The Unmoveable Bank

This is the first house I lived in on my mission in Brazil:

The house consisted of just three rooms: a tiny bedroom, a tiny bathroom, and the slightly larger room visible in the photograph. This room was a little bit of everything - a kitchen, a study, a living room, even a laundry room (you can see a clothesline strung across the room). The walls were literally made of dirt that had been painted over, but you can see strips where the paint had worn through. If you touched the brown part of the wall a little cascade of dirt would fall to the floor. The house was so perpetually abafado (a Portuguese word meaning humid, stuffy, and suffocating) that my first companion left a suit untouched on a hanger for about two months and when he finally needed to wear it he found it was covered with mold. Every few weeks the freezer would completely freeze over and we'd break up the giant ice chunk and then unplug it so it would thaw out, creating a small lake in the main room. Oh, and my bed was literally a pile of bricks with an ancient, thin little mattress on top. It was hard to sleep on it, but that may have been because of all of the loud music and yelling from the bar next door.

I had no idea that I was living in a hellhole. It was my first mission house and I assumed that the state of the house was typical of what I would experience for the next two years. Missionaries had been living in that house for years and my first companion made no apologies for the house, so I just accepted it as normal. However, after two months he was transferred away and the instant my second companion set foot in the house a look of disgust passed over his face as he declared, "We need to move ASAP." He called in the missionaries from the mission office to have a look at our house and they said that they had never seen such an unhealthy missionary habitation. They deemed our quarters unfit for human habitation and ordered us to devote most of our time to finding a new place to live.

We spent weeks visiting various real estate agencies* looking for a house that would be in the right price range, in a non-scary neighborhood, and comply with the church's strict requirements for missionary housing. The house search was exhausting and after two months it seemed like we would never find anything suitable. But then one day as we were tracking down a referral we saw a house with a "for rent" sign. Within a few minutes we had taken a quickie tour of the house and my companion had negotiated a deal with the landlord for us to move in that very day. On the way back home my companion stopped a guy with a truck and offered him twenty reais if he would swing by our old house in an hour.

We got home and I had to haphazardly throw all of my stuff together in order to be ready in just one hour. I hadn't finished gathering and organizing all my stuff when the truck pulled up, so I had to throw most of my belongings loose into the truck bed, and I think I lost a bunch of stuff in the process.

Within two hours we were all moved into our new house, never to return to the former house. The new house was palatial compared to our old house, and more importantly it was clean and in a much nicer location. However, before the dust had a chance to settle in our old house I became really sulky, to the astonishment of my companion. "What's the matter?" he asked. "That was too sudden," I replied. "Huh? Didn't you hate the old house?" "Of course. It was awful." "Then what's the problem?"

The problem was that although I did indeed hate the old house, I had somehow endured living there for four months and I had formed an attachment to the place (in this case, the attachment was more like Stockholm Syndrome). Yes, it was amazing that, given the amount of mold on everything, the old house hadn't made me violently ill. Yes, I did love the new house and was looking forward to non-dirt walls and a non-pile-o'-bricks bed. It made no sense to me that I was upset about the move, but I felt like the hastiness of the move provided me with no closure whatsoever.

The point of this really long story is that I find moving to be really jarring. This time around I've had more than just an hour to prepare myself, but I still find it hard to make a clean break with a place where I have spent so much time, had so many experiences, and created so many memories. I've had a good three-year run here on Lancashire Dr. - it was a prefect combo of low price, easy accessibility to school, cool roommates, and close proximity to the fence mural. It's also kind of sad because this particular apartment has been inhabited by guys from the Hill Street Ward for many, many years and we're severing the chain.

I could keep on moaning about leaving Ann Arbor, but instead I'll let the fine folks at Boyz II Men tell you how I feel:



(When I mentioned Boyz II Men you thought I was going to post this song, didn't you? Psych!)

*A real estate agency is called an imobiliária, one of my favorite Portuguese words. So fun to say. The word for a piece of property is imóvel ("unmoveable"), as opposed to a móvel ("moveable"), which is the Portuguese word for furniture. Makes perfect sense: furniture = moveable, houses = not moveable. Also, the game Monopoly in Brazil is called Banco Imobiliário ("Real Estate Bank"), which translated literally means "Unmoveable Bank." Next time you get together for a game night with friends, try suggesting a round of "Unmoveable Bank."