leave the mission field. “My contract with the Lord is for two years, and it’s not up yet,” he told his father.
While recovering at the clinic, Manuel received visits from Luis Palomino, a friend from his hometown who was attending school in Lima. Although his injuries made it difficult for him to speak with Luis, Manuel began sharing the missionary lessons. Luis was surprised and impressed by Manuel’s decision to finish his mission.
“I want to know what is motivating you,” Luis told him. “Why is your faith so great?”
Six weeks after the explosion, Manuel left the clinic and started serving at the mission office in Lima. The threat of terrorism still loomed, and he was afraid every time he saw a car like the one that exploded. At night, he struggled to sleep without medication.
Each day, one of the elders in the mission office would change Manuel’s bandages. Manuel could not bear to look in the mirror and see his missing eye. Around three weeks after leaving the clinic, he received a prosthetic.
One day, Luis came to the mission office to visit Manuel. “I want to be baptized,” he told him. “What do I have to do?” The mission office was not far from where Luis lived, so over the next few weeks, Manuel and his companion taught Luis the rest of the lessons at a nearby chapel. Manuel was excited to teach a friend, and Luis eagerly completed all the goals he set with the missionaries.
On October 14, 1990, Manuel performed Luis’s baptism. He was still bothered by his injury, but the ordeal had made it possible for him to baptize a friend from his hometown—something he never expected to do on his mission. After Luis came out of the water, they embraced, and Manuel felt the Spirit strongly. He knew Luis could feel it too.
To commemorate the occasion, Manuel gave Luis a Bible. “When the days get dark,” Manuel wrote on the inside cover, “just remember this day, the day you were reborn.”
Back in Utah, meanwhile, Darius Gray received a telephone call from his friend Margery “Marie” Taylor, a specialist in African American genealogy at the Church’s Family History Library in Salt Lake City. She had just found some rolls of microfilm with important African American records on them, and she could hardly contain her excitement. “You need to come here so you can appreciate it,” she said.
Intrigued, Darius agreed to meet with her. The Family History Library was the largest genealogical center in the world, and hundreds of thousands of people visited every year. When Darius had first gone to the library, he had known little about his ancestors beyond what he’d gleaned from family stories and photographs. Marie had been the one to help him find more answers. Though not Black herself, she had proved to be an adept guide in introducing Darius to records about his family and the history of Black people in the United States.
When Darius arrived at the Family History Library, Marie showed him the records she found. The Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company had been chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1865 to help provide financial security to freeborn and formerly enslaved African Americans. More than a hundred thousand people had set up accounts with the bank, but it failed after nine years, taking its customers’ hard-earned savings with it.
Despite the bank’s failure, its record books were immensely valuable to genealogists. Descendants of enslaved people often struggled to find details about their ancestors. The records people usually used to identify family names and dates—such as cemetery listings, voter registries, and birth and death certificates—either did not exist for enslaved people or were not widely available. The Freedman’s Bank records, however, included a wealth of personal information about account holders, including the names of family members and where they had been enslaved. Some records even contained physical descriptions of clients.
Darius could immediately see the importance of this information for African Americans. But the records themselves posed a major problem for researchers. The clerks who kept the books had recorded the names and details of account holders in the order they had come in to open an account, not alphabetically. This meant that researchers had to comb through the record books line by line until they found the information they were seeking. To be useful, the records needed to be better organized.
Marie asked Darius if members of the Genesis Group could help transcribe and index the records, but not enough people had the time—or a personal computer—to do the work. Darius wrote to one of the apostles to ask if the Church could assist. While the apostle expressed his support, he said the Church could not undertake the project. At the time, Church headquarters did not generally sponsor name-extraction projects. Stakes and wards handled that work.
Running out of options, Marie had another idea. Over the past twenty-five years, the Church had established more than twelve hundred family history centers in forty-five countries. These centers were places where people both in and out of the Church could learn more about their ancestors. Usually, the centers were attached to stakes, but Marie knew a family history center had recently opened at the Utah State Prison. Inmates could use the center an hour a week. What if she and Darius recruited them to help on the Freedman’s Bank project?
Marie spoke with the family history director at the prison, and before long, four inmate volunteers were hard at work on the records.
In September 1990, Alice Johnson was taking classes at Holy Child Teacher Training College in Takoradi, Ghana. More than a year had passed since the government had suspended Church operations in the country, abruptly ending her mission. At first, she’d been unsure what to do next. But at her sister’s recommendation, she had decided to become a teacher, and she was accepted by the training college for the following academic year.
As the freeze persisted, month after month, Alice and other Church members adapted to home worship. Emmanuel Kissi, the president of the Accra Ghana District, became the acting mission president and presiding Church authority in the country. He traveled extensively throughout Ghana, visiting and strengthening the Saints. The government permitted the Church’s “essential services” to remain open temporarily, allowing some Church employees to keep working in welfare, Church education, and distribution. The Saints could not pay tithing or give offerings, but some set aside their earnings, patiently waiting for when they could make donations again.
Unlike William Acquah and the Saints briefly imprisoned in Cape Coast, Alice experienced no harassment during the freeze. She and a few friends would gather on Sundays in a private home to partake of the sacrament, pray, and give talks. Her parents, who continued to serve their mission without wearing a badge or missionary attire, would visit her whenever they were in the area. Yet Alice felt like she was standing still while she waited for regular Church meetings to resume.
Finally, in November 1990, Alice learned that the government had lifted its ban on the Church. From the start of the freeze, President Kissi and other Saints had been lobbying government officials to end restrictions. In response to misinformation about Church teachings, they wrote long letters explaining Church doctrine and history and petitioned government leaders in person. When officials raised concerns about the Church’s former priesthood restriction, the Saints explained that Black members enjoyed all the rights of any other people in the Church. Other churches that had been hostile to the Latter-day Saints also defended the Saints’ right to worship once they saw that the freeze put their own religious freedom at risk.
A key person in lifting the ban was Isaac Addy, the Church’s regional manager for temporal affairs in Ghana. He was the older half-brother of the president of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings. The brothers were estranged, and Isaac had not wanted to speak with Jerry about the freeze. One day, however, Georges Bonnet, the director for temporal affairs for Africa, prevailed on him to pray until his heart softened toward his brother. Isaac did so, and the Spirit touched his heart. He agreed to meet with Jerry. They spoke that night, and by the end of the discussion, they had resolved their differences. The next day, the government decided to end the freeze.
Alice was emotional when she returned to public Church meetings for the first time in eighteen months. Nearly a hundred Saints attended the Takoradi Branch that day, and the meeting lasted more than two hours because so many people went up to bear their testimonies.
Alice felt both excitement and worry as she thought about the converts from her mission in Koforidua. She wondered if they had stayed true to the gospel over the past year and a half. She knew that some Church members had grown discouraged and left the faith.
Shortly after the freeze ended, the first two stakes in Ghana were organized. In Cape Coast, Alice’s father, Billy Johnson, was called to serve as stake patriarch. The government, meanwhile, allowed the Saints to resume missionary work in the country. Grant Gunnell, the newly called president of the Ghana Accra Mission, called Alice in for an interview. He had located sixty of the missionaries who were serving before the freeze and wanted to know if they were willing to return to the mission field.
“Would you like to come back and serve a mission after school?” he asked.
“No,” she said without hesitation. “I want to serve right now.”
“What?” the president asked, surprised by her quick answer.
“I want to do it right now,” she repeated. Her priority had always been to serve God, and she was willing to put her education on hold for Him.
Soon, Alice reported back to the mission field. When she told her father, a man who had devoted so much of his life to preaching the restored gospel, he was not surprised.
“That’s my daughter,” he said.
When Manuel Navarro completed his mission in March 1991, his parents came to Lima to pick him up. Since he did not live in a stake, the local mission president released him from service. Yet Manuel was not quite ready to return to Nazca, his hometown in southern Peru. He had promised a friend in his last area that he would come to her baptism, so he and his parents stayed in the city for another week.
One morning, Manuel and his father went out to buy bread for breakfast. His father realized he had forgotten to bring money, so he turned around and headed back inside. “Wait for me here,” he said.
Manuel froze. After having a mission companion for so long, it felt strange to be alone on the street. After a moment, he decided to stay put. “I’m not a missionary anymore,” he thought.
Even after returning to Nazca, Manuel struggled to adapt to life after the mission—especially with his injury. Shaking hands was harder with one eye. He kept putting his hand in the wrong place. Then a brother in his branch began to play ping-pong with him, and tracking the small, white ball with one eye helped him develop better depth perception.
In April, Manuel moved to a larger city, Ica, to begin his university studies in automotive mechanics. It was less than a hundred miles from Nazca, and he had friends and family who lived there. He lived at his aunt’s house in a room he had to himself. His mother worried about him and would call him almost every night on the telephone. “Son,” she often told him, “always remember prayer.” Whenever he felt anguished, he prayed for strength and found refuge in the Lord.
To encourage young, unmarried Saints to meet and socialize, the Ica Stake offered institute classes and had a single-adult group that held activities and devotionals. Manuel found a home at these activities and in his new ward in Ica. While the children at church often stared at his prosthetic eye, adults treated him like any other member.
One day, Manuel was invited to meet with Alexander Nunez, the stake president in Ica. Manuel had known President Nunez since he was a teenager in Nazca, and President Nunez had visited his seminary class as a coordinator for the Church Educational System. Manuel admired him a great deal.
During the interview, President Nunez called Manuel to serve on the stake high council.
“Wow!” Manuel said to himself. Usually, Saints serving in stake callings were older and more experienced than he was. Yet President Nunez expressed confidence in him.
In the weeks that followed, Manuel visited his assigned wards. At first, he was self-conscious as he worked with ward leaders. But he learned to focus on the call, not on himself. As he studied the Church handbooks and reported to the stake, he no longer feared being too young for his position. He found that he enjoyed sharing his testimony with Saints in the stake, attending devotionals, and encouraging young people to serve missions.
The problems caused by Manuel’s injuries did not go away. Sometimes, when he was alone, he felt sad and shaken when he thought about the attack he suffered. The scriptures were full of miraculous stories of faithful people being healed of infirmities or preserved from danger. Yet they also told the stories of people like Job and Joseph Smith, who suffered pain and injustice without immediate deliverance. At times, when he thought about his injuries, Manuel wondered, “Why did this have to happen to me?”
Still, he knew he was fortunate to have survived the attack. In the months following his injury, terrorists had targeted and killed Church members and missionaries, spreading sorrow and fear among the Saints in Peru. Yet things were changing. The Peruvian government had begun cracking down on terrorism, leading to fewer attacks. And in the Church, the local Saints embraced an effort called “Trust in the Lord,” which invited them to fast, pray, and exercise faith that they would be delivered from the violence in their country.
Manuel found that his schoolwork and service in the Church helped him cope with his hardships. He trusted in the Lord and thought of Him often.
Around the time Manuel returned from his mission, Gordon B. Hinckley, the first counselor in the First Presidency, traveled to Hong Kong to look at potential sites for a house of the Lord. As a young apostle, he had supervised the development of the Church in Asia, and he was overjoyed by its progress. The region now had two hundred thousand Saints and four temples, located in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines. While countries like Myanmar, Laos, Mongolia, and Nepal had no Church presence yet, new branches were taking root in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India.
Hong Kong, home to the Church’s Asia Area office, was a British territory. In six years, however, authority over the region would pass from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China.
As part of the handover, China promised to honor Hong Kong’s economic and political systems and respect the religious practices of its citizens. Even so, with eighteen thousand Saints living in the territory, Church leaders felt compelled to build a house of the Lord there before the transfer of authority.
President Hinckley spent a day looking at various locations, but he did not find any affordable options. In other areas of the world, the Church could avoid purchasing expensive city lots by building temples in suburbs. But Hong Kong was a densely populated region of over five million people, making suitable land almost impossible to acquire.
President Hinckley wondered if the Church should simply build a temple on one of the small lots it already owned in the city. He imagined a high-rise multipurpose building, with lower floors serving as a chapel and mission office.
“The three top floors could become a temple,” he thought. “It could be done without any problems.”
It was an interesting possibility. But the Church had never built such a building, and he wasn’t sure if that was the best option for the Saints in Hong Kong.
On June 15, 1991, Hungary’s historic Budapest Opera House thundered with applause as the Tabernacle Choir performed its final encore for an audience of fourteen hundred people. Among the concertgoers were Elder Russell M. Nelson and his wife, Dantzel. They were traveling with the choir on a three-week tour of various European countries.
Elder Nelson had spent five years leading the Church’s efforts to improve its relationship with governments in central and eastern Europe. Many of the countries, including Hungary, were transitioning away from communist leadership. Czechoslovakia now enjoyed complete religious freedom, and the government officially recognized the Church. East Germany and West Germany had become one country, bringing the old restrictions in the GDR to an end. Missionaries were now permitted in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, and Croatia as well.
The choir’s tour was an opportunity to build bridges. And from the sound of the applause, the concert had done just that.
“I want you to know,” one Hungarian man told a choir member after the performance, “my wife and I, we believe in God too. We understand what your music tells us.”
The next day, Elder Nelson spoke at a sacrament meeting in a hotel ballroom overlooking the hill where he had dedicated Hungary for gospel preaching four years earlier. He had been with a handful of people then, including the only member of the Church in Budapest. Now the country was home to four hundred Saints.
From Hungary, the choir traveled to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Elder Nelson met up with Elder Dallin H. Oaks in the Soviet republic of Armenia, where the Church had given humanitarian aid after a devastating earthquake. Since Elder Nelson’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1987, significant political and social changes had taken place in the country. It had become more open to foreigners, and the people of several Soviet republics were now seeking greater control over their local affairs. There was also more religious freedom in the region, and interest in religion was growing.
Although the Church had no official presence in the Soviet Union, nothing prevented Soviet citizens from traveling abroad, finding the restored gospel, and bringing it back with them when they returned home. By 1990, there were enough Saints in Leningrad, Russia, and Tallinn, Estonia, to register the Church in those cities. In the meantime, missionaries and Saints in Finland were assigned to support the new converts.
In Moscow, Elder Nelson was amazed by how tolerant the Russian government had become toward the Church. Over the past few years, he had crossed the Atlantic several times to meet with government officials in eastern Europe. At first, they rarely seemed pleased to see him, and he had often felt that his efforts were fruitless. Then the Lord provided a way forward.
The Saints now had a branch in Leningrad. Church members in the cities of Vyborg and Moscow had also obtained government approval for their small congregations. The progress was remarkable, and Elder Nelson hoped that soon the Church might be publicly recognized throughout Russia, by far the largest republic in the Soviet Union.
After a concert by the Tabernacle Choir at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, the Nelsons and Elder Oaks crossed the street to the Metropol Hotel, where the Church hosted a postconcert dinner. Elder Nelson had attended many such dinners and receptions on this tour thanks to Beverly Campbell, the director of the Church’s International Affairs Office in Washington, DC. In this role, Beverly had arranged meetings and built relationships between Church representatives and government officials around the world.
At the dinner, Elder Nelson stepped up to a microphone and thanked the many dignitaries for coming. He then invited Alexander Rutskoi, the vice president of Russia, to join him in front of the crowd. “We would be grateful,” Elder Nelson said, “to have any comment you would care to make.”
“My dear guests,” Vice President Rutskoi said, “we are pleased this evening to have the opportunity of welcoming these guests here with us tonight. I’d like to read to you this registration form, which is dated May 28, 1991, which registers The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.”
As Vice President Rutskoi read the document, Elder Nelson was overwhelmed. He had hoped the public announcement was coming soon, but he had not expected it that night. Receiving formal recognition meant the Church would be able to send more missionaries to Russia, print and distribute Church literature, and establish more congregations.
The next day, amid visits to government officials with Elder Oaks and a few others, Elder Nelson went to a small park near the Kremlin and offered a prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord.
A week later, the two apostles visited President Benson at his Salt Lake City apartment. They showed him a copy of the document registering the Church in Russia and told him the Church was now established in eastern Europe.
When he heard the news, President Benson’s face lit up with joy.