As the composer and lyricist of “Nephi’s Courage,” Lisa Hansen’s influence is felt in Primaries across the Church. But it is her work as the leader of a gay choir in Utah County that now occupies much of Lisa’s time. As a Marriage and Family Therapy graduate student at BYU, Lisa is a counselor for gay LDS youth and the author of a curriculum for LDS families of gay youth. You’re a grandmother and yet you have gone back to school, working on your PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy. How did you decide that you wanted to go back to school? Yes, I have seven grandkids. I’ve always known that I wanted to do something to help couples. Relationships seem to be more difficult than ever to maintain and I worked in a law office for 20 years, watching relationships fall apart, and that gave me even more motivation. I finished my bachelor’s degree when I was eight months pregnant with child number six. I took a hiatus from school until child number seven, my youngest, was in college. I applied for master’s programs, but I think it took a little convincing to let schools know that someone over fifty who hadn’t been in school for ages could do a master’s degree program. I went to BYU and got my master’s in the marriage and family therapy program. Has it been hard to study as an older person? I study differently than I did when I was younger. I find it hard to study late at night, so I basically study all the time. When I wake up I study a little bit, and study some more and if I don’t remember things, I say oh well, and I just keep going. I still have my master’s thesis to finish off before I can start the PhD program. My thesis is on the effect of children’s attachment to parents, especially when the parents have conflict. My research is showing that the more attached children are to their fathers, the less deleterious the effects when there is conflict in the marriage. Children tend not to do well when there’s parental conflict, but if they have a lot of bonding and affection, they tend not to do as poorly. It seems to be that the fathers that have the more protective influence. For my PhD, I am interested in looking at women on missions and the attitude of mission presidents towards sister missionaries. I want to see if there is a link between the physical and mental outlook of women on missions and the attitudes of presidents towards sister missionaries. Some sisters do well and some are more likely to come home early. Some missions organize districts of sisters and some sisters feel subordinate to male missionaries. Some treat them as equals; in fact, there are missions where a sister and an elder both assist the mission president. Now that women can serve at a younger age, there will be many more women serving, which will likely change some of the assumptions about women missionaries, and will likely affect the way they are viewed by men and women alike. I suspect we will see beneficial change as we become more aware of the effects of mission service on a larger population of women. You act as a counselor on the Brigham Young University campus for gay youth. What motivated you to use your psychology skills in this way? I have always felt a resonance, an empathy, a sense of what it’s like not to belong when you want to belong so desperately. Being aware of my own intense psychological states growing up often made me feel separate from other people. And then psychological separation creates a labyrinthine world that stretches out the days and minutes of growing up into a constant winding inward, ending up feeling essentially inadequate. I began suspecting that gay and lesbian members of the church felt the same way. It just seems to make sense to me: that young people who grow up in the Church want what has always been promised to them, which is that sense of belonging. If they have been faithful, they’ve been promised the kind of relationship and family interaction that leads to eternal hope: the plan of happiness. But it seems that it is only available to members of the church if you can manage to be straight. And I feel deeply for those young people who try so hard to be straight and then eventually come to an understanding that it isn’t going to work well for them. I know for some who have started out with some gay feelings, they find ways they can still have a marriage relationship that fits in with the gospel plan. And I don’t mean to detract from that at all, because I’m glad for those who have been able to make that work; I’m happy their dreams are coming true. But I believe there is a significant number of young people who find they are not able to do that with integrity. And then they feel that that they cannot participate fully in what the Church teaches and offers, because they feel like an abomination even if they maintain celibacy and are faithful to what they have believed. In what ways have you felt the Lord lead you down this path of helping gay LDS youth? Like most of us, gay and lesbian people surround me. Their desire for community touches me. Their desire to be in community with me is an honor. I have watched many young people in my neighborhood grow up and have felt pain because what they have to offer has been dismissed because it was gay, didn’t fit, was feared, and finally rejected. These have been some of my favorite people with some of the tenderest souls who, in order to survive and thrive had to move away from my community (both figuratively and literally). And heaven knows, if each of us gave of ourselves to be supportive emotionally and spiritually to the people we know who are struggling to belong, that would be a great work. I’m not sure how long ago it was that I was just sitting at a desk and suddenly the idea popped in my mind, “Why not start a choir for gay people in Utah County?” There is not much here for you to participate in if you’re gay without feeling like you’re separating yourself in a way that might make others raise an eyebrow and suspect you mean to be in everyone else’s face as a gay person. So I organized a choir. I think some people do raise their eyebrows at the choir, but we sing uplifting music and spiritual music. I think the very first song we sang was Lead Kindly Light? And this past summer we sang “I’m Trying to Be Like Jesus,” as well as a repertoire of other fun songs. The choir means to be uplifting, in both a social and a spiritual way. Lisa Hansen Leading Her Choir Tell me about your involvement in the Understanding Same-Gender Attraction group at BYU. The Understanding Same-Gender Attraction group has been meeting for about three years, and I just became involved with it about two years ago. Anyone can get involved simply by attending their Thursday night meetings. Gay, lesbian, and supportive straight people are welcome.They don’t advertise on campus, but if you look for the group online you can find it, and it’s fully supported by the administration. USGA’s goal is to “strengthen families and the BYU community by providing a place for open, respectful discussions on the topic of same-gender attraction.” Those who know about it and attend it seem to feel that it is helping. As part of my master’s work, I interned in the Women’s Services Office—where we mostly saw women who dropped in for counseling—and at the Comprehensive Clinic, where I saw both men and women and worked on marriage and family issues. As a counselor on the BYU campus, I counseled a fair number of gay students whose campus experiences were made considerably happier by knowing about the USGA group. I also know of people who did not know about it and felt they had to leave campus because they didn’t feel like they belonged and could find no supportive community. So it’s performing an important, if unsung, service. The gay and lesbian clients I’ve worked with did not list being gay or lesbian as the reason they were seeking counseling, so my seeing them was not the result of any particular therapeutic assignment. Silence seems to still be the rule of survival for many gay and lesbian young people, particularly those who are struggling to conform to the straight plan of happiness. But since the plan of happiness for gay and lesbian members seems out of reach in this life, they are likely to experience levels of depression and anxiety that are greater than the general public. We may be more likely to see them in counseling situations, particularly when they have a faith that motivates them to belong among the saints. Are the gay people you counsel able to find happiness in the gospel without going the direction of marriage and family? I believe in the future that there will be a wave of gay members who are able to maintain activity. But, right now, as soon as young men feel they are gay or have these strong feelings, they are not welcomingly talked about in a ward setting. I still regularly hear trivializing and demeaning comments about gays and lesbians in church that embarrass me, including the “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” quip so often, I wonder if some children think it’s scripture. To realize that you have homosexual feelings and that you are not really wanted and valued is a tough row to hoe. To find some kind of happiness, they have to negate part of themselves—church or sexuality—and that’s hard for mental health. Those who faithfully attend but feel a stigma at church may be opening themselves to anxiety and depression unless they have tremendous support. What do I do in counseling with gay and lesbian young people? The guiding principle is that I encourage them to find out what God wants them to do. I encourage them to look at the consequences (internal and external) of their choices, and ask how they feel about them. Choosing to find new parts of the self in a spiritual community with covenants and eternal promises, while leaving other parts of the old self behind, can be freeing and empowering, but it can also be devastating. Choosing to leave old spiritual parts of the self behind to come into new spirituality can move people in different directions. At BYU, I can use the young person’s relationship with God as a beacon toward the kind of life the young person’s best self most dreams of: a life of connection and service and community. That has taken different pathways for different clients. There are no easy answers. Lisa Hansen at a Foster Daughter's Graduation Currently, in the Church, Ty Mansfield is the best example we have of someone who has experienced homosexual feelings and is married and who has found a place of peace with this. He is working with the North Star organization, a support organization for LDS individuals and families with same-sex attraction, to get information to those who may follow in his footsteps and find some success. He has a new book out, a compilation of essays that are meant to help people in that situation. It is published by Deseret Book and called Voices of Hope. His first book is In Quiet Desperation. Both books offer a great deal of hope. How do you see the families of gay members working together to support them? As part of my work at BYU, I created a family support group curriculum. But so far, we have had no takers. We advertized at BYU and through various stake presidencies. I am guessing that this is private enough and tender enough that families are reluctant to talk openly about what is going on with their child and how they feel about it, especially with strangers. Families are where we need to do the most work. A number of parents still believe that you can encourage your homosexually-tended child to be more heterosexually attracted by engaging in certain behaviors. They say things like, “Don’t hang out with your gay friends. Don’t research being gay on the Internet.” The Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco University has reported on a longitudinal study which found that gay and lesbian youth whose parents tried to do that actually felt rejected by their parents, and that kind of rejection had a significant and measurable effect on their suicide and depression rates and their likelihood of using drugs. Behaviors that some parents think will help their child end up increasing the risk of awful outcomes. I hope eventually that families become involved in the family support group curriculum. If you could suggest any helps for families, what would they be? There are two good organizations, the PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbian and Gays) and then there is LDS Family Fellowship, an LDS organization supporting families who have gay members. The thrust of both programs is to love and not reject your child, which of course would contribute to lowering suicide rates. There needs to be greater love and acceptance within our ward families, too. I know of families that have chosen to be accepting, and yet going to church is still a painful experience for them and for their child, increasing the child’s self-loathing. It’s a common experience for kids to say, “It’s either suicide or I have to quit going to church, I am so loathsome to the Lord they want me to believe in.” Lisa Hansen and Her Husband Is this topic addressed in the curriculum that you helped produce? What happens at church and the experiences of young people at church are an important discussion in the curriculum. Young people who believe their families understand them and defend them are more likely to keep attending church. But families are trying to process new information about their child against the backdrop of a judgmental and non-accepting society. Trying to see things from the child’s point of view may be difficult because we are so used to seeing homosexuality from the point of view of being temple-worthy people. Every active LDS parent’s hope—it’s in every baby blessing—is that the child go to the temple some day. And if your child is gay, that goal seems at risk. What are your reactions to the Church’s new website, mormonsandgays.com? I’m delighted first of all that official talk about this topic addresses people as lesbians and gays, and not just people suffering from same-sex attraction. The terms “gay” and “lesbian” are associated with less depression and anxiety. I am also delighted that the website makes the subject less taboo for open discussion. Perhaps we can move the discussion out of the primary domains of the bishop’s office and the corners of the meetinghouse and into the Relief Society, quorum and Young Men and Women’s meetings. We need to welcome and value our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, and I think the website helps us start to do that. I also hope for much more understanding than is currently available, even on the website. The mental health of our gay and lesbian young people is in our power to do something about. We can reduce the suicides that plague this population. Tell me one more interesting contribution you have made. Well, my sister told me I had to share this in this interview: My husband and I wrote the primary song, “Nephi’s Courage”–“I will go, I will do…” We wrote the music and lyrics together. He played the piano a lot while the kids were growing up. If Dad thinks being musical is cool, then kids seem to engage in it more often. Both my experience and my academic research have shown me the kids are more likely to think it is wonderful when Dad is involved. At A Glance Name: Lisa Tensmeyer Hansen Location: Payson, UT Age: 54 Marital status: Married 35 years to Wilford (Bill) Hansen Children: 1) Mike, 34; 2) BJ, 32; 3) Amelie, 30; 4) Maggie, 27; 5) Melanie, 25; 6) Nels, 22; 7) Rachel, 20; 8 ) F.E. Student Serena, 32; 9) F.E. Student Chu Man-Chi; 21; 10) Foster Daughter Meisha, 18; 7 grandchildren Occupation: Legal Secretary; Ph.D. candidate, BYU Marriage and Family Therapy Schools Attended: M.S. BYU, 2012, Marriage and Family Therapy; B.S. BYU, 1990 (pregnantwith child #6 at graduation); Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis (where alumnus DavidLetterman is still legendary for some actions that actually happened and some that are surelyrumors) Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Lord, We Come Before Thee Now” (Hymns #162) Interview by Deila Taylor

Married to Brandon Flowers, the frontman of an internationally-known rock band, Tana and her husband spend much of their time apart. To combat the common consequences of a public career, mother their three boisterous boys, and maintain intimacy in her marriage, Tana builds upon the skills she learned during her conversion to the gospel nine years ago by asking the Lord and listening to the Spirit for answers to the questions in her everyday life. Your husband grew up in an LDS family. What was his influence on your conversion and what was your conversion experience like? I’m not going to give him too much credit. Brandon, when we met, was 20 and I was 20. He wasn’t church-going. It’s really weird to talk about how I found the church, because it’s almost like it found me in a way. Being around Brandon’s family, I knew they were Mormon, but nobody was in my face about it. I didn’t feel like there was anything wrong with not being LDS. Brandon was in a band with The Killers’ guitarist when we met. Their band started moving along, and we started to drift apart a bit. We were still dating when I had this moment when I was driving and I just heard a voice say, “Read the Book of Mormon.” Which was a weird thing, because I wasn’t even thinking about that. But I felt a rush, like this was a good idea. It felt like that was the right thing to do, like, this is a chance—take it. So that night, I asked Brandon’s mom for a Book of Mormon. She gave me a Book of Mormon that Brandon’s dad meant to give to someone else, so it had his testimony in it, which was interesting to read. So I started reading the Book of Mormon, and I was just like, this is it. I’m so thankful to be a convert because the emotions I get from the Book of Mormon and the experiences I have are so new. I feel like in my experience with the church, we are all individuals, and that is one of the things I believe most strongly. Heavenly Father knew how to get to me, and He just gave me that chance. I feel so weird talking about my conversion because it doesn’t always make sense. Brandon will tell you, I was the furthest thing away from a Mormon; it was almost like dating me was a rebellion against everything he was taught growing up. I grew up with a crazy family. When I met Brandon and his family I thought, you have parents and brothers and sisters who spend time together? It was all new. The Church was new. Everything was new Lana Flowers So in raising your kids, do you feel like you have good examples? How do you navigate through parenting? I couldn’t imagine being a mom without the Church. I can’t see it. Before I was a member of the Church, I had no intention of having children. I hadn’t seen families work out yet. There’s a John Bytheway talk I like to listen to and it says that you have the ability to change things for generations. And I just hope I do that for my kids. So it’s a lot of prayer and reading. Being a mom is such a weird blessing because it’s a lot of mini-trials throughout the day. It’s like, am I going to get mad about this or this? But at the same time, I can’t imagine having as much growth as a person without being a mom—spiritually and growing up. It gives me confidence, too. I have that peace of being happy with myself, being happy with my choices, being happy with who I am because of the Church. Motherhood isn’t really something I need to navigate because if I stay on my path, I feel comfortable. How do you feel like you learn your path? What feelings do you feel when you know you are on the right path? I just feel comfortable. I feel happy, I feel settled. I tend to be an anxious person, so when I feel anxious, I know that I need to fix something. So I ask Heavenly Father what it is that needs to be fixed, and I go through everything it could possibly be. It could be something simple, like it’s a pain to wash my face upstairs in the morning because the kids are awake—let’s just figure it out. So I’ll wash my face downstairs. I’m always trying to figure out how to make my actions easier and better. I just feel weird being so blessed to be at a point in my life where I can finally feel peace and feel calm and not have such chaos around me. So when you do feel anxious or discouraged, what do you find helps you?S Oh, it’s hard. Sometimes, I’ll have a real problem with anxiety. It’s kind of tough because it’s medical and I have the symptoms. It’s hard to deal with. In the past I would go out for a run by myself, but I don’t have babysitters that will come and watch the kids that early in the morning. I always fall back on asking for answers in my prayers. One of my questions is: Do I need to take medicine right now or do I not need to take medicine right now to get through this? Artwork by Their Son Ammon After I had Henry, I kind of went into a dip and got depressed. It was hard. It has to be something about having three kids in such a short amount of time. I probably did something; I probably tripped some wire and shorted a fuse in my brain somewhere! So I was having a really hard time struggling with that because I’m typically a happy, outgoing person. And then when I feel like that part of me is dimming, I get stressed, because I think, wait, that’s not who I am and I can’t feel like who I am right now because I’m having these symptoms. So after having Henry, I prayed about it. I always feel like my answers to my prayers zigzag: I get taken around a loop before I accept something that’s a little more out there than I would initially accept. So my loop was, I went to the doctor and got medicine, even though I don’t like being on the medicine because part of me feels like I’m giving something up. So I thought, there has to be some other way. I started looking at holistic solutions and herbal medications, so now I take herbal medicines and drink herbal teas. It works better for me. Heavenly Father knew I wasn’t going to go into an herbal store and say, “I’m here!” So he gave me the opportunity to find the answer for myself, which led me to take another risk. It’s so amazing the direction things go. So basically, to handle my anxiety, I ask questions and I just get led around and I try to listen. With your family apart a lot of the time, how do you maintain unity? That is hard. For instance, Ammon made a present today and it has Brandon’s picture on it, and Henry sometimes freaks out and wants his dad. Ammon has a really hard time—he’s anxious too—so he had a hard time at school when it started. He had separation issues. I’ll bring up Brandon’s absence myself to the kids and say, “I miss Daddy right now.” So I just try to let them know it’s okay to feel what they feel and to say it. It’s hard, but at the same time, I can’t complain. My husband has a good job. I think everybody has those challenges with jobs and other demands. It’s just something we all deal with. And I’ve been doing it for so long—being away from him — so it’s not really that big of a deal anymore. My personality does well with some time apart from my husband. Plus, I still get butterflies when I’m around my husband, which is great! So what helps you deal with the distance in your marriage? I don’t really deal with the outside world. I don’t ever go on the computer. I don’t have a Facebook account; my husband and I are adamant about no Facebook. I have friendships, but I don’t seek friendships online. My husband is concerned about privacy with his work, of course, but I know he’s concerned for us too. So we just work on the relationships we already have more than seeking others. We have a really close circle of people around us. We’re not popular, so that helps our marriage. It’s more intimate for us. We don’t have friendships that take time from each other. Also, if my husband were not an active member of the Church, I would not be married to him. I just couldn’t do it, because I would not be married to a guy in a band on the road unless I knew what he believed in, and he stood his ground. I think having trust in my husband and his faith and knowing how strong his faith is definitely helps. I never feel preoccupied about what he is or is not doing. Heavenly Father blesses women. We have sensors and we know what’s going on. Brandon and I both work hard for our family and that’s our job. Is there an experience you fall back on when you are in need of more faith? When I was little, I had experiences growing up when I was really, really frightened and I remember feeling comforted, like I was going to be okay. I remember just being little and feeling that peace and the calmness. There were scary situations. My mom had a really abusive husband. Now when I think about it, I can’t believe I wasn’t more terrified of these things. That feeling that I was going to be okay and I wasn’t going to be hurt is a testimony to me that when you need it, Heavenly Father will speak to you. You’ll hear something. I just listen to little things. I listen and I’m always trying to hear. Listening has always been kind of natural to me in a weird way but now that I’m a member of the Church, I understand where that comes from. All along I’ve had help and I’ve had Heavenly Father’s love with me. At A Glance Name: Tana Flowers Location: Las Vegas, NV Marital status: Married Occupation: Mother Children: Ammon (5), Gunnar (3), and Henry (1) Interview by Jessica Tingey Hansen.

First married at age 18, Kimberly White emerged from an abusive marriage to earn a degree from BYU in philosophy and marry in the temple. She is the mother of five children, one of whom was stillborn, and currently lives in New York City. She shares her thoughts on the unfinished stories of women who struggle with suffering children, the death of a loved one or trials of every kind. I was raised in the church. I have seven brothers and sisters. Many things about my upbringing were wonderful, and yet not everything was wonderful. There was a constant background noise of never knowing when I was going to be hurt or insulted or ridiculed because of family dynamics. In my early life I had a number of times when I would feel overwhelmed by the sad part of my life, frustrated and helpless and very, very lonely. It wasn’t obvious outside the family that there was a problem. Nobody knew that it was rough. But I felt like everything was horrible, and I knelt down and said a prayer and He answered me, as a young child, with comfort and assurance that He was there and He was watching over me. Then I became a teenager. The teenage years are complicated and you get stupid. I ended up becoming bitter at my situation and I left the Church and I left my home. I ended up married to a person just like the mean people already in my life. It’s a cliché. I was continuing to play out those patterns of abuse. Kimberly White I became pregnant with my oldest daughter at 18. She was born when I was 19, so I was very young. When I was about 7 months pregnant, I was in a car accident. I started going into labor and at the hospital they told me that if I delivered, the baby probably wouldn’t survive so they were going to try to stop the labor, which they ultimately were able to do. But I was very scared. As I look back now with the eyes of an adult, it’s clear to me that the doctor who came into the ER to care for me was respectful and comforting and behaving the way a professional doctor should behave to a young mother in a panic. I really appreciated him, but my husband at the time decided that he was flirting with me, and he became so angry he wouldn’t let that doctor come back into the room and actually decided that he wasn’t going to let any male doctors anywhere near me. But at the same time, he wouldn’t himself take responsibility and tell the nurses and doctors, “I’m mad. Don’t let the doctor come back in.” He made me tell the nurse that I didn’t want the doctor to come back in, that I didn’t want to see a man. This is the sort of life I was living. I was afraid all the time. I was blamed for things that were not my fault. The baby was born a few months later. That day my husband was mad at me for a number of things, so it was a very unpleasant experience having the baby. After she was born, my husband went home to take a nap, and there I was in the hospital, nineteen years old and alone with this baby that I didn’t know what to do with. I thought, “How did this become my life? I’m a smart person! I could have done other things!” It was awful. For the first time in a long time, I remembered those experiences I had when I was young where I prayed and felt comforted, so I started to say a little prayer, asking God to help me out, and my prayer was interrupted. I felt or heard a voice, not a happy voice, but a stern voice, telling me, “This is not your daughter. This is my daughter. And you are in no position to take care of her.” And I realized that it was true. I was now responsible for another human being, one of Heavenly Father’s children, and I wasn’t in a situation where I was able to give her what she needed. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t living the gospel. I felt the full force of the decisions I had made. I felt what it meant not just to my life but to hers that I had chosen to become bitter about the problems in my life and had stopped turning to the Lord for help. This is what I’d ended up with. That was it. In a matter of weeks, I left my husband and moved back home. So quickly! It’s a hard thing to do when you’re caught up in a relationship like that–it’s hard to get out of. But I just couldn’t forget that I was responsible for a human being and that I needed to get it right. The divorce itself was difficult. My parents were very, very supportive of me. Everything they could think of to help me out, they did it. But, they didn’t have unlimited funds and they were in the process of moving an entire household across the country. A friend of a friend handled my legal work pro bono. On the other hand, my ex had a team of 4 lawyers. It was ridiculous. He wanted to take custody of this small child whom I knew wouldn’t be safe with him. It was a terribly lonely and frustrating experience. This was one of the first times where it became clear to me that the goodness and support of other people is so important when we’re experiencing trials. There are many times in my life where the Lord spoke to me and comforted me directly. But this was a time when the Lord mostly spoke to me and did His comforting through other people. My old Young Women’s leaders were so nonjudgmental. I had left the Church in a big dramatic show and then I’m back in two years divorced with a baby. Nobody said a word of criticism. It was just, “It’s so wonderful to see you here again.” I had been so afraid when I was going back to Church that people would treat me as the bad seed. But nobody did. The kindness and consideration of the people who were in my parents’ lives, and in my life, so blessed me. Kimberly White and Her Daughter I was given custody of my daughter. My husband was granted visitation initially and it went very, very badly. The divorce dragged on for a couple of years. All I could do was wait around for the legal system. Finally, he lost all of his parental rights. It was very hard, but I never lost the sense that I was responsible for this human being, that she was Heavenly Father’s child and not my own. It was about what I needed to do for this child of God. Had you gone to college before she was born? I had not. I didn’t even graduate from high school. After she was born, I took the GED and enrolled at a community college. I was able to transfer to BYU after a while. And so I went through BYU as a young single parent. My parents had moved to Salt Lake City. At first I just commuted to BYU. But I didn’t want to be the kid who got in trouble and moved back home and grandma raised her daughter. I didn’t feel like that was what Heavenly Father had in mind. I wanted to do it as much as possible on our own. I had to take out student loans, but we got our own apartment in Provo. A horrible, tiny, dark basement apartment. She was young enough she didn’t care and I figured, “Well, at least I’m going to college.” I was able to pay for some daycare and I was able to take her to some classes with me. When those options were exhausted, my brother, who was a freshman, and his six pre-mission roommates in Helaman Halls would take this two year old girl. They would watch her for 6 hours or however long I needed. They were amazing babysitters. There aren’t a lot of nineteen year old boys who just think it’s cute and funny that they’re babysitting two or three times a week. And these guys did. It was a wonderful blessing. So I was able to make it work all of those years at BYU, working and going to school full-time. I eventually got a scholarship that helped, too. It must have been a very small demographic, being a single mother at BYU. Oh my goodness, yes. I loved BYU. It was a great place to be, but I had no peers. There is actually a single parent group at BYU, but it was mostly women whose husbands had left them after 25 years. I admired those women, but it was a very different situation than mine. I never met one other young single parent. I had friends, and I even had friends with kids, but they were all married. Having a social life was awkward. My parents were always supportive of my single parenting. There were times when we were in the habit of their having my daughter every Friday night through Saturday so I could work or finish papers or do things that were hard to do otherwise. It couldn’t have been done without their support. I feel like I was really lucky to have so much support. But at the same time you can’t get enough support to make single parenting easy. You can’t get enough support to make being alone and without peers easy. What did you study at BYU? I studied philosophy. Not a very practical choice. But it’s my personality. I took classes about some of the more obscure points of doctrine. It was an amazing thing to study. Philosophy brought into focus—though it didn’t solve—two big issues I had to sort through. One was the problem of evil. Life can be bad! And it’s not your fault. How does that mix in with there being a God? If you’re put in a family with an abusive person, you didn’t do anything to deserve it and yet you have the consequences your whole life. My daughter didn’t do anything wrong, yet she had some traumatic experiences in her early life with her visitation and now she was being raised by a single mom who couldn’t be there for her. I remember one time having to ask her daycare teacher what she thought she’d like for Christmas because I wasn’t sure. That’s terrible! It was my fault, not her fault. The other issue was, what does it mean that the Lord had comforted me in my childhood and then I left Him? What kind of standing had that left me? Do you lose your salvation entirely if you do that? I knew there was a God. I knew that He cared for me. And yet I had left. What does that mean? I felt that my behavior had probably disqualified from the highest levels of heaven, but I decided that would be fine. I felt the love of the Lord, and I was so grateful for whatever the Lord was willing to give me. I could be a ministering angel. I had no problem with that. Kimberly White and Her Family But then I started to think, as part of raising my daughter, I wanted to go to the temple, like an adult. When I went to the temple, I was taken totally by surprise. To be told that my sins were forgiven struck me so powerfully in my heart. Forgiven means forgiven. You don’t disqualify yourself. This is what life is for. Everybody messes up. I feel like I hadn’t understood what the Lord’s forgiveness meant until I was in the temple It must have changed your view of yourself. It really did. I’m not a person who could have been a good person and then blew it. A person who can be a great person can be a great person at any point. You never blow it! I feel like I had never quite understood the Lord before. Not just to know that for me the possibilities were still endless, which is a wonderful thing, but to know that the kind of God I’m dealing with is one who doesn’t keep score! He doesn’t say, “She’s pretty good, but remember when she was 18? She knew better.” He’s not doing that. He’s saying, “Repent, and we’ll get you right back like it never happened.” He’s not holding on, so we don’t need to, for ourselves or for other people. Among my biggest regrets in life is that I hadn’t gone to the temple earlier. I felt a powerful difference in my life afterwards. It’s an inspiring story! The inspiring stories we tell in Church, they’re all true. There is no miracle the Lord can’t perform, He is full of mercy. But often, telling things in the form of stories leads to this idea that if you’re keeping the commandments and if you’re a good person, everything wraps itself up neatly. Life doesn’t have the structure of a story. It just keeps going on and on, like a movie where they keep making too many sequels. I thought at the time—this was so naïve—that my experience with the temple was so powerful that I would never do anything wrong again. Why would I ever go a day without reading my scriptures? And of course that’s not how we are. Life is less pretty than that. I’m still forgetting to read my scripture. Surely the Lord has done everything He needs to do to convince me that this is important, and I still forget. I feel like I want to talk to you about some of the things that have happened recently because they have had such an impact on my life. I feel like it would be unfair to leave them out. So, thinking of the notion of stories, here’s mine: I had a difficult home life and then a crazy abusive husband, and single parented for all these years and finally, just before I finished at BYU, I met this wonderful man and married him. My husband adopted my daughter, and we had other children and we had a close, splendid family, and we all lived happily ever after. That’s a lovely end to the story, if that were the end. Those things did happen, but it wasn’t the end. Important things have happened since then. My husband and I went to England for him to get a master’s degree a number of years ago. I was pregnant with my fourth child, our third biological child together. I cannot tell you how much it felt to me like I was living out the happy ending of a story in the Ensign: I went to the temple and I got married and everything was wonderful. I had a wonderful husband, and two adorable little boys. Our oldest daughter loved her dad and was growing up so big and pretty. I was having another baby and we were living in England surrounded by wonderful people. I felt so happy and so blessed. One day my husband came home from Church and said, “We had an elder’s quorum lesson today and it really struck me. The teacher said, ‘Bad times will come to everyone, and it’s hard to build up the Spirit when you’re struggling and suffering. When things are going well for you, you should devote time to the Spirit and build up reserves so when the bad times come, you have a lot to draw on instead of having to pick that moment to start reading your scriptures or start praying.’” We were both really struck by that idea because everything was so perfect in our lives. We had the time and energy, so we felt inspired to start getting up about half an hour earlier every morning to read scriptures together, which was lovely. Right at the end of this pregnancy—I was a full forty weeks—I happened to have a regular check-up. My boys loved going to the doctor, loved listening to the baby’s heartbeat. I chatted with the doctor, and my little boy climbed up on the table. He said, “I want to heaw the heawt.” After a minute, the doctor said, “Why don’t you get down, honey. We’re not going to do that today.” Because there wasn’t one. There I was in the doctor’s office with two boys and no heartbeat. It was very rough. The worst part of things like that, seriously, is that you don’t get to just respond emotionally. You don’t get to break down and cry. Because there are logistics that you have to work out. Someone has to reach your husband. Someone has to take care of the boys. Someone has to pick Caitlyn up from school. All of these mundane, earthly things that have to be dealt with. I was very lucky. I’d just run into my neighbor so I knew she was home and wanted my boys to come over. So that was taken care of. I was able to reach my husband easily. I had a friend with a car so we could get to the hospital. So those things got worked out easily. But still, when tragedy drops into your life, you should be able to just faint like in the movies. But no, you have to work out all these little steps. It’s insulting. The whole world is falling apart and I have to find phone numbers and make phone calls. Kimberly White I had called my husband. I had dropped off my boys. I was in my house alone, sitting on the ground with my phone, waiting for my husband to come, waiting for the situation to resolve itself somehow. I remember having this distinct sense that since I hadn’t broken down and cried or responded emotionally yet, I was completely capable of going one of two directions. I could say, “This is not fair. The Lord has betrayed me. I didn’t deserve this.” And I would be fully justified. No one would blame me. That way was fully open to me. But next to this there was an option that I could say, “I know the Lord and I trust him and I’m just going to bow my head and do this thing that He apparently has called me to do.” I decided that, while I might be justified in being angry and upset, there was nothing to be gained in that. It wasn’t clear to me how there could possibly be any purpose in losing a child, and in losing a child in this way. But I decided I was just going to give the Lord a chance to show me that it was OK. And so, that’s what I did. I bowed my head and went to the hospital. They did the ultrasound. The child was dead. We hadn’t even known if it was a boy or a girl. With this sort of situation, you want to have a C-section immediately, but they only do C-sections when either the child’s or the mother’s life or health is at risk. When the child has died, the operation is a serious risk to the mother so you just have to wait and deliver the child in the normal way. We were back in the hospital only about 24 hours later. It was a very difficult delivery. If the baby had lived two days longer, she would have just been delivered alive, without any other problems. It turns out there was a knot in the umbilical cord. Which is almost never a problem, but in this case, for some reason it got pulled tight, and cut off. One of the really difficult things about having a stillborn baby is that church doctrine does not tell us anything about the status of unborn children. I know people walking around today who were delivered earlier than my daughter. They are alive! People I know who lost infants find great comfort in the idea that their baby got a body, that they got to see him, that he served his purpose. I, on the other hand, can’t get any doctrinal solace because doctrine doesn’t say what the rules are for a child who dies before he’s born. So in addition to the trial of losing a child, we couldn’t draw on gospel comfort because the doctrine isn’t there. I suppose that’s something I could have become very angry about. But I decided not to get angry. Nobody said church doctrine tells us everything that is true. We have prayer and we have the Spirit when doctrine doesn’t answer our questions. It gave me comfort to know that just because something isn’t answered for the entire church, that doesn’t mean it can’t be answered for me and my husband. We can get revelation directly. Just because I can’t say to anyone else, “The spirit enters the body before birth,” I know what the Spirit told me. It would be nice to know that everyone in my religion agreed with me, but it’s not necessary. When something like that happens, you spend years having up days and down days. As much as I think the Spirit confirmed to me that this fully-gestated 7 ½ pound human female was a real person with a real spirit who would be resurrected and saved like everyone else, other than having that assurance, I never, ever from the Spirit or from any other source got any inkling or indication or even foggy idea of what sort of purpose this might serve. It doesn’t make any sense. And frankly, if you gave me the reason, I probably wouldn’t like it. But, as it became clear that there just wasn’t going to be a reason given for this one, my husband and I decided that if the Lord was giving us a trial that wasn’t going to have an explanation, that it was up to us to find a way to get a benefit. So we used this as an opportunity to think about things we wanted to change in our family, things we wanted to do in our lives, things we wanted to repent of, that we’d never been able to fix before. It has turned into one of the great blessings of my life to have made the decision to do that. When I think of Elizabeth, even though we never met her, I can say, “This is the positive impact she had on my life,” because of the things that we chose to do. That attitude, that approach, has proven so useful in smaller trials: the trouble finding a job, someone’s having trouble at school, I don’t like my calling. It has given me the option in my own heart and my own mind to say, “OK, this is bad, but what can I pull out of it? What can I do in response to it that’s going to be a good thing?” It’s amazing, but you can always find something to make your life better. I think often in the Church we talk about having trials as if there’s something about having a trial that makes us learn. But actually, that’s not true. There’s a lot of agency involved in how we respond to our trials. I’d never say that I’m glad I went through that experience of losing a child. If I had a time machine and could go back in time, I would, and I’d change it. But since I don’t have that option, I have been very grateful that I learned to respond the way I did. I feel fully reconciled to whatever it was the Lord was trying to do because it has ended up being a blessing. That would also have been a lovely end to my story: I had this big trial, and I got through it, and Kimberly White’s life just went on all lovely. It has not gone that way. I would have loved it if the loss of a baby was the final difficulty of my life. As the years have gone by, more difficulties have arisen and not been resolved. We were able, about a year after Elizabeth died, to have another little girl, which was a great blessing for us. She’s been wonderful. We always thought we would have another child and never did. I know I’m not in any position to talk about that kind of pain when there are people who never have children at all. But, when you want something and it’s a righteous thing and you know of no reason you shouldn’t have it and yet you don’t get it, that’s still hard. I cried a lot and suffered a lot. Most recently, our sweet little oldest girl, whom I single-parented for so long and whom my husband adopted to raise as his own, has had difficult problems. Right now she’s in a psychiatric hospital. I don’t know how it’s all going to play out in our family life. My daughter is struggling so much right now. It’s too raw. I can’t talk too much about it. You know that there are things you could have done better, that you should have done better. And if your children grow up OK anyway, you can wipe your brow and say, “I guess it wasn’t too bad.” And if they struggle for any other reason, because of mental illness or other traumas they face at school, or just their personality, then as a parent you can’t pretend that it wouldn’t have been better if you had been a better parent. But at the same time, you can’t beat yourself up. Nobody’s a perfect parent. If I could pass a law for the Church, it would be that nobody is ever allowed to say, “The reason my seven children all went on missions and got married in the temple is because we always had family home evening.” Or “I gave them a blessing at the beginning of every school year, and that’s why they’re all OK.” In my experience, that’s just not true. The world is more complicated. I never heard a prophet say, “Everything in your life will go OK if you have family home evening.” They say, “You’ll have more of the Spirit in your home. You’ll have more inspiration, be better able to help,” not that you won’t then struggle. I’m actually kind of glad we weren’t able to schedule this interview earlier but are doing it now right in the middle of this trauma with my daughter. I wouldn’t want this interview to sound like a story that was finished. Life just doesn’t work that way. Or at least it doesn’t work that way for me. I think there are a lot of people who just never settle down to ease and happiness. The Lord has this whole vast church to run and the people best equipped to be in positions of leadership are the ones whose lives are stable. Everyone has trials, but some people have fewer than others, and those are the people He should use as church leaders. They’re not going to be falling apart all the time. We often see that our leaders have children faithful in the church, they have jobs, they have hobbies and big full lives. But it can be difficult for other people looking at that. They may think, “If you’re more righteous, if you’re good enough to be the Relief Society president, you also get this kind of a life.” That idea creeps into the Church sometimes. I just don’t believe that’s true. Obviously it’s not true. I mean, Abinadi got burned at the stake. What might be a helpful way to tell the stories of our lives? The way we frame the stories of our lives for each other matters. It‘s true that there are people who come back to the Church and people whose lives are saved by loved ones. It’s just that it’s also true that there are people who never come back and people who die and people who suffer from horrible diseases for years and years and years. We forget that for some of us, the happy ending isn’t going to come in this life. In this most recent conference, someone told a story of his daughter-in-law who had had three or four children and then she was unable to have more. I really resonated with that story. Although I know it’s much worse if you can never have any children, I appreciated its being acknowledged that being unable to bear a child is a painful thing even if you already have children. But then the story ended that she went on to have two more children. Tell a story that doesn’t end happily! Tell a story where she just found other ways to be happy. For a lot of us, that’s what we have to do. God puts us here, knowing we won’t be perfect. He gives us children, knowing we’re not always going to treat them right. He gives us callings, knowing we’re not always going to do them right. I’m not always the kind of person I wish I was. This whole messy, muddy business with all these complications and uncertainties, the grunginess of mortality: this is the plan! He sent us, fallen, to let us fight it out. If this messy, complicated mortality with all its pains and miseries and unfairness is the plan, if all this serves a purpose for our Heavenly Father, how sacred and wonderful all of these messes and pains must be. There is something divine and purposeful about what it means for us to struggle through all of this darkness. There’s one way of looking at the gospel that says, none of us are good enough to deserve the exaltation that the Lord has promised. Maybe only a very, very few of the most righteous will really deserve to become powerful gods. But I look at it differently. I think if we get out of this life, having made any kind of a consistent effort, with all of the noise that Satan throws at us and all of the difficulties of just being a person, what a wonderful thing that is! People who have done that have really earned great blessings. Anyway, I hope so. At A Glance Name: Kimberly White Location: New York, NY Age: 38 Marital status: Married at 18, divorced at 20, married at 25 Children: 5 total: age 18, 11, 10, 6 (our deceased daughter would have been 8 ) Schools Attended: BYU Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Praise to the Lord”

Siu Man has been a member of the Church in Hong Kong for about 40 years. Despite a congenital heart defect that has kept her homebound for most of her life, Siu Man learned how to read from the Book of Mormon. Today, Siu Man serves her family by caring for aging family members, researching her ancestors and sharing her handiwork crafts with others. What happened when you were born? What kind of sickness did you have? I was born and raised in Hong Kong, in a traditional Chinese family. I lived with my parents and my two older brothers. When I was only a few months old, my mother took me to the hospital for a body check because of my unusual health condition. She found that my lips and my finger nails were purple and I looked pale all the time. When a baby looks like this, the mother is terrified. Especially for my parents because they were not well-educated, they did not know much about this type of sickness nor did other people during that time have much knowledge of heart disease. My mother was worried because she was not sure what was happening or what would happen to me. But having a “blue baby” was not something that Chinese traditional parents would expect. She eventually took me to the doctor. After several appointments with the doctor and many tests, I was diagnosed with Tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect. With my parent’s educational level, they had no idea of the health problem that I had or what my life would be like, except for knowing that I had a rare kind of heart disease. They only knew that my blood vessels in my heart were not working in the right way and I did not have enough oxygen in my blood. Back in that time heart surgery was something very serious and dangerous and the success rate was low. My parent knew nothing about what to do with me. Instead of proceeding to do a surgery, my mother decided to keep me at home and take care of me. I was too young and did not understand the whole situation. When I grew up, I realized I was different from other people and I started to learn of my health condition. Everything I did must be in a slow pace because if I rushed or just even walked a little faster than usual, I might have fainted or even died. I did not ask my parents for more details of my sickness because it was too complicated to them, and also to me. However, my sickness did not bother me much because I was too young to realize the seriousness of this heart disease, which is a good thing because I did not have to spend time worrying, or terrifying myself with this sickness. Siu Man With this sickness, what was your childhood like? As I mentioned before, my mother kept me at home and did not allow me to go outside. Occasionally I was allowed to go out under special circumstances. I lived in an old apartment complex in Hong Kong. Back in those days, buildings in Hong Kong, especially residential buildings, were usually built up to ten stories. Nothing like what you see in Hong Kong nowadays, with all the high-rises and skyscrapers. These old apartment complexes usually have no elevator built-in. In the building that I used to live, there was no elevator also. I lived on the seventh floor of my building, which means whenever you needed to go to the market, to the park or just go outside for a walk, you had to go up and down by the stairs. It made it even more difficult for me to go outside. When I was a child, for every few steps I took, I had to stop every few minutes in order to keep my heart calm. Because once my heart pumps too fast, I might faint or die because there is not enough oxygen in my blood. For people with good health, climbing stairs to the seventh floor was an easy job, but for me, it was impossible to do. This living condition was difficult for me especially when I was in an emergency situation or in need of medical attention. Every time I needed to go out or go to the hospital for doctor’s appointment, my brothers would piggy-back me up and down the stairs. They did the same when I needed to go outside. Without them, I would not be able to see the world or know what it was like outside my home. I seldom interacted with others because I stayed home most of the time when I was young. Fortunately I had some kind neighbors. They would come to my home and play with me. Life was simple back then, we did not have any fancy toys, computers or television games. But having my neighbors visit was good enough for a child like me who was not allowed to go outside to play nor attend school. Their visits meant a lot to me. They made my childhood life happier and more colorful. Even until now, I still keep in touch with them and they are still my best friends. When did you join the Church? And how? I was baptized when I was eleven years old. My brother was the first one in my family to learn of the Church. He later on got baptized and introduced me to the Church. When I first learned the gospel, I was very happy because I was able to have more interaction with others. Many people came and visited me and taught me about the Gospel. My problem was I did not know how to read or write because I did not receive proper education. I was kept home by my mother after they found out that I had heart disease. I was not allowed to go to school and learn like other children. I later on learned how to read and write from my friends and from attending evening school. When I was taught about the Gospel, I knew that reading the scriptures was very important in gaining a testimony. However I felt discouraged because I did even know how to read and write. I remember when the missionaries first taught me how to read the scriptures, I did not even know how to read “Nephi,” the very first word in the first chapter of the Book of Mormon. My brother wanted me to learn the Gospel so he taught me how to read, especially the scriptures. Later on, my brother went overseas for study, and I was left alone with my other non-member family members. Before my brother left, he bought me a dictionary. With the dictionary and the help of other members, I started to learn how to read the Book of Mormon. Those members would come to my home and teach me reading and writing. They were very patient with me, and I could feel their love. I am grateful they were willing to teach me reading and writing so that I could learn the Gospel of Jesus Christ. From not knowing how to read at all to now reading the whole Book of Mormon, it is a miracle to me and it strengthens my faith from reading the scriptures. People around me witnessed this miracle also. To me, learning the Gospel gave me hope. I was able to meet a lot of great friends in the Church and they were willing to take care of me after my brother left. This was very encouraging to me. I felt God’s love surrounded me. I decided to be baptized and joined the Church. You had several major surgeries in your life. How has the Gospel and your faith in Jesus Christ helped you overcome these difficult times? When I was first diagnosed with this heart disease, the doctor told my parents that the successful rate of heart surgery was low. Also, the medical technology was not as advanced as what we have today. My parents’ family did not agree to do the surgery even though it might improve my health condition. However, they finally agreed to send me to the hospital to have my first major heart surgery when I was around 9 years old. Since then, I have had four major heart surgeries in my life. They are all critical and dangerous. Following each surgery, I had at least 30 or more stitches on my chest and stayed in the hospital for several months for recovery. Not all the surgeries were as successful as they were supposed to be, and I was fortunate to be alive after each surgery. But in general, my health did improve little by little after each surgery. Before every surgery, my doctor would explain to me the risk of doing the surgery and that I might even not be able to survive. Siu Man's Handiwork I remember when I was in my twenties I had my fourth surgery. The medical technology was way better compared to when I was a child. The doctor planned to fix my blood vessels so that my heart could be ‘normal’ again. They needed to open my chest once again for the surgery. My doctor told me that the chance of surviving was only half and half. But I had a peaceful feeling about this particular surgery. I asked for a priesthood blessing before the surgery. In the blessing, the brother did not even mention the surgery. I was a little bit puzzled and did not know how to respond. However, I was not too worried because I know Heavenly Father was mindful of me and of my health condition. At the end, the doctor did open my chest and checked inside. My heart structure and the blood vessels were too complicated, so they decided just leave it as it was. Instead of complaining that the doctor opened my chest for nothing (opening the chest was a pain to a patient like me), I am indeed grateful that Heavenly Father watches over me. I am grateful that even though my body is weak, Heavenly Father gives me a strong mind to overcome these challenges. My faith increases through these experiences. I never pity myself for having this heart disease, which has caused so many inconveniences in my life and to people around me. But I do not want to complain because I know that Heavenly Father is taking care of me. I am His daughter. He puts me in His hand. It is up to me to choose to be happy or sad, positive or negative. I choose to be happy and positive, whatever happens in my life. I continue to serve and be an instrument of God. Having heart problems might seem to be an obstacle in a person’s life, but I try my best to find ways to be happy and serve others. When I grew up, and after recovering from my major surgeries, my health condition was improving. I started to look for jobs and attend evening school. I wanted to be independent and tried not to rely on my family. I worked in a factory doing packaging in the morning. I enjoyed working because I learned so much from it. Also, I was able to meet new people in my workplace. At first my mother opposed my going to work because of my health condition, but I insisted on going. I know that I have to learn skills and earn a living in case I have to in return take care of my parents. Besides working, I have a great desire to go to school after joining the Church and knowing how to read the scriptures. My brother who went overseas was the only one who supported me to go to school. I attended evening school at night. Since I have a little knowledge in reading and writing, I started the school courses in grade 3 level. I love going to school. Attending evening school has allowed me to gain more knowledge and know the importance of education. Having a job and attending school were something that I had longed for in my childhood. I am grateful that I have enough strength to handle both. Several years after my fourth surgery, my dad had a stroke and my mum’s health was declining. At the time, I still had my part time job. I remember I had to work and take care of my parents at the same time. I had to cook for them and make sure all they were all right. When I was young, they took care of me, and it was my time to take care of them. They eventually passed away due to old age and illness. I felt that Heavenly Father saved my life so that I could take care of my parents. He gave me work to do in serving His children on earth. I am grateful that He gave me strength to my body so that I could have this responsibility to take care of my parents when they were getting old. I know that this is my mission in life and many more to come. Siu Man's Handiwork In the meantime of taking care of my parents, I was able to visit my ancestral home in China. Miraculously, I was able to find my family history. It was a thick and bulky book, with records of many of my ancestors who lived that long time ago. As some of you may know, keeping a family history book in China is very important to the family and the culture. The family history book means a lot to the Chinese families because it is a symbol of preservation of family line and root. The family history book that I received has over three thousand names in it. I felt so blessed to have this family history book of my own family. After taking care of my parents and serving them until they died, my mission now is to take care of my ancestors. I enjoy going to the temple for ordinances on their behalf. I know that they are also watching over me so that I can continue to work on my family history. They are allowing me to serve them while I am still on this earth. Besides serving my family, I also learned that it is important to serve others and be their friends. It is my dream to be a volunteer. I want to serve others because Jesus Christ teaches us to love one another. I try my best to serve as my health condition allows. One thing that I did over the years was handcraft work. I enjoy and love beading. I made little dolls, handbags, wallets, and many other things with plastic beads. I would do this handcraft work and make it as a gift for people I meet. Sometimes I do this for the elderly center or other non-profit organizations. Besides this, I also do stitching. Currently, I am stitching the word “marriage” in Chinese and will frame it for a friend who just had her wedding anniversary. I know that I am not able to help people to move furniture when they move from house to house, nor will I be able to do any work that require a lot of man power. But I am able to do small things like this, such as beading. I love to see the smiles on people’s face when they receive my gift. Sometimes I compare myself to others, especially those who grew up with me. Most of them are married, have children, or are successful in their career. I sometimes do think that they are better off than me. But when I look back my life, I see that God is with me all the time. He watches over me and supports me in everything I encounter. I am forever grateful to have the chance to learn the Gospel. To me, I learned a lot in the Church and in the Gospel. The Gospel gives me hope. It was not easy for me to learn how to read, but I did it through reading the scriptures. From the scriptures, I learned that there are still works for me to do in this life. I learned to accept God’s will and continue to have faith and hope. I am grateful that Heavenly Father gives me a strong mind, even though my body is weak, so that I am able to overcome the challenges in my life. I feel God’s love every single day in my life. In return I am willing to be His servant. I will continue to serve Him and His children with all that I can offer. At A Glance Name: Siu Man Location: Hong Kong Age: 50+ Marital status: Single Favorite Hymn: “Count Your Many Blessings” Interview by Grace Ka Ki Kwok.

As a public health officer in the United States Air Force, Janice recently completed a year-long “hardship” tour at Kunsan Air Base in Korea. She is now stationed in Okinawa, Japan, and her military career has also included a six month tour in Afghanistan during which she assessed every medical station. Janice discusses the importance of fasting and prayer in her work, and the meaningful role of the Church in her service career. Was the military part of your background growing up? Not at all. My joining the military was one of those times where we feel like the Lord wants to direct our lives, and we’re willing but often think, “No, that’s not for me.” I had always been interested in the military growing up. I loved TV shows like “M*A*S*H*” and in high school I even talked to my mother about joining the military, but I think her exact words were, “Over my dead body.” I had a scholarship to BYU, so I didn’t need the military to get my education. I got my bachelor’s in microbiology and originally planned on doing the pre-med route, but I felt being a doctor would take too much time, and I wouldn’t be able to be with my family that much. So I changed career goals and went into the medical laboratory. While I was in the military, I got my master’s in Public Health. Listening to my mother, I felt joining the military was not the right thing for an LDS woman to do. After coming home from my mission, I started working in a lab, and kept having these experiences where I felt like I was in limbo, like I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. Other times I drove by a recruiting station and could not shake the feeling, “I need to talk to him.” Then 9/11 hit. I was 26 at the time, and I still wanted to honor my mother’s wishes, but once that door opened, I immediately called a recruiter and started the process. I think the Lord really guided me in commissioning with the Air Force. With my personality, now I know that I am happier in the Air Force than I would be in the other services. What aspects of the military appealed to you and fit your personality? Being part of a broader cause and being able to help and defend our freedom. I love the discipline of the military and not necessarily having to think about what I wear. I like to do things by the book. I’m more of an obedient person versus a creative person, so in a way I take comfort in knowing that I’m doing what’s right because I’m following the proper regulations. Even with the Church, I know I’m supposed to pay my tithing so I feel more comfortable. What does your position as a public health officer with the Air Force entail? I joined in 2002 and spent four years as a personnel officer. In 2007, I converted over after earning my master’s degree in generalized Public Health, which is more the educational model. I often tell people my job is to teach the Word of Wisdom and the law of chastity, but there is a lot of disaster and emergency preparedness as well. Janice M. McDowell Right now I’m a part of what’s called a “flight.” The basic unit of the Air Force is a squadron, and a flight falls under a squadron. My flight is made up of public health technicians where we make sure groups are following approved health and safety guidelines. We have a community health section to monitor any reportable diseases within the Air Force, most of which are contagious or sexually transmitted. We monitor those who have a positive skin test for tuberculosis and keep track of the increase in influenza cases, or if there’s an outbreak of food-borne illness, we monitor that and hopefully try to stop it. Another section monitors occupational exposure. For instance, with our airmen that are working on the flightline with airplanes or are exposed to chemicals, we make sure that they get the appropriate tests, that they’re not overexposed, and that they’re using their protective gear. We also have a deployment section so anyone who is deployed comes to our office, and we make sure they have all the appropriate vaccines. If malaria is in the area, then we make sure that they get medication to help protect them. We provide them information on what animals and poisonous plants they can find in the area. We also travel to other areas of the world in a program called Subject Matter Expert Exchanges. Earlier this year, I went to the Philippines where I was matched up with Filipino counterparts, both military and civilian, and we talked about what problems they’re seeing in the Philippines. I actually trained a lot of them on how to do proper food inspections, because many of the diseases you see in these countries are either water or food-borne. We teach them how to cook their food properly and how to maintain it. You are married. At what point did you meet your husband? I met him online in 2004, so I was already in the military. He was living in Colorado at the time, and I was stationed in Florida. I would come home from work and call him and we would just talk about the day. We weren’t necessarily dating, we were just chatting with each other, and then, several months later he came to visit me, and at that point we decided to get married. I tease him a lot that he married me because I was in the military. You spent 6 months deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and recently completed a year-long unaccompanied “hardship” tour of duty in Korea. What was the process for deciding to accept those missions? I actually volunteered to go to Korea. It was one of those things where I heard a lot of people talk about how it was a great experience, and the camaraderie was very good. I didn’t quite expect the timing, but it ended up working out. Kunsan Air Base in Korea is one of the few Air Force locations where we’re not allowed to bring our families, so it’s a short tour. My husband was hesitant at first since he didn’t want me to be gone for a year. But the one thing he doesn’t like about the military is having to move a lot, so one of the key things that got him to accept it was when I told him it would be another year where he wouldn’t have to move. We both prayed about it and felt it was something that I needed to do. He stayed in Texas where we’d been stationed. He’s very active in the ward, so he got a lot of support from there. How did you maintain your relationship with your spouse while you were away? A lot of it was electronic. I didn’t always necessarily have telephone service, but whenever I was connected to a wireless service, I was able to hook up to it, and there’s also a way to text from computer for free, so I was able to text my husband almost on a daily basis even if I couldn’t talk directly to him. And when I could, I would Skype. When I’m home, we really try to spend a lot of time together. Either in the home or whenever there’s a long weekend or a holiday, we do things that we enjoy together like going places and trying different foods. Janice McDowell and Her Husband There are some good times and bad times. I really do miss my husband when we’re separated. I’ve noticed that when I’m with someone for a long time, after a while you start paying attention to the little things that annoy you. But when I’m gone, it forces me to remember the good things and why I chose him. I tell him a lot, one of the reasons that I married him was he was the person that could calm me down whenever I was angry or frustrated about something. The other guys I had dated would either make me more frustrated, or would tell me that I was worrying about something that I didn’t need to worry about. So there have been times where I’ve been really frustrated about something at work or at Kunsan, and I’ll call my husband in the middle of the night or in the early morning for him and I’ll talk to him so I can calm down. How does Kunsan differ from a standard military base? Everyone on Kunsan lives on base in dorm-style housing, in very close settings. I lived with several other officers that are about my same rank, who worked in the same types of position. We each had our own room, but you see the same people that you work with after you go home. In the United States, a lot of us live off base in houses within the community since there’s not enough base housing to accommodate everyone. When the day is over, we go to our homes and live what we call our “civilian lives.” We either hang out with our church friends, family, or neighbors, but we rarely see others in the military community. Being at Kunsan, we’d see each other at the base store or within the community. There’s a lot more support for our intramural sports and the different activities because we don’t have our families with us. We’re more willing to interact. Another difference is that on Kunsan, it’s about one female for every 10 males. What are the pros and cons of being a female in a very male–dominated environment? Often I’m the only one that has help with my bags, but not because I am having trouble. But there are also times where being women, we often have to be careful of how we present ourselves, because there are still some stereotypes of being a woman in the military. When I go to correct someone, I have to be very careful of the manner I correct them in, the verbiage that I use, because someone will think “Oh, you’re just nagging me.” Whereas if I tell my male counterpart to go correct the person, they don’t get the same feedback that I would if I did it. Overall, I would say being a female in the military is much more accepted, even in the last ten years or so. I see women getting jobs that were typically male-only jobs. The nice thing about being in the medical world is that a lot of the military females are actually in the medicine part of it, probably 50/50. What was your experience in Afghanistan like? It definitely was an experience I wasn’t expecting. I was primarily out of Kandahar and assigned to be a mentor to my Afghan counterpart. When I got to Afghanistan, my boss said, “We want you to go with them to every medical station and assess what kinds of resources they already have.” And because of that, I was required to travel all throughout these other regions of Afghanistan. I probably traveled over half of the time I was there, either on a helicopter or in a humvee. Did you feel danger for your life? How was the security situation for you personally? That was where I was grateful for the Church. I remember about a month or so before I deployed, I read about a young man that had been killed in Afghanistan. He was a medical officer and had gone to BYU, and at that point it kinda drove home to me, “I’m really going to a dangerous spot.” I got nervous. I remember going to a stake conference and the person speaking talked about an experience he had where he had to go into a different country, and he said that he prayed to have a pathway opened for him, that doors would be opened and he would be able to speak with the people. And so that’s what I started praying for. Both my husband and I also received blessings before I deployed. In my blessing I was told that I’d be protected and that this deployment would be beneficial for my career and it would be a good experience for me. Because of that blessing, I knew that if I was doing the traveling for work and because I wanted to do it for professional reasons that I would be protected. It’s really amazing because there were times that I would hear about a helicopter crashing or an IED that damaged a Humvee or something like that, and they were in the same areas where I had just been. But the most serious situation I was in was a car accident on one of the convoys. But I never ever had a problem getting back to my home base. There were times when a flight or a convoy was cancelled and I couldn’t go do a mission that I wanted to do. But the times when I was allowed to go, or able to get out there, I never had a problem getting back. I know that I was protected and the people that were traveling with me were protected also. Do you feel that deployment has been beneficial to your career? I do. I really feel it provided me with experience. For instance a lot of people that haven’t toured before, when they go to Kunsan, they complain a lot. You know in Kunsan we’re stuck in the dorms, we’re not allowed to be with our families and all that, but when I compare Kunsan with my deployment I can say, “Well at least I don’t have to go outside to go to the bathroom, I’m not scared to go to the bathroom, I have hot water pretty much every single day, I get to choose the foods I eat. There are also a lot of things I learned working with my Afghan counterpart. I was able to see how they were able to resolve some of the problems with the limited resources that they had. How was it being accepted and giving advice as a woman, given the strong gender roles in Afghan culture? Yes, that was a concern. Even going to the training at Fort Polk, they talked about how it was a very male-dominated culture, and there would be times when we may not be able to get our message through because we were women. But the nice thing about it was we were medical, and our medical counterparts were usually very well educated and much more willing to listen to us. One of the coolest experiences I had with being a woman was I when was up at one of the Afghan headquarters. Another female officer and I were walking toward the building and around the corner came this woman with her 10-year-old daughter. Just the look on that little girl’s face when she saw women in uniform. You could tell she was excited, tugging on her mom’s skirt. The smile on her face made my day. There were a couple times I felt the gender barriers, but it wasn’t necessarily the Afghans that weren’t receiving my message. It was partly the coalition forces, all the other nations that were working with the U.S. It was partly my being a woman and part of it my being a captain versus a colonel. There were times where I had to get my boss to step in and tell people, “You gotta listen to her.” I’m considered one of the first levels in the Officer ranks – Captain – and Colonel is the highest. What kind of cultural interactions have you had when you’ve lived outside the U.S.? Do you get to interact with the local people? Yes, quite a bit. With Afghanistan, because I was a mentor, I actually dealt with the Afghans more than I dealt with the U.S. military. So I was able to learn about some of their culture. I ate with them quite a bit, I saw their work facilities. In Korea, I actually had two Korean civilians work with me, and when I got there, they took the time to sit down with me and teach me about the cultural differences– what’s accepted, what’s not accepted. They were really good and made sure I tried the different foods and saw the different sites too. The Korean people as a whole are extremely nice, very polite. When I was in Seoul, probably one of the biggest cities I’ve been in, I actually felt safe, whereas other places, I wouldn’t necessarily feel safe walking down the street or at night. How have these experiences of getting to know these other cultures affected you? It’s really helped me to see how if we don’t allow ourselves to look outside our own little world, we don’t realize how similar we are to each other. When I go to Honduras, Korea, Afghanistan, or the Philippines, a lot of these countries have very similar beliefs and standards. And it’s amazing to see that, whether I go to a wealthy or an impoverished area. A lot of times when I talked to some of the Filipinos, they would tell me, “Well this is just how the Filipinos do it.” And I was just laughing to myself, “Well, the Hondurans do it that way too.” How does the gospel fit into the structure of military life? Going to basic training was easy for me because I had been on a mission. Some of the initial rules people complained about were that you couldn’t smoke or have caffeinated drinks for at least the first two weeks. I watched several of my fellow trainees go through withdrawals of being without those substances and it was no big deal to me. On a mission, I was only allowed to talk to my family on Mother’s Day or Christmas, but in the military there are phones available and I could call home whenever I was off duty. It’s still one of those situations where you have to be careful about not wanting to make others feel like you’re preaching to them. But I do have ways of letting others know that I’m LDS. For instance, at Kunsan, each of our units had jerseys with patches. On my jersey for the Med Unit, I have a BYU patch and a CTR patch. They’re pretty bright, it’s hard to miss them. I also took some of the MormonAds, the less religious ones, and put them up throughout my office, so when people came in they saw different little sayings. Janice McDowell in the Philippines Even now in my job, when I encounter a problem, I often fast and pray. I had an experience when I first got to Kunsan where I heavily relied on prayer. What had happened was my predecessor didn’t necessarily leave my program in the best of shape. If we’d have had an institutional inspection at the time, we would have failed because of the lack of documentation. I actually fasted about it because it was such a concern for me. In the Doctrine and Covenants, it talks about speaking sharply as the Spirit directs you and then follow with a spirit of love afterward. I’ve learned that I’m willing to stand up for what is right, whether it’s something with one of my programs, or something with the Church. I brought in my entire flight and basically told them how disappointed I was and gave them the challenge to prove to me that they could run their program. They were not happy with me for a couple weeks, but during those weeks, whenever I got the opportunity, I would praise them for even the smallest of things and tell them how pleased I was with their work. It was amazing – the first time in 10 years where I had a flight that was truly united. I really feel it’s because of how I was guided in that first session I had with them, providing them with what my expectations were. Because of that, and because of the opportunity the Lord gave me to help them resolve any obstacles, they were able to unite, and during the last six months they turned all those programs around to the point where they were pretty much perfect. What resources does the Church provide to support military personnel? They have a lot of stuff like dog tags and a special scripture set that has a red cover and is small enough to fit it into the pockets of our uniform. Going into the desert, like Afghanistan, it gets really hot, so they understand that and allow us to have special t-shirts that have the marked garments on them, so instead of having to wear two layers of clothing, we only have to wear one layer. They also make sure that Church services are available wherever there’s the possibility. Wherever there are small military branches, we actually fall under the local mission. In Afghanistan, being part of the district Relief Society presidency, those that notified us that they were LDS and wanted to have contact, we had sisters all throughout the country, both in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, and one my roles in the Relief Society was to send out the visiting teaching messages. So even though we weren’t physically close to each other, we would email each other, and I would send out a little message each month, or a devotional. The Church actually does a good job of making sure we have the Relief Society set up. What are worship services like? Each military base has a chapel, and it’s very similar in the deployed setting. At Kunsan, our chaplain services coordinated different times in two different buildings for every religion that wanted the opportunity to hold services there. One of them was the chapel itself, the other was another facility with a small worship room run by the chaplain. We met in the afternoon. There’s a piano in there and tables where we had the sacrament. Because we didn’t have any children with us, we had a different schedule for our meetings. We had sacrament meeting, but didn’t have two additional hours, just one. For the second hour we alternated between Sunday School one week and Priesthood/Relief Society the next and all met together. What does patriotism mean to you? When I look at freedom, it’s based on being allowed to worship how I see fit, or being able to go to sleep at night and not worry that some militants or gunmen are going to come. Freedom is the right to be able to express ourselves and not to fear reprisal. Being in Afghanistan and seeing what life is like when freedoms are denied strengthened my resolve to defend our freedoms and the privilege we have of enjoying our services. What can the average person do to be a good citizen whatever country they live in? A lot of it is just to take care of those within your community. If you have a program to take care of those, then start branching out from your community. When we take care of each other in our communities, it’s amazing what can happen. At A Glance Name: Janice M. McDowell Location: Kunsan Air Base Republic of Korea Age: 37 Marital status: Married Occupation: Public Health Officer United States Air Force Schools Attended: BYU and Univ Mass-Amherst Languages Spoken at Home: English and Spanish Favorite Hymn: “Do What Is Right” Interview by Nollie Haws.

Maya Brown-Zimmerman is an outspoken Latina mother of two special-needs children. She has Marfan syndrome. Maya earned a Masters in Public Health from The Ohio State University and has particular interests in patient advocacy for those with chronic illness. She writes for WebMD and teaches the Valiants in her ward. You write the blog “Musings of a Marfan Mom” and are on the board of the National Marfan Foundation. Can you explain what Marfan syndrome is? Marfan syndrome is a rare, life-threatening connective tissue disorder. Connective tissue is the glue that holds our body together, so people with Marfan syndrome can be affected throughout their body. It affects the cardiovascular system, particularly the aorta, which is the main blood vessel running from the heart. The aorta can grow to be too large and develop weak spots called aneurysms, which, if not monitored, can tear. That tear, or dissection, of the aorta can kill you. Marfan can also cause issues with the eyes, the lungs, the skeleton, the skin, and the nervous system. How did you come to be involved with the Marfan community? I was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome at age 8. I remember my diagnosis vividly. My mom took me to a pediatrician because I seemed too weak to do things other kids could do. I couldn’t ride my bike. I couldn’t run. I didn’t seem to have any coordination and I would get tired easily. So she told the doctor she wasn’t going to leave until he told her what was going on. Maya Brown-Zimmerman and Her Family I remember him pulling out a measuring tape. He started taking measurements and asked a few questions. Then he stopped and looked at her and said, “I am so sorry. I should have caught this sooner.” He told my mom he believed I had Marfan syndrome and referred us to the cardiology and genetics clinic at the children’s hospital for further evaluation. I remember being really frustrated because I felt like the doctors were talking over me to my parents. I felt like I was capable of understanding what they were saying. I said to my mom, “They’re treating me like a kid!” Which I was. I was eight! But I wanted to be part of that conversation. I could tell that my parents were struggling with the diagnosis. I remember them struggling with whether they “gave” me the syndrome and what they were going to do about handling my diagnosis. I didn’t realize the potential seriousness of it until later when I had to stop doing activities that I loved like horseback riding and basketball. Why did you have to stop? With Marfan syndrome you have to be careful of any contact to the chest or the eyes, also of activities where you start and stop frequently, which you do with basketball. You can’t do any contact sport, or sports that are going to get your heart rate up. Most competitive sports are out. The doctor had told me that I needed to stop horseback riding. But my father used to be a cowboy and had grown up riding horses, and he and my mom knew how important horseback riding was to me, so they decided they weren’t going to follow the doctor’s advice. Within a few months of getting diagnosed, I was thrown off the horse. I got pretty banged up, just bruises and things, but it scared my parents into believing I needed to follow the doctor’s activity restrictions—no horseback riding, no basketball. Before all the activity restrictions, I thought having Marfan was kind of cool because they told my parents that it was what Abraham Lincoln probably had. I wanted to tell everyone at school. “I have the same thing that Lincoln had!” But my mom told me that I shouldn’t tell anyone, that it wasn’t anything to talk about. And yet now you are very open and public about all things Marfan. How did you make that transition from privacy and even secrecy to openness? As a pre-teen I began to get really angry. I was getting made fun of at school all the time. One of the symptoms of Marfan syndrome is a disproportionate torso. I was taller at 12 and 13 than all of my teachers, let alone all the other kids. I was shockingly skinny. When I was thirteen, I was almost six feet tall and I weighed 90 pounds. That got a lot of attention. People would make lots of comments and call me anorexic or ugly. I couldn’t participate in gym class with the other kids. At that age, you really want to look like everybody else and be like everybody else. My mom noticed that I was becoming angrier and angrier and suggested that I write my doctors and ask if there were any other patients with Marfan syndrome. So I did, and I eventually heard from a counselor at the hospital who said that there was a local group with a girl my age, and there was a meeting coming up. My dad was very reluctant to have me go. He had a cleft palate and had been made fun of a lot growing up. So my parents weren’t sure that they wanted me to associate with people who might look really different. I remember my dad taking me to the meeting and sitting in the parking lot and saying, “You know, I need to prepare you for what you’re going to see. These people might have deformities. They may look really different. They may be scary. Are you sure you really want to go?” I said, “But Dad, that is what I look like.” That’s how I saw myself. By the end of the meeting my dad had completely changed his mind. The girl my age was there and we hit it off. Sometimes there are people in this world that you were predestined to meet. It was like we’d always known each other. Talking to someone else my age who had such a positive view of Marfan syndrome was an eye-opener for me. Marfan is a spectrum syndrome, so people can be very affected or only mildly affected, and she was much more severely affected than me. She had overcome all these trials and still had a very positive view about herself, her mission on earth, and her relationship with God. She was a great example. Outside my group of girlfriends at Church, I didn’t know other kids my age who were very religious, and it was really nice to have another friend who also had a strong faith. She knew that the trials we have here are just here and that they’re for a purpose. She felt like she could use the things that she had learned to glorify her Heavenly Father. I started thinking, I guess I don’t need to look at Marfan syndrome as some kind of curse. We would email back and forth every single day, but about a month later she passed away from an aortic dissection. It was devastating to me. My parents worried that I would be afraid that I was going to die, but I knew that she and I were in different places in terms of severity. What was scary to me was that someone could know as much as she did about Marfan syndrome and yet at the end of the day they were still in the hands of their physician. She had known that she was having a dissection, and she still passed away. I decided that I didn’t want anyone else to die from Marfan syndrome. At age 13, that is obviously an unrealistic goal. But I decided that I needed to become informed, and once I had done that I could move forward to inform other people. So the next year I went to a conference that the National Marfan Foundation puts on every year. I got to meet other teens my age. That was really a life-changing experience as well. And now you volunteer with the teens in the National Marfan Foundation! Yes. I run the teen program for NMF. I started helping out in 2006. It’s so much fun. When I came to conference as a teenager, there were fifteen of us, ages 12 through 23. This year we had 107 teenagers ages 13-18. So the program has really blossomed. I learn so much from them. They are such a group of strong, smart, funny teens. We do workshops and activities, oversee the teen website, and of course plan the conference. We plan all the conference activities so that the most severely affected teen can participate to the full extent. We want them to have a weekend where they can feel like a regular teen and not a teen with something “wrong” with them. The prognosis of your original diagnosis was very serious, and yet you’ve grown up to marry and have your own family. Tell me about them. I started dating Mark pretty soon after I got to college at Case Western Reserve University. I approached it just as a casual relationship, but it became more serious, and I thought, “I don’t know if he’s ever going to take an interest in the church. He really likes coffee.” Over the summer, he would email me every night or every morning pages of questions about the Church. Really difficult ones. I would spend all day, when I wasn’t working, in the scriptures or talking to my old seminary teachers or members of the bishopric to get answers and at night we would get on chat and I would answer everything that he sent. The next day it would start again. I found out later he was trying to convert me to Catholicism, but after a few weeks of getting all of these answers from me, he realized that he was developing a testimony of the Church. By the time we got back to school in the fall, he asked to come to church with me and to meet with the missionaries. His parents asked him to wait a year to get baptized to be sure that was what he really wanted to do. So he did wait a year and then he was baptized and we were married about a year and a half after that. I didn’t know if I could have any biological kids, because of the stress pregnancy and delivery would put on my aorta. And knowing that we had a 50% chance of passing my Marfan syndrome to a child makes having biological kids really controversial. On some of the Marfan communities online, people say, “It’s a sin to have a baby. Why would you put this on your child?” Maya Brown-Zimmerman When I first got pregnant, it was hard for our families, both because of a concern for the baby and a concern for my health. My mom was really upset when I called and told her I was pregnant. I had told her ahead of time that we were going to check with the doctors and get all my specialists to approve my pregnancy. I think she just didn’t think it was actually going to happen. She was thinking of the time when she was at the doctor with me when I was 8 years old and the doctor said that the average life expectancy was middle-age. The whole outlook and expectation back the was different. So when I called and told her that I was pregnant, her response was, “Do you think I’m supposed to be happy about this?” But science and medicine have changed. With proper management, patients with Marfan now have a normal life expectancy. It was really difficult feeling that not all of our family was on board at first but I still had a feeling of peace that this was exactly what we were supposed to be doing. A lot of people didn’t expect us to have a second child, but we felt very sure that’s what we were supposed to do. So we always just let prayer guide our decisions and had the faith that it would work out. While we were still in the hospital after I had Julian, our second, I said to Mark, “There’s one more baby.” My doctor had already come to tell me I couldn’t have more kids. But I’ve known since college that I wanted to adopt. We’re now about halfway through the adoption process. It was our faith in Heavenly Father that shaped our decision to have kids, knowing that it wasn’t a popular decision. But I know that we’re here for a reason, for a purpose. To me, having a perfect body is not the most important thing. Even though my body is not perfect, there’s a lot that I can add to the world around me. I felt that our kids would be able to do the same, even if they inherited Marfan syndrome. Our younger son, Julian, has been diagnosed with Marfan. Our older son, Miles, does not have Marfan but has been diagnosed with autism. Autism wasn’t really on our radar, but the same thing applies. Your sons both have special needs. How do your memories of being a child with Marfan influence your own parenting? My brother and sister also have different special needs, and so my parents were thrown into this, having three kids with different disabilities. It wasn’t something that they were prepared for, so they had to learn on their feet. There were things I think that they did very well. My mother encouraged me to get involved in the Marfan community. I remember being a teenager and having a news station coming over to interview me for a segment, and my dad made a big effort to take some of my photography and blow it up and frame it to show them that I was more than just my diagnosis. They encouraged me to be involved and to have other interests and to not see myself as being sick. But they were also very over-protective. So I’m hoping that my understanding of Marfan and having the perspective of the good and the less good from my growing up will help me adjust my parenting. My son is only 2 next month. We’ve got a lot of years to worry about still. With my older son, there’s a lot about autism that I had to learn. But in dealing with the school system or trying to make sure that he maintains a positive self esteem, or in the way we talk about autism, I try to mirror my experience with Marfan syndrome. I want him to be able to find adult autistic role models. He’s four, so we have conversations like, “Yeah, you have autism. These are some of the good things about autism.” I want him to be proud of who he is. I take pictures of Julian’s distinctive Marfan features. People might look at them and say I’m taking photos of his imperfections, but to me it’s so important to capture those. I want him to see them as being an important and a beautiful and a valuable part of who he is. How have ward members supported and helped your family? When I was in Young Women’s, I had a couple of leaders that really had an impact on me. They were great listeners. They really worked to make sure that we had youth activities that I was able to do. They’ve continued to ask about the work that I do and show interest. In terms of the boys, people have been supportive in helping out with childcare and trying to get to know them and the things that they like and the needs that they have. My son will be in Sunbeams in January and I had a great conversation with the Primary president about what his needs are and how we can adjust things in Primary to make it easier for him to make that adjustment. Maya Brown-Zimmerman and Her Family If we’re willing to be open with our struggles, people want to know and help and learn. That’s one of the great things about the Church; it is a larger family unit. I was in the hospital a couple of weeks ago for three days and immediately our ward family was there. They took care of child care for my kids, they came to the hospital to give me a blessing, they brought over meals. Now they may not understand the ins and outs of Marfan syndrome and why I was in the hospital, but they were there to support our family. In a blogpost you wrote, “Words matter.” Can you explain what you meant by that? The way we talk about other people and the way we talk about ourselves frames a lot. I read an article where the author talked about people “suffering” from Marfan syndrome. The word “suffering” paints a picture of what you think of the other person and how you think of them handling their issues. We need to be careful of the labels we use because it affects how people see themselves or how they interact with you or other people. We want to use uplifting language. I try to not assume anything negative, so I don’t use “suffering” when I’m talking about another’s illness unless the person tells me they’re suffering. I don’t use the word “victim.” Is there anything else you’d like to add? I feel like my knowledge of the gospel, the testimony I’ve built, has been really central to being successful in having Marfan syndrome, and being able to go out and do things and live a full life and be a parent. Our responsibility in our trials, is to try to make them something positive for ourselves or the people around us. I would never presume to tell anybody else what their Marfan syndrome means for them. I would not do it for my son. I would not do it for my friends. But for me personally, I believe that I was meant to have Marfan syndrome and to do something with it. And so having the knowledge of the plan of salvation has been important to me. I know that Heavenly Father knows me. He knows what I’m going through and He has a plan for me. Knowing that Marfan syndrome is part of that plan is very comforting to me. Christ didn’t just die for our sins. He also felt all of the pains we have ever felt. All the times I’ve had surgeries or I’ve had pain, or I’ve lost a friend to the syndrome, I know that Christ felt those feelings, and I can go to Him for comfort. At A Glance Name: Maya Brown-Zimmerman Location: Ohio Age: 27 Marital status: Married Children: Miles (3 1/2) and Julian (2) Occupation: Stay-at-home mother, freelance writer Schools Attended: Case Western Reserve University, The Ohio State University Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and “Come, Come Ye Saints” On The Web: http://marfmom.com Interview by Annette Pimentel.

As a psychotherapist practicing in Chicago, Jennifer understands how important sexual intimacy can be to healthy, honest marriages. Jennifer professionally helps LDS women find ways to overcome cultural and psychological barriers to sexual desire, and shares some of her wisdom in this interview. You wrote your dissertation on LDS women and sexuality and have given presentations on making marriages more passionate. How did you become interested in this? I began my studies at BYU in 1985. At the time, I wasn’t very educationally driven. Honestly, my bigger goal was to get married, but because I had to pay for my own education, I recognized it would serve me well to get scholarships, so I became more of an academic and really enjoyed it. It shifted my vision of who I could be. I was initially interested in design and architecture, but when I returned from my mission to southern Spain, I decided I wanted to be a therapist. I graduated with degrees in psychology and women’s studies. I also returned to BYU in the midst of the turmoil happening in the early 90s when Tomi-Ann Roberts, a non-Mormon psychology professor, and English professor Cecilia Konchar Farr taught there. I was fortunate to be at BYU during that time, grappling with questions about women’s status in the church and how it related to my own experience and anxiety and grief about who I believed I was supposed to be as an LDS woman. It was very helpful for me to be exposed to feminist ideas and thinking; I’m very grateful to have been there during that time. I went on to get my master’s and PhD in counseling psychology from Boston College. New England was closer to the culture and geography that I was most happy in (I grew up in Vermont). It is also where I met John, to whom I’m now married. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife In grad school, I remember someone presenting a case about a woman who, at age 25, was still a virgin for religious reasons. The senior clinician who was giving feedback said that the client was obviously sexually repressed and must have had a lot of anxiety about sex. I remember speaking up and saying I didn’t think that was necessarily the case—her sexual abstinence could be because of her own integrity, a reflection of her own convictions. I was—not surprisingly—the only one with that viewpoint. I grappled with how feminism often mischaracterizes conservative religious women’s choices. Most feminist theories see religious women’s choices as a result of fear and limited exposure, and not necessarily a result of genuine conviction and empowered choice. Yet at that time in my life, I saw many smart, strong, capable LDS women who were choosing to be active members of the church, women who wanted the good things that the church offered. During my graduate studies, and in part because I was asked to teach an undergraduate course on human sexuality, I became more reflective about the sexually conservative environment I had grown up in. I saw that our perspective on sexuality gave it deeper meaning than I thought the larger culture did, and I was grateful for that. At the same time, I saw LDS friends getting married who had a lot of unhappiness in their sexual relationships. There is a lot of cultural anxiety about sex among our membership, and I had inherited some of that as well, so it made me interested in what Mormon women’s experiences are with sexuality and how they compare to non-LDS women’s experiences, as well as if they fit with the feminist perspectives I was familiar with. So I decided to write my dissertation on LDS women and sexuality. How has your faith helped you in your profession? While I was in my PhD program, I was told that I took the pursuit of truth very seriously in comparison to other students—I think that was a reflection of being a Mormon. Discovering what is true really matters, and I think that’s been an important part of my own evolution as a thinker. I deeply value the reference point the church has given me as I’ve explored other ideas and viewpoints. The church’s positions have enriched who I am, particularly around being a mother. What are some of your core beliefs about sexuality? First, I think sexuality is God-given and fundamental to our human experience. It’s not peripheral. Our sexuality is fundamental to our spiritual and moral development. Our theology, more than any other Christian faith, teaches us that the body is fundamental to our spiritual development; we were given a body to become more like God, with all of the parts and passions of our heavenly parents. Second, I think a healthy sexual relationship is fundamental to a good marriage. When sexual relationships aren’t working well, they account for about 65 percent of people’s stated dissatisfaction; when a sexual relationship is working well, it accounts for about 20 percent of people’s satisfaction. In other words, sex has a more powerful negative effect than positive effect. When it’s working well, it really enhances and makes people happy to be in their marriage. When it’s not working well, it deeply undermines a marriage relationship. Of course, it’s not the most important part of a marriage, but it supports a happy, healthy marriage. What would you say are the most common cultural or psychological barriers for healthy sexual relationships? For Mormon women, and I’m speaking in general terms, I see a deep disownership of their sexuality. In other words, they often say to themselves: “This isn’t really my domain. My way of relating to sex is accommodating my spouse’s desire.” Often, when women first get married, they might be a little excited and curious and interested, but when they transition into marriage, it quickly becomes about duty and obligation, another job, someone else to care of; it isn’t passionate or desirable, and then they feel guilty about that. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife I think part of that disowernship comes from a sexual double standard that tends to bleed into our theology. While we expect both men and women to be chaste until marriage, it often gets communicated in ways that create different meanings for them. For women, it’s often conveyed that they’re less sexual than men and that because they’re inherently less sexual, they shouldn’t associate sexuality as part of their identity. This is problematic for women because they don’t feel like they should think “I am sexual” or “I have desire.” For many LDS women, the idea of loving sex and embracing their eroticism seems so incongruent with the idealized Mormon woman, and therefore a lot of women have a hard time seeing the possibility of healthy sexual desire in themselves. Women in my research who were comfortable with themselves as sexual beings rejected this double standard completely. They understood that physical intimacy doesn’t have anything to do with placating a man or earning his approval. It’s about expressing themselves to the one they love and maintaining and respecting their own dignity and desire at the same time. They also saw the law of chastity as being positive and protective for them—that it held men to a higher standard than men in the larger culture, and this provided them with what they wanted: committed sexuality, domesticated sexuality with men who were willing to commit to them and create a family with them. Also, many of the women I meet often have a spouse who thinks they’re attractive, but the wife has a hard time feeling sexual when she doesn’t fit an externalized standard of beauty. Part of the work I do is helping women embrace themselves—to stop living for everyone else, to develop deeper self-acceptance. When people say they want intimacy, they imply that they want to be validated and to hear that their partner approves of everything about them. But true intimacy is a willingness to bring your very flawed self to somebody else, to be fully seen by that person, and to embrace yourself enough to let your flawed self be known. I think that truly letting ourselves be known to another person is something both men and women need to learn in order to have positive, intimate relationships. So how do you suggest women overcome those cultural and psychological barriers? I don’t know why, as a church, we need to be invested in telling women who they ought to be, because if we are so naturally those things, then let us just be what we naturally are. Let women define themselves, because as soon as you tell a woman that she is inherently nurturing and giving and happily goes without, it tells her that wanting and desire and self-care are somehow not feminine and therefore not okay. Yet I think those qualities are inherent to good sexuality. One example of this is found in the Young Men and Young Women lesson manuals. One of the chapters in Aaronic Priesthood Manual 3 is “Choosing an Eternal Companion” and the Young Women’s corollary lesson is “Preparing to Become an Eternal Companion.” It’s indicative of the way we talk about men and women—men are agentic, making choices, deciding what they want, while women are passive, preparing to be chosen, trying to be wanted, supportive of male roles, etc. That kind of language and ideology doesn’t prepare someone to have pleasure and desire in sex and life. It preps them to feel needless and wantless and depressed. To be clear, I don’t think it has anything to do with the gospel. I don’t. It’s a cultural thing. I believe there are natural differences between men and women, but we would do much better if we would express our uniqueness to one another rather than trying to live up to cultural dictates of who we are supposed to be. One way to reverse this is to talk about what you want in your relationships, and what you want in life in general. Define who you want to be, what you want your relationship with God to be, and then be true to those desires as they relate to your sexuality and to men in your life. I think it’s a much more powerful way to motivate young women to obey the law of chastity and other gospel principles. She’s doing it because she wants the positive benefits of living by it, and she expects the men she’s with to live by it, too. Knowing what you desire gives you the courage to go after the things that matter to you. It’s the best antidote to depression. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife and Her Family In one of your presentations you mentioned that sex is like learning a new language. How so? If you’re trying to learn German, you’ll learn it a lot better if you truly want to learn how to converse in it. You bring a different energy to the process. So, desire is the first step. I don’t mean physiological desire. It’s truly wanting to want. Often in my work, I’m first helping people discover why they don’t want to even want sex. A lot of women don’t want to be sexual because they feel like they will be taken over by their spouse’s desires, or sex will be a way of condoning their husband’s bad behavior in their relationship. For these women, not wanting sex is their way to hold on to their sense of self or rebel against the pressures in the relationship. An important piece is learning how to hold on to your sense of self while expressing yourself to your spouse. For many people, as soon as they are intimately connected, and I mean even in an embrace with their spouse, they begin to feel anxious and start thinking about who they’re suppose to be or who they don’t want to be with respect to their spouse. Learning to be intimate is about calming yourself enough to actually be present and more genuine in those interactions. I often have couples engage in physical interactions lower than intercourse, like hugging one another, and track what’s going on in their minds. This can expose what’s undermining the sexual relationship. One client’s throat literally closes up when she hugs her spouse because she thinks about all of the things she needs to be in order to please him. I help women learn how to calm themselves and understand that intimate interactions won’t work out of a sense of duty or obligation. Instead, you often need to learn how to be truer to yourself while you’re with your spouse in order to find more genuine pleasure. Being less reactive and more emotionally grounded becomes the emotional framework of all emotional and physical interactions. Otherwise, you’re just trying to be who someone else wants you to be, and interactions end up being stilted or uncomfortable, which eventually undermines intimacy and desire. Any final advice you’d like to share? It’s way too cliché, but be yourself. Don’t disown your strengths, and certainly don’t disown them and call it being Christ-like—that drives me crazy when we throw ourselves under the bus and then say it’s Christ-like. Women have tremendous capacity, creativity, ability and wisdom that’s needed in order for ourselves, our communities and our families to thrive. Don’t devalue your strengths and desires. Keep evolving. At A Glance Name: Jennifer Finlayson-Fife Location: Chicago, IL Age: 44 Marital status: Married Occupation: Professional Counselor Children: Graham (13), Elliot (10), Jane (6) Schools Attended: Brigham Young University, Boston College Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” On The Web: www.finlayson-fife.com and www.drjenniferfife.blogspot.com Interview by Kathryn Peterson.

Raquel Johnston is a former Cuban refugee who came to America at age 10. Among the blessings she discovered in the United States, Raquel learned the value of education and became converted to the Church. She has passed both of those legacies on to her seven children. Tell me about coming to the United States. I came to the United States as a child with my parents. I was 10 and my brother was 11. My father had been a sergeant in Batista’s army (the Cuban dictator in power previous to Castro). After the revolt in which Castro defeated Batista in 1959, followers of Batista were being picked up and weren’t allowed to leave the island. Many members of my family were affiliated with Batista’s regime, and my father wanted to send us out of the country for safety. His life was very much in danger because he was considered part of the opposition. One of the outward expressions of opposition was when my dad pulled both my brother and I out of school as soon as he discovered that we were being taught Communism and atheism. We did not attend school for nine months because he was not willing to allow his children to be indoctrinated with an ideology hateful to him, even if it meant incarceration. My mom, however, said she wouldn’t break up the family. So, my dad took a gamble and paid for a chartered flight out of Cuba. He could have been arrested any time, even at the airport as we were leaving. So he coached my brother and me to continue boarding the flight if anyone came to take him. We took no personal belongings with us — all I had was a small handbag with a few family books. Raquel Johnston and Her Mother We went to Florida and asked for political asylum, but U.S. Immigration gave us a hard time because Castro still wasn’t a confirmed Communist threat. Cubans were flooding into Florida, as it is located only 90 miles away, has the same climate, and helped us feel close to our homeland. Many Cubans wanted to stay close. No one thought it would be long before Castro fell. It became harder and harder for refugees to find work since the local infrastructure couldn’t support so many people. Also, most of the Cubans, including our family, had a language barrier which limited the available jobs even more. My dad was working two jobs, as a janitor at a hospital and as a dishwasher in a restaurant, but that was all he could get. My mom could not find work. It was the same for everyone from Cuba – even doctors and lawyers; no one could find much work. The four of us were living in a little one-bedroom apartment with some of my uncles. The government created the Cuban Resettlement Program to help the Cubans move to other states to find work. We considered New York but my father decided we couldn’t live there because of the cold winters. Then, my mom’s brother opted to try California because he heard there was a lot of work and the climate was warm and pleasant. A month later we got a letter from him telling us he had everything ready for us to move to Los Angeles. There was plenty of work and many people spoke Spanish because of all of the Mexicans. We didn’t know anything about California, but that’s how we ended up here. What was school like for you? None of us spoke English, so it made things really difficult. None of the schools in Florida had bilingual education at the time, so all of the teachers spoke English only. They couldn’t communicate with us. We were some of the first non-English speakers at the school. No one knew what to do with my brother and me, so they gave us math worksheets every day. We’d do the Pledge of Allegiance and then they’d put us with an aide or leave us alone and we’d do worksheets, day after day, since math is the universal language. That’s when I learned to love math. We became very good at it very quickly because of all the practice. One day, the principal called us in and threatened to deport us, which was very frightening for us as little children. We didn’t understand what was happening. After that, my dad came to the school and with the help of a translator said he wouldn’t stand for his children being threatened when they didn’t have any say in the situation. The principal said that we’d have to attend evening classes to learn to speak English. My brother and I started going to adult education and summer school classes to try to learn the language. That was a huge turning point. I remember running home and sharing with my mom, with great excitement, how the ESL teacher had picked up a small table and said “la mesa…table” and a light had gone off in my head. It was really exciting for me to learn to connect all the words I was hearing. We started buying comic books too — lots of pictures, few words — and slowly but surely we learned English. Raquel Johnston and Her Husband During this time of feeling out of place and scared in Florida, my brother and I would come and go to school through our apartment complex every day. There was an older lady in our building who would give us cookies every time she saw us coming home from school. No one could understand us or knew who we were, including her, but she knew we were struggling, so she did that small act of kindness for us. I’ve never forgotten that. After two years in Florida (I was 12 and my brother was 13), we went to California where everyone thought we were Mexican because we spoke Spanish. We let them think that because it was too complicated to explain. No one even knew where Cuba was. When we came to California, we couldn’t understand the Mexicans — the language sounded different. Both cultures are of Spanish descent but at first we had some difficulty communicating with each other. Cubans speak really fast — to us, it seemed like the Mexicans were singing their words. Their speech sounded slow to us, but eventually we adapted. We moved into a small apartment owned by a Mexican family who lived below us. They were very kind-hearted people of very modest means. Yet, they had gone to Pic ‘N Save [Big Lots] and bought plastic plates and cups, utensils, and basic pots and pans. They donated all this as well as bedding to help us get a head start. Everything looked beautiful to us. They understood our situation and their generosity made a big impression on me as a child. My parents worked really hard. My dad had two jobs, and my mom took me along with her to look for work. It was a time when you knocked on doors and asked for work instead of sending in a resume like we do now. My mom did a bunch of odd jobs. She’d clean, sew, whatever. My dad eventually opened his own delivery business and became successful. He was able to provide higher education for his children. Both my brother and I attended UCLA. Many of our family members had not left Cuba because they didn’t think it would get as bad as it did. Some of them lived and died there. We were among a few of the fortunate ones who left the country. Every good thing I have, I owe to this country and the God given freedoms that are available here. How did you develop such a love for education? School was hard that first year in LA. Teenage years are difficult because you want to be a part of everything, but in my situation it was impossible — different culture, different language, and my parents were uneducated and couldn’t talk to the school personnel to help us be involved in school activities such as clubs, music, or sports. Fortunately, the school counselors were helpful. We worked extra hard in school because my parents really believed in education and told us we were very fortunate to be in this country. We believed the U.S. was the greatest country in the world, the land of opportunity, and that we could achieve anything that we wanted to achieve by working hard. My parents reminded us that had we stayed in Cuba, we never would have had an education since only the rich could go to school there. Part of the reason the revolution took place in Cuba was due to ignorance and poverty destroying lives. You can’t become what you’re supposed to become, or in other words “achieve your potential,” unless you rise above ignorance. My dad would take us to the library often and we’d check out lots of books. We couldn’t afford anything so the library became our favorite place. We’d get encyclopedias, dictionaries, everything. We caught the passion for this great land and its educational opportunities. Things were especially hard for me. In Cuba I was considered gifted and was applauded by my teachers for my accomplishments, but in America I was treated as someone lacking intelligence because I could not communicate. It made me realize that when there is a language barrier, people sometimes tend to classify others incorrectly. I had a hard time and cried a lot, but my parents’ attitude was that being here was a gift. They never spoke negatively about America. They were extremely supportive of our education. This enthusiasm has been passed on to our children – it is part of my parents’ legacy. During junior high school, I reached a turning point when I realized that I had to accept who I was, in that it was okay that I was never going to be like my American peers. My heritage was different and my family did things differently. We were starting a new life in a new country and I had some handicaps that weren’t going to change. I remember how one day during those formative high school years, my dad asked me why I cried so much. I shared with him how I was not being accepted by most of the other students. He replied that sometimes people, through ignorance, treat others in a demeaning manner but that they do not have the power to change who I am; only I can do that. He told me that I could maintain courage despite what was happening around me. Those loving words of advice made all the difference for me, particularly in how I saw myself in respect to others. To this day, I still have a great love for teenagers because I experienced many difficulties of my own, while I was growing up. How did you learn about the Church? I had been raised Catholic, where lay-people were discouraged from reading the Bible and you couldn’t see or understand what was going on during the mass because it was in Latin. Around the time I was 13 years old, The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) was held which made some changes and opened up study for regular members. I started reading the Bible and taking religious classes. I also resolved to pray to Heavenly Father only. As I did so, my love and trust in Him increased. I developed a very real and personal relationship with Him through prayer. I had a lot of questions and began to see discrepancies in the teachings of the faith in which I had been raised. I felt a growing need and determination to put the teachings of Jesus Christ into practice, not just worship. I knew that God loved me and was aware of me. I also felt that He would provide me with direction as to what to do in my life. As I read the Bible, I was particularly intrigued by the idea of prophets and apostles in the Old Testament. After high school, I began my undergraduate studies at UCLA. When I was 19, missionaries approached me on the street near the UCLA campus. I was not acquainted with the church at that time. When they posed the question, “What would you say if we told you there was a prophet on the earth today?” they had my attention. It led to a discussion about that topic and many other things, and then they gave me a Book of Mormon. I promised I would read it and I did, cover to cover. As I read the Book of Mormon and learned more about the gospel from the missionaries, it was incredible to me how everything made sense and how all of my questions were being answered. Filled with excitement, I proceeded to share with my parents all the wonderful things that I was learning, and they were not happy. It was a very hard time for our relationship. They loved me and I loved them, our family was very close — we were all each other had when we came to this country — but there was no compromise on either side on this subject. They were shocked that I would be the first to leave the faith of my fathers after so many generations. My brother, on the other hand, later became a Catholic priest. They held me back from joining the church as long as they could, and then told me I had to move out of their house if I got baptized. I went to an LDS member’s house and shed lots of tears. The day I was baptized, something extraordinary happened to me. I received the Gift of the Holy Ghost and found that I was given the strength to stand alone not only that day but for many years following. In time, my family and I reconciled and our relationship gradually improved. Acting on what I knew to be right was a very difficult thing for me to do, but decisions are like that. I have learned from this experience that sometimes years and years pass before you can see all the blessings you would have missed if you hadn’t said yes when given the opportunity. I could have said no! But because of it, my life has been very rich and abundantly blessed — I have never regretted my decision. Tell me about your husband and children. My husband is a native Californian. He served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War for four years while I was in high school and college. He was finishing his last year at UCLA when I met him. I was baptized in April 1970 and we met that August. He wasn’t a Mormon. We fell in love and were married almost two years later in a non-denominational church. Raquel Johnston and Her Husband Prior to our marriage, I told him the LDS Church was everything to me and it was something I had to live. He said he’d support me, so he started coming to church with me after we were married. He was baptized two years later. A year after that, we were sealed (married in the Church) in the Los Angeles Temple. We have seven children — four girls, three boys. True to my parents’ legacy, education was emphasized in our home and all of our children have gone to college. All the boys went to Harvard, one girl to Wellesley, and three girls to BYU. Most have gone on to graduate programs. When I told my dad that my oldest son was accepted to Harvard he said, “Isn’t this the greatest country in the world? We’ve come a long way from cutting sugar cane in Cuba.” They’re wonderful kids, they all live the gospel. They have been wonderful examples to my parents and have helped them become more appreciative of the LDS faith. All three boys and one girl served missions for our Church and all seven have been endowed. All of the pain and sacrifice was worth it for my posterity. My family means everything to me, including the people who preceded me. My husband and I just celebrated 40 years of marriage. I am so grateful for his love and support throughout the years. I’m also a three-time cancer survivor and am currently cancer free. We’ve had lots of ups and downs — life isn’t easy. However, we love each other and just keep going, trying not to let the bad things destroy the good things. Life presents challenges and God gives us the strength to bear them. I’ve found that you have to get on your knees and talk to Heavenly Father, ask Him to help you make it through the hard things and He will. I’ve tried to help my children understand what they’re capable of becoming, their potential. You have to help them catch the vision — set their sights high so they can achieve, just like Heavenly Father did for me. Do the same thing for your children: set that atmosphere, until they’re capable of recognizing that what you’ve been teaching is true. I don’t like it when people talk bad about teenagers. Children need a lot of support, encouragement, and help. Although my teen years were very hard, my dad and mom encouraged me. I never would have made it without them. Raquel Johnston at a Family Wedding How have you found the courage and strength to overcome the obstacles in your life? I look back to my baptism and wonder how I did it. I was very wimpy, sheltered, and protected; I’d never even been out on my own. I still can’t believe I did it. But God delivers you. You don’t always see it along the way. At A Glance Name: Raquel Perez Johnston Location: Escondido, San Diego, California Age: 62 Marital status: Married 40 years Children: Seven- Son (36yrs), Daughter (35yrs), Daughter (33yrs), Son (32 yrs), Daughter (28yrs), Daughter (25yrs), Son (23yrs). Occupation: Homemaker Convert: 4 April 1970 Schools Attended: UCLA Languages Spoken at Home: Spanish and English Favorite Hymn: “I Believe in Christ” and “I’m A Child of God” Interview by Lyndsey Payzant Wells.

Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill has dedicated her professional life to the study of peace and how to bring peace to the lives of women around the world. Both as a professor of psychology at Fordham University in New York City for 30 years and as the director of the Women’s Research Institute at BYU for 16 years, Bonnie has demonstrated the power of one to inspire kindness and love coupled with a fierce fight for women’s freedoms. For more on this remarkable woman’s personal life, watch her participate in the MWP 2010 Salon here. Take me back to your college and graduate school experience in the 1960s. Did you know studying peace was going to be the trajectory of your career or did you just fall into it? It evolved, but I was always interested in how to help people maximize their own development, so I was interested in psychology and education. I wasn’t just interested in helping people overcome weaknesses or problems; rather, I was interested in the development of their minds. I was fascinated by the concept of repentance, which comes from the Greek word metanoia. The “meta” part means transformation, like metamorphosis of a butterfly. And the “noia” part means the mind, suggesting that the mind can be transformed from an inferior state to a superior state. I wondered a lot about how this transformation takes place, how human beings have the eternal capacity to grown and ascend. So much of the gospel is about growing and progression. Those were major ideas in my thinking. I was also very interested in Christ’s teachings and His use of the mustard seed as an analogy for faith. It seemed, as I studied more about what that meant, that His teachings if actually used in our lives, can grow from a tiny seed into an enormous mustard plant which bears fruit and more seeds and brings more lifting and expanding. It seemed to me that our power – our ability to think, our spiritual power – could literally explode if we could catch a glimpse of and use His teachings we’ve been taught. I don’t think we can comprehend the magnitude of this growth and expansion. I guess it is the process that allows a mere mortal to become a god someday. I’ve met a lot of people who’ve followed those same interests by going into religious studies, instead of something so practical as psychology and really helping other through the practice of psychology. Did you ever consider going into religious studies and studying these concepts academically rather than as a practioner? I’ve always believed that the teachings of the gospel couldn’t just be something that are spoken about; they need to be lived and used and internalized. There was a part of me that found just the discussion of these issues a little lacking in actually bearing much fruit in people’s lives. Where the excitement comes for me is when I see people really able to grow and transform themselves. That’s overwhelming. You see it with your children; you work with them and help them catch a glimpse of what they can be. So I was interested in the applied part as much as the theoretical part. Let’s talk about that focus started being funneled into an interest in women and peace. How did your interest in regeneration and connection lead you specifically to an interest in women and peace? There were a couple of things. Yehudi Menuhin, the violinists, gave an interview in the New York Times very soon after I went to New York in 1968 and the interviewer asked him, with so many troubles in the world, how did he justify spending so much time in his music. Menuhin responded with something like, “It’s for the very reason that there’s so much ugliness and hatred in the world that I spend so much time on music. I have to counterbalance that with something beautiful and lovely and something that represents the best that I can be.” While I was teaching there, the women’s movement was very prominent especially in New York and I quickly became aware of the disparity between opportunities that were available for women to grow when compared with men. Education, employment, healthcare… all aspects of our society in the United States, but also internationally. What barriers need to be removed for women to excel? What would it look like in a peaceful world where there was great literature and art, but also people knew how to interact with each other in prosocial ways. How do you actually make a career in that? What sorts of courses did you teach? Research did you do? How did you practically craft those broad, idealistic goals into a career? I was a professor at the Graduate School at Fordham University at Lincoln Center for thirty years. This was an amazing opportunity for me because I was surrounded by very bright, capable doctoral students. The way I framed my ideas for a non-Mormon audience was in terms of learning and growing and progressing. I was developing a model to help children excel and love learning. As you know, New York City has many different dimensions and there were plenty of opportunities for these students of mine to take parts of this model I was building and use it to help children and adolescents throughout the city grow and learn. This model evolved and grew throughout the course of my work with my students. Many of my students were international because it’s a Jesuit university and drew the attention of many nuns and priests from around the world who come there to study. I was also able to look at parts of my model and see how it worked in different parts of the world. I was trying to identify the emotional and affective states along with how the brain functions cognitively in order to determine what conditions were the most beneficial to growing and learning in both schools and corporations and lots of other settings. It was a very rich time to explore a motivational learning model, and that’s where my career really took off since no one else was really interested in my thoughts on eternal progression! Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill and Her Husband, Robert One of the most important experiences I had in New York City didn’t occur in the classroom or even the university campus. One morning, my husband Bob and I woke to total silence. We lived on 57th Street, and that morning there was no honking, no talking people, no sirens… It was total silence. We were stunned. We got up and looked out the window at a city that was absolutely buried in snow. There were no cars on the street, even though the traffic lights kept turning red, green and yellow. The stores were closed. Wall Street was closed, schools were closed. This enormous, powerful city had just stopped. We got up and walked around in Central Park and I caught a little snowflake and I watched it quickly melt on my fingertips. I wondered how such a vulnerable little flake could have such a power over this giant city. Then I realized it wasn’t just one snowflake that had done it but millions and millions of snowflakes together that had brought the city to its knees. From then on, I had a perspective that what I was doing was not significant by itself. But if many people would help each other grow and develop, we could develop a culture of learning and of peace. I began to see that having a culture of peace where people are kind to each other really does accelerate learning. If millions of people would do it, we would reduce violence and free people to grow and develop to their fullest potential! I’d already seen in my collaboration with my students that it took more than my ideas to make a difference; it took their teamwork to make them happen. I realized we need to help everyone engage in this process. Do you feel that you have a spiritual gift for peace, for bringing calm and bringing unity? Not only your career, but your personal life and your demeanor make those around you feel so assured and loving towards each other. Is that something you’ve identified as a personal gift? That’s a hard question for me to answer. I think as I have studied it more and tried to apply it more in my life, I have become more peaceful. It may be that I’ve always tried to stay very close to my Father in Heaven, and He has guided me so many times and helped me so much. I certainly don’t believe I chose this path on my own. I think He needed someone to work in this space. Whether or not He gave me a special gift, I don’t know but I do know that He’s opened the way for things to happen that are actually miraculous. Maybe I had some tendencies in that direction that He was able to develop a bit, I don’t know. Let’s move on to your time at the Women’s Research Institute (WRI), which is the department you ran at BYU for 16 years. One of the things that excited me about the WRI was that it was a place where I could take my theological understandings established through our latter-day revelation and actually use them as a foundation to study the differences between women and men. We basically had three principles that we worked from at the Institute: One is the idea that gender is eternal and a central characteristic of premortal, mortal and eternal lives. There is an identity that surrounds us being female that is profoundly important. We wanted to know what parts of our being female are eternal, as opposed to the cultural things we grow up and learn to be on this earth. This was one serious question we wrestled with at the Institute. We also believed that increasing the understanding of women would have a significant impact on strengthening both male and female spirits as we try to comprehend ourselves and interact in this existence and prepare to interact to interact in the next existence. The second principle was that women and men are equal, but from a theological point of view. We argue unequivocally for the development of the full potential of each person, regardless of gender. Central to Christ’s work was the way He interacted with women, even though at that time they were relegated to inferior status in the culture. He recognized their spirits and intellects, He taught them, healed them, raised them from the dead. And after His resurrection, He appeared first to a woman and asked her to give the news to the apostles, even though at that time in Jewish law women were not considered competent as legal witnesses. So the fact that He used a woman as a witness is especially profound. The third principle that drove us came from statements from President Hinckley when he talked about how women had been put down and denigrated and abused and how the full gamut of opportunities were now available to women. The institute itself was a community of scholars, much like a university department, and it facilitated faculty collaboration. That kind of collaboration increases the quality of research and teaching. That community that the Institute created involved over 80 affiliates from across the other departments of the campus, and also across universities. We made good connections with other scholars that helped on a national level to understand that the attitude toward women at BYU wasn’t as archaic as many of them had been led to believe. Our connections and influence were felt around the world. The institute did great things: we met every week, we had discussions and lectures and films and it was all built around Christian responsibility to look after the downtrodden. As long as some women are the last to be fed, the first to be denied healthcare, as long as they are abused in their homes and social barriers keep them from growing and being educated and they’re denied opportunities and exploited for trade, then solutions to these problems must be found. We have to study them and find out what it is that is hindering these women and help alleviate those barriers. That’s what, I believe, what the Research Institute fostered in students and faculty. The most critical challenge of the 21st century is the need to improve women’s lives and increase their opportunities for growth because they turn around and increase the opportunities for grown and development among their own families. There are so many studies that provide evidence that the same amount of energy and effort and resources given to the men does not result in the improvement of the health or education of the children. But when provided to the women, it does. Supporting women leads directly to peace within our communities. There were three areas in particular that resulted in significant accomplishments, and these were three things I was personally involved in: First of all, when I started at the WRI, we wanted to identify what constitutes peace from a feminine perspective. There are many men out there talking about violence and peace, but we couldn’t find women’s definitions or discussions of their experiences with it. To start, we needed to carefully define what it was we were looking for and trying to understand. We did interview women to get definitions of peace and women’s experiences with it, but we finally decided to go to the most articulate women in the world: female poets who’ve written about their experiences with violence and peace. We wanted them from all over the world because we wanted to see the similarities and differences. We literally scoured the works of hundreds of poets. Eventually, we published our findings in a book called A Chorus for Peace. It was a global anthology of poetry by women and it was edited by myself and Marilyn Arnold and Kristen Tracy and was published by the University of Iowa Press. But the way these female poets saw war and strife, on fronts that were both international and domestic, and then the way they wrote graphically and poignantly about these conflicts and how they tore up their lives was just unbelievable. I don’t think it’s appropriate to repeat the poems here, but for example one woman from Africa talked about her memories of violence being like broken glass running over smooth skin. With just that image you begin to get a female perspective. Many of them were about rape and devastating birth circumstances and other heartrending situations. But, out of these ashes of violence, these women insist that peace be born. They want peace, and they describe peace and they plead for peace. One woman from China starts her poem with, “Let me be in my mother’s arms. Let my mother be in a small boat. Let the small boat be on a moonlit sea…” You begin to get this sense of peace that she would feel in the arms of her mother. It was an amazing collection of feminine perspectives. I’ll never forget the poem you read at my baby shower by the Chilean poet… Was it Gabrielle Mistral? Actually, that one about rocking a baby was in this collection. What’s so interesting is that women have similar feelings and perspectives. We relate immediately to rocking a baby or being rocked in a boat by a mother. We react to the image of broken glass on smooth skin. There is something that is eternal about being female that, I think, is universal. There are, of course, many modifications of what we start with, but at least in these poems we read and studied there was a great deal of blending of voices in a heartbreaking plea for peace. The second series of studies I worked on was with Valerie Hudson, Mary Caprioli and Chad Emmett and these were studies that were just published in Sex and World Peace by Columbia University Press. There were several elements of these studies that were important. One is that we build an enormous database called WomenStats, which is on the Internet and is free. It’s information about women from all over the world and all aspects of their lives. It’s about the laws of their lands and how they’re enforced in regards to women, their attitudes and mores as well as facts, such as percent of women who die in childbirth. That is a huge contribution, which is already being used by many scholars. Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill and Her Three Daughters Using those data, we were able to find an empirical link between the security of women and the security of the state. Basically, that means that a country’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, democracy or ethnoreligious identity, but how well its women are treated. Those studies also show that the larger the gender gap between the treatment of men and women in a society, the more likely a country is to be involved in intrastate and interstate conflict and to be the first to resort to force and higher levels of violence to solve conflicts. The third area we focused on at the WRI was reducing violence in the home, particularly spouse abuse. The intergenerational cycle of domestic violence is really strong: if there’s abuse in the home, particularly the young sons are likely to be abusively in their own relationships in the future. So we decided to study children who have been exposed to violence in the home and compare them with children in nonviolent homes. We saw what the differences were in their patterns of thought and their emotions so that we would know how to address those who have been exposed to the violence and how to stop it in the future. We found very specific thoughts and emotions in witnesses of violence that are different from those of other children. We also identified, from the different types of conflict that are common to children, the one that is most likely to erupt into violent episodes: that is feeling excluded, not being allowed to play with someone, or being left out of some sort of gathering. We developed a program from these findings which we believe can provide an intervention for these emotions. It’s called PEACEABILITIES, published by Brigham Young University.. It’s an intervention program that increases children’s abilities to be peaceful in all kinds of interpersonal relationships. It’s just barely come out and it’s a collection of compelling stories and songs and games and artwork and activities that originate from many ancient and modern cultures. It’s unique in that it develops the internal strengths that children need, rather than external controls. If I have a brain tumor, I don’t want a surgeon to go in near where the tumor is. I want the surgeon to root out that exact tumor. It’s that sort of precision we believe PEACEABILITIES has to target the root of the behavior. It’s not going to solve all world conflict today or tomorrow. But if it can be used as a model for selecting specific resources that target specific behaviors, then maybe children will be less likely in the future to be angry and escalate their own feelings into conflict. There will be less spouse abuse and neighborhood fighting. There will be less tribal fighting… That, I know, is a dream, because we’re a long way from having materials in all the languages we need. But the vice president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is really interested in PEACEABILITIES and wants to get it translated into French… There are many opportunities to spread this program.. We are trying now to raise money to place it in shelters for domestic violence families, schools and non profits. Since we’ve started this, we are beginning to see women who are determined to develop children’s abilities to be peaceful joining together in what is being called now the PEACEABILITIES movement in order to break violent patterns. This is exciting. Here’s a real key: peace is not the absence of violence. That’s just parallel living. Peace is not something warm and fuzzy and lovey and dovey. It’s very specific skills you have to interact with other people. And they can be taught. I read a good portion of Sex and World Peace, but I didn’t finish it cause it is heavy stuff. All of your work deals with heartbreaking circumstances. In the face of all of this devastating information, both statistically and anecdotally, that you have worked with over the course of your career, how do you stay positive and optimistic about the future of women? There’s nowhere else to go. We have to go up. We have to get better. We have to make a way for things to improve. Again, it’s not just one person. All of us have to work together. President Hinckley famously implored us to be a little kinder, be a little more considerate, be a little more gentle. That’s the only way to go. I don’t want to contribute to the negative things. I guess that’s where the mustard seed comes back to me. I still believe that if we will try just a little bit, peace will grow. You just have to have hope and keep trying. I don’t have a magic ball. I don’t know if we are going to destroy ourselves as human beings; there are certainly some pessimistic prophecies ahead of us. But among those prophecies and that pessimism, is always the constant promise that hope and charity and faith will keep us going. Those three things, in a very applied way, keep me going. I think when I started out as a graduate student, I had no idea what was going on around the world for women. I did not know. But as I tried to study and figure out how to remove barriers, I considered only very little barriers until I was actually truly studying world issues. Then it seemed overwhelming. But you just have to pick up your feet and take one step and then another and another… Hopefully, it’ll make a difference, if not to many then to one or two. I find it fascinating that the greatest advocates for women’s equality in the academic world come from Mormon women like you and Valerie Hudson. What do you say to a critic who wonders how this emancipation of women globally can be led by Mormon women? It is our theology that gives root to the ability to keep going. My passion is a natural outgrowth of our doctrinal beliefs. One of the things that concerns me most is we are not teaching our young people the theology. We’re teaching them behaviors: do this, don’t do that. But we’re not teaching them things like the forever existing intelligences which we all are, and the whole concepts of our eternal identities, especially our identities as females. That concept gives me great energy to try to figure out what that means and to try to encourage females to be females! I think a lot of females have sold out, frankly, and try to live in a male world according to male norms. But I don’t think we know what it means to be a female from a spiritual perspective that is eons old; I think we’re so culturally bound. I’m on a detective mission. I’m on an intense search to try to figure that out for myself… and for my daughters! I believe in the contagion theory. We’re all worried about one flu or another spreading the world and wiping us out. My vision is, Let’s spread these ideas! They do catch on with some, and we can remove the violence against women and the barriers in developing their creativity and voices. I think that is the last phase of the development of the earth. We have a responsibility to do it. The last chapter or two in Sex in World Peace talk about specific things that can be done and individual women who’ve stood up and done things in their own countries. There’s a movement in India, for example, for the women not to marry the pursuing male if he doesn’t have a toilet in the home. They’re standing up for having things that make their lives better and more manageable. We’ve moved away from the collective forum of formal violence like world wars. We don’t do that anymore. But we have so much informal, personal, neighbor-against-neighbor, intimate, family, bullying in schoolyards violence. These things can be fought at a personal level if we give our children the tools to teach them. That is the major challenge of the 21st century: to stop violence. Violence begins in the mind, long before weapons are fired or abuse is afflicted. So preventing violence also has to take place in the mind. Just as women are in the most vulnerable position during wars, they are also in a key position to lead this challenge against violence. They are with their little children before those children are socialized to hate. And if they could get started teaching peace, not just one woman with one child, but dozens of women with dozens of children, and hundreds of women and millions of women… I get a little emotional. We’ve got to figure out a way to fill the world with these abilities. Women have got to believe they can change the young hearts around them, and that if they do so, the momentum will build and peace will ripple through homes and neighborhoods and even countries. Peace will triumph, quietly and tenderly. At A Glance Name: Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill Location: Provo, UT Age: 72 Marital status: Widowed Children: 3 girls ages 28, 25, 23 Occupation: Research Psychologist, Writer Convert: Baptized at age 8, converted gradually until I had sure knowledge at age 18 Interview by Neylan McBaine.

Chris, Alisa and Christi are bound together not only by blood but by their affinity to a continent where they learned to love the people, the culture, and the soul of Africa. This love has passed from mother to daughter but now has expanded to friends and family around the world with Serve a Village, their NGO that supports sustainable projects to help improve the health, education, welfare and environment of needy communities throughout the world. How did your family establish such a strong connection to Africa? Chris: Well, Alisa and I are sisters, and Christi is my niece (Alisa’s daughter). Alisa: Chris and I had a great uncle who went on a mission to South Africa back in the 1920s and he ended up falling in love with Africa. He also fell in love with a South African woman, and he stayed in Africa and married her. He was very entrepreneurial and convinced several of his brothers, including our grandfather, grandmother, and their five children, to come back to South Africa with him. After our mother (Kathryn Hunt) left school, she worked as a decoder in the American Embassy during the second World War and was engaged to a South African man. However, she ended up marrying an American man instead, and had six children with him. (We’re two of them!) Twenty-six years later she reconnected with the South African man, they married and I moved to South Africa with her when I was 13. (Chris had just gotten married, but she and her husband also lived in Africa for 10 years.) We moved from San Francisco—a very liberal urban area; Chris was even living in Haight-Ashbury — to apartheid South Africa where we lived on a farm. We came straight from the hippie days burn your bra and draft card, that whole thing, and we landed in South Africa where we had to come to dinner in our long dresses. Chris: Our formal dresses. Alisa: Formal dresses! Chris: There was no television in South Africa for at least, how many, six, six years? Five or six years after we moved there. They didn’t have television. Alisa: And we’d had television our whole lives. And I was sent off to a girl’s boarding school which was very archaic, old British system, with the uniforms… Our mother lived in South Africa for over 30 years. She had to walk that fine line of keeping her husband happy, doing what her conscience told her she should do, and trying to care for the 300-400 Africans who lived on the farm. Our mom actually had a village right on her farm, and it was all the people who worked on the farm and the families of those people that worked on the farm. She built modern homes complete with electricity and running water for all who lived on her property. She also built a couple of schools in Warrenton (the newer African name is Magareng) and she was responsible for the children’s medical care. Chris Troger, Christi Romney and Alisa Cozzens Chris: When the babies were born she would help deliver them. Alisa: Our mother built a couple of schools in Warrenton (Magareng) and for the rest of our lives we were very involved in helping with the schools. Whenever we came back to America, we shipped clothing and school supplies and books and backpacks and soccer equipment to the schools in South Africa. That’s what our kids grew up doing: for their eagle projects they were collecting school supplies and books for schools there. Chris: When we came back here, that’s all we wanted to do: help the people over there because we felt so attached to them. Alisa: When we did girl’s camp in America, for example, all of the girls at camp learned African dances and they made backpacks and painted them and filled them with school supplies and hygiene supplies. Alisa: So, when my daughter Christi was about 13, I took my kids to South Africa for a couple of months to live with my mom so they could get to know the country. Christi, wasn’t that probably the single most impactful experience you had growing up? Didn’t it really change your whole perspective? Christi: Yeah, I was just your average 13 year old, involved in sports and music and church and school and going along with life. And then my brave mom took all her kids on a long flight from California over to South Africa. At the time, we’d been living in San Francisco, which is very multiracial and my school had kids from all around the world, and so I was comfortable in that sense. But when I got there and I saw the disparity between the whites and the blacks, it was just a shock to me. I was at such a naïve, innocent age. I would go out and run around with the kids and play tackle with them and barefoot soccer with them, and then I would get some looks from my grandma that what I was doing wasn’t quite appropriate, that there might be some talk from the neighbors or from the other whites in the area about it. It was just really a shock to me to see that disparity and to see that all the whites had their nice homes, cars, clothes, and then a stone’s throw from their home were their maids and farm hands, living in mud huts. It’s a very impressionable age to see that, and I think I was old enough to really comprehend it, whereas some of my younger siblings were just on a trip and probably maybe didn’t even realize they were in another country. I was old enough to comprehend what I was seeing and it really had an impact on me and changed me. Christi, did this experience spark your interest in international studies and to pursue a master’s in public health? Christi: As I got older, I was looking for any way possible to get back to Africa. I went to BYU in International Relations with an emphasis in African studies, and then I did a Master’s in Public Health. Alisa: She became a very independent 18-year-old who took off to Ghana to study the buruli skin disease after her freshman year of college… Christi: Well, either I had to do college to get back there or just disobey my parents by going off with a random group of people and study a weird skin disease in the bush…. Whatever it took, I was really anxious to get back to Africa. There’s something about the land and I think anybody that goes there will tell you this, that it just gets into your blood. Christi Romney in Africa Chris: Weren’t you the only white person in the whole African Dancing Troupe at BYU? Yeah, Africa draws you back. There’s something about it, you just miss it. There’s something… the smells, the sounds, and the people and just everything about it. Alisa: It’s the people mostly, because they’re so friendly and they’re so full of life and they’re so happy even though they have so little. Christi: Despite their difficulties, they have warm, big smiles. I love the vivid colors they use and their dancing and singing. It’s so energetic. So after you developed this deep connection to Africa, how did Serve a Village begin? Alisa: For so many years, we’d be engaged as a family and with friends in carrying out sustainable projects that help to improve the health, education, welfare and environment of needy communities in Africa. In 2006, we decided to incorporate our efforts, actually just prior to our mother’s passing. Serve A Village became an official non-profit in 2010. Also, Christi went over to South Africa a couple times for her Masters of Public Health (MPH) program to work in some of the townships in Cape Town and we began to see that we could do more than what we had been doing there. Christi: We also realized there were a lot of people really interested in serving some way in Africa, people who wanted to go with us on our trips. From my personal experience and talking with others, there’s a big difference between giving money and then actually going and seeing the needs for yourself. Once you’ve been there and you’ve interacted with the people, you get Africa in your blood and it’s something that you want to be a part of for the rest of your life. So Serve a Village today plans and carries out projects for needy communities around the world, and we take volunteers with us on our trips. Most of the people we bring with us become really personally involved with all the things that are going on over there. Alisa Cozzens Talk about some of the experiences you’ve had on your service expeditions. Alisa: In 2011, we collected and shipped 500 bicycles to Kenya. Thanks to a couple in our stake who served a mission there, we met a man who had been a bishop for six years in Nairobi and he helped us make sure the bikes were being distributed to those in need. He took me to his village about 9 hours away from Nairobi. We took every form of public transportation you could take—bike taxi, motorcycle taxi, and an 8 person van full of 25 people. We arrived late at night and I walked with him down this muddy little trail to his family home where there was no running water or electricity. I was so surprised since was he was always emailing us—I assumed he had an office! I don’t know what I was thinking after all the time I had spent in Africa. They gave me the room of honor and all their family was crowded in another room. I was awakened by chickens and cows the next morning. He gave me a tour through the banana plantations, sugarcane, and then all the different projects where we have people working— a children’s school, a clinic and an orphanage. We put together a kind of a town hall with a thousand senior citizens because he was so excited to have me tell them about the eyeglasses we were going to send them. Not a child or an adult that I saw there had eyeglasses. If they learn to read once they need glasses, they can’t read anymore, so they can’t do anything. And so that to me seemed like collecting eyeglasses is a really concrete, doable project that we’re going to work on in the future. There were no cars in this town and really the only public transportation was the bikes with the seats they rig on the back for people to sit on. He showed me the schools and the clinics where the bikes we collected were going to be distributed, one bike to each of them so they can go out to get their groceries or whatever they need to do. Chris: These are used bikes, so we’re also setting up a small workshop where the people will be able to take their bikes to be repaired. Alisa: Aside from the eyeglasses and bikes, the thing that had the greatest impact on me in Nairobi was Kibera—which is the largest slum in the northern half of Africa other than Soweto. There’s no pavement anywhere in Kibera. When you go, you wind through these miles of kind of really just paths, muddy paths, just trash piled up and mud on top of that and then tin or wooden shanties with just rows and rows and rows of shops. There are streams of putrid water throughout the roads and you can’t get back unless you walk back the same way; there are no cross roads. We walked for miles deep into Kibera to a birthing clinic and I asked the nurse what she does if there is an emergency and she said, “We have to take the woman out in a wheelbarrow because there’s no other way to get her out.” Kibera You mentioned that SAV has started schools and clinics in Africa? Alisa: We have a crèche (preschool) in Warrenton (the town where my mom lived) that we support. Most of the children are AIDS orphans. Chris: Most of them are young, two to five years old maybe, before they start school. They have about 150 children in this school when we went there the first time. The second time we went all the windows in the whole school had been broken out. It had been an old railroad warehouse. It gets so cold there in the winter, the roof was coming down, there were no toilets and all these children were in there and it just so sad. So we got windows put in all the whole school that year. This past summer we purchased and installed playground equipment for the school. There was nothing for them to play with, and no playground equipment. There is one woman there who just keeps trying to keep this thing going and has for years now. Alisa: Every year we go we take some school supplies. We take whatever we can. We came out to paint the school and fix the roof. I remember one night we were trying to get around the school and it was dark and all the lights in the whole place went down and it was pitch black. We should never have been there in the first place at night because you just don’t know…. Here we were, three American women in the middle of this place in the middle of Africa, but the people in the village were watching out for us. They all knew we were there and they were all trying to make sure we were okay and it was just amazing. So you know you just, you do fall in love with that kind of thing. I can hear how you have fallen in love with the people… Christi: I think that one of the things that has impressed me most is how gracious they are. They’ll give you the one room in their home and they’ll all go sleep in the kitchen on the floor together, all eight of them. They’ll feed you everything that they have for the next week—because you’re hungry and American—then they probably go pretty hungry for the rest of the week. It’s just so humbling. You think you’re coming there to help them and really they just do so much more for you than you do for them. Another really impressive experience that I had was in Ghana when I stayed with a very gracious family with two sons (twins) who had graduated from high school and were waiting to get into college and couldn’t get a job because the economy was poor. They were not really being very productive and they complained it was because of their poor economy and their country. I challenged them to come out with me since I was going over to these hospitals or to villages to give shots to the people and teach them how to seek treatment. Finally, I was able to talk one of them into going with me and it was just a life changing experience for him. He said he didn’t realize that his neighbors still lived in grass huts next to a creek. A bunch of them had just cleared away some of the bush and were living there and had nothing modern and didn’t know anything about modern healthcare. He was shocked but, just like for us, it totally changed his life. He’s gone on to help a lot of his friends his age realize that during this time they are waiting for college and a job, they can do something productive and effective and make a change in their country and improve it instead of sitting around complaining. Alisa: When you mention unemployment, it reminds me of when we started in Warrenton, we became familiar with several nonprofit organizations (NGOs) that help out with unemployment. There is something like 80 percent unemployment there. For example, the lady who used to work with our mother in the house is one of the people who runs an NGO there. Although they can’t get paid jobs, the people in her NGO go out and volunteer to AIDS patients in their communities. It’s incredible that even though so many of them are unemployed, they are doing a lot to help each other. Chris: We had another experience with a young boy who lived on my mother’s farm. Although he was shy, one day he came up to us and told us he had finished high school and was looking for work. It was a big thing for him to be able to graduate from high school and the fact that he actually came to ask for help showed it was clear he really wanted to change his life. So we got him into a local computer program and then we left to come back to America. When we returned, we found out the school didn’t have computers that ever worked and he was still struggling. Finally, we helped him get into a program for electrical engineering. We kept telling him about the Church and he starting to go to church with us. A member there took him under her wing and he joined the Church, and when he graduates he’s planning on going on a mission. How do you prioritize your projects? You’ve expanded to service throughout the world. How do you decide which projects to take on? Alisa: Sometimes we see a need and find a way to meet that need. Sometimes resources come to us and then we match a project to that resource. The bikes, for example. We’d been considering bikes as a project for quite a while but then the bikes became available and we had to determine which location would use them most and how would we get them there. On the other hand, when there was the horrible disaster in Haiti we were able to get a lot of people involved in collecting medical and emergency supplies and because we had someone on the ground there could distribute them quickly. So, if we have a strong person on the ground and we have a connection with the community and there’s a need, we can try to fill that need. Our hope is to expand to a lot more communities throughout the world, wherever we find people on the ground who are supportive. How has your faith impacted your service? Christi: It’s just part of the Mormon culture to do service and it doesn’t seem like a big deal to us. I think some may hear about what we’re doing and think, “Whoa you do all this voluntarily? You spend all that time and money doing this? Why?” Well, it’s what we do, it’s what Jesus would do, it’s how we’ve been raised. It’s the right thing to do. Chris: As Mormon women—it’s just part of our being part of being true to what we’ve been raised with and what we believe we should be doing. Alisa: And I think in a much more formal sense, the structure of the Church has allowed us to learn how to do it, to develop projects: Young Women projects and Relief Society projects…. About half of our volunteers for expeditions are church members. Christi: They realize that we are serving our brothers and sisters and that we need to help as much as we can. Alisa: We’ve always received more from them than we’ve given them. It’s that that feeling of warmth and gratitude and appreciation and I think everybody likes to feel appreciated. Chris: I’m a nurse professionally, and I think that’s part of being a nurse too. As a nurse, you are also doing things for other people, but they’re giving you so much more appreciation back. I’m just giving them a flu shot and they thank me and it makes you feel so good. That’s how you feel when you go to Africa and it’s that spirit of give and take. What would your message be to other Mormon Women? You all have full plates as mothers and your full time callings in the presidencies of the Relief Society or Young Women. How do you balance it all? Christi: You get your family involved in it like we’ve done and then it becomes a domino effect. My mom got me involved, then I get someone else involved and they get their kids involved in it too. Alisa: It comes down to priorities—you know, when you love something enough you’ll make time to do it. We’re all Heavenly Father’s children and deserving of the same blessings, and every time I go to Africa I’m reminded again of how much we have and how little some other people have. I also am reminded of how much spirit they have and sometimes how little spirit we have. It makes you wonder, why we deserve to have so much when others have so little. I think the Lord expects us to use our God-given abilities that He gave us to help others. I believe as His servants here on this earth that we can go out and help people. He gives us these opportunities to get jobs where we can travel and we have the gospel, so now we need to serve Him by going out and helping others. Happiness and spiritual understanding don’t necessarily come from things. How can we be more aware of the needs in the world? How can we help? Alisa: I visualize the difference being between watching war on TV and actually being in the battlefield. You can imagine if you were the soldier on the ground and you saw those people being killed and shot, how different that would be from watching it on television. It’s the same with us telling you about Kibera and actually walking through Kibera, and you can’t come back and not be changed and not want to help. Christi: I think that one of the best parts of our organization is that it allows for anybody to help in whatever capacity they can. Some people are great at making crafts and we’ve had ladies who’ve sewn bags and then we were able to take them over for the kids to use as schoolbags or they have sewn clothes or knitted scarves for the children in the villages I wanted to put in a plug for moms of young children at home. I know a lot of times they feel incapacitated and it’s hard work just taking care of these little beings that need so much help. I’ve realized from my own experience going with my mom and now having little kids of my own and taking them overseas that it’s really one of the best things you can do for them because it will change their life and help them realize how much they have and how much they can give. It helps them really focus more on being Christ-like. I know a lot of moms in and out of the Church may feel like they don’t have an identity because their life is taking care of their kids. But everyone has talents and we take whatever they can provide. At A Glance Name: Christine Troger Location: Reston, VA Age: 65 Marital status: Married Children: 2 children and 8 grandchildren Occupation: Retired nurse Schools Attended: Ricks, BYU, and Canada College, CA, RN from Fort Pierce JC, FL, Natal Technicon (Residential Child care diploma) Durban, South Africa. Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “The Spirit of God” On The Web: www.serveavillage.org Name: Alisa Cozzens Location: Great Falls, VA Age: 56 Marital status: Married Children: 4 children and 5 grandchildren Occupation: Executive Director — Serve a Village, Flight Attendant Schools Attended: BYU, BA Communications Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel” On The Web: www.serveavillage.org Name: Christi Romney Location: Perth, Western Australia Age: 32 Marital status: Married Children: 3 [River (4y); Nya (2y); Soleil (4m)] Occupation: Full time mom, part time Director of Operations of Serve a Village and Registered Nurse Schools Attended: BYU (BA- International Relations, MPH); George Mason University (BS – RN) Languages Spoken at Home: English, Spanish Favorite Hymn: “Because I Have Been Given Much” On The Web: www.serveavillage.org Interview by Melinda Semadeni.

Elizabeth Perry’s evangelical upbringing caused her to loathe The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. An eating disorder she developed in college helped soften her heart. An LDS boy from her high school introduced her to the Church; she later embraced the gospel, then married that boy. Tell me about your upbringing. I grew up in the Bay Area in California. My parents were very involved in different Christian evangelical churches and involved my brother and me in them as well. Some of the churches we went to offered classes on how to preach to people of other faiths. So I read a lot of anti-Mormon material. I learned what tactics to use to prove to Mormons that they were wrong. Why was your family so opposed to the Church? Mormonism is very powerful. I grew up thinking it was dangerous because it is so close to the truth, but at the same time so far from it. I knew Mormons believed in God, but it was wrong to me because it was a different God. So I essentially thought Mormons were devil worshippers. So you grew up with a strong belief that Mormonism was evil. Did you know any Mormons at the time? The first Mormon I knew well was a boy in my high school named Daniel. He and I liked each other and even dated on and off some, but the whole religion thing was a problem, so we never pursued anything serious. Plus he wanted to follow the prophet’s counsel to not date seriously before a mission. There were other Mormons as well; I could pick them out of the crowd because there was something unique about them. I would recognize that now as the Spirit, but at the time that feeling scared me because it was powerful but unfamiliar. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, these are nice people. It’s too bad they are going to hell!” Tell me about what happened when you went to college. I graduated from high school in 2006 and went to UC Davis. I still felt very passionately about the importance of preaching against the Mormon Church. I became involved in a Christian group on campus and wanted to start a class to teach about the dangers of Mormonism. I was very prepared and had lots of material to teach. But at this time I developed a severe eating disorder that changed my plans. Can you explain about the eating disorder? I come from a long line of people who struggle with eating disorders, and the problem started early for me. When I was in third grade I started thinking I was fat. This continued as I grew up, but my freshman year of college it really took hold of me. I was depressed and on medication, but still, some days were so hard that I didn’t want to get out of bed. Then I would binge and purge to take away the pain I felt. Both my eating disorder and my depression spiraled out of control. I was failing almost all my classes and considered dropping out of school. Thankfully I got help early; I saw a psychiatrist and also was in group therapy. So I never ended up teaching that class on Mormonism. So it seems that your eating disorder helped you in the long run, although I would never want to say it was a good thing… I would! If I hadn’t had an eating disorder, I wouldn’t have joined the Church. Just as the Nephites and the Lamanites in the Book of Mormon were humbled by their trials, I was humbled by my trial. It stripped me of my pride. I was so angry at God; I felt like He had abandoned me, so I decided to abandon Him. But in order to heal I had to soften my heart and let go of any anger I had, including my anger about the Mormon Church. So my eating disorder removed my vendetta and caused me to give up my hatred. Tell me about how your thoughts on the Church began to further change and how you eventually joined. The turn-around: it was wild! So Daniel, my Mormon friend from high school, had just gotten back from serving a mission in Germany. He felt inspired to come pay me a visit, although he had reservations because he didn’t want me to think that he was just trying to convert me. I was dating another guy at the time who was also doing a lot of soul-searching. When Daniel and I met up again, I was so impressed by the change in him. He was a good person before but still there was such a profound change in him after his mission. I was so curious as to what had brought this about. And he had such a peace and confidence that I was lacking. I wanted that peace for myself. He was reluctant to answer my questions because he didn’t want to seem too preachy, but he eventually did ask me to come to church with him. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a picture of Christ. I broke down and started sobbing. There was this indescribable feeling of love and peace that I was experiencing for the first time. It was like being an orphan my whole life, looking for my parents but being rejected and turned away, and then finally coming home. It’s pretty amazing that I felt all these things just the first time I came to an LDS church meeting. And then through attending church more I was able to learn about the Savior and about Heavenly Father’s plan for me. I broke up with the guy I was dating, and Daniel baptized me on November 1, 2008. A few months later we started dating. We got married in the Oakland Temple on May 1, 2010. And now we’re expecting our first baby! How did your family react to your joining the Church? My parents were very, very angry. They were initially going to disown me. My brother respected my decision, but it still upset him. But I can’t blame them because I understand the mindset they are coming from. Things have gotten better, though. My family is beginning to understand that Mormons are real people. My mom tells me that I am still saved because I was once a member of a “true Christian” church. I think it’s a coping mechanism for her because she still can’t accept that, according to her beliefs, I’m going to hell. So things are definitely still hard sometimes. My Mormonism is sort of the elephant in the room. It’s still something we don’t talk about a lot. You say you are working daily to maintain a recovered state from your disorder. Explain that to me. Everyday I wake up and don’t allow myself to give in. When you have an eating disorder, food, calories, and exercise take over your life. They consume your thought patterns. And you can begin to think that you are not worthy of happiness or worthy of love. So I fight to actively resist those kinds of thoughts. Every time something like that comes into my head I evaluate if it is true or false. Like, if I catch myself thinking badly about my body, then I realize those thoughts are lies and are not from God. What advice would you give someone who is struggling or has struggled with an eating disorder? I would tell them to hold on. And to tell someone about it, tell anyone who cares about them. That person you tell can help you and also help hold you accountable to yourself. Also, I would encourage someone to evaluate the source of those negative self-thoughts and try to identify the root of the problem. If you have an eating disorder, there is hope for you. You were Christian before joining the LDS church. Will you describe your spirituality now? I have a very personal and close relationship with Christ that I didn’t have before. It’s not emotionally based; it’s more of a knowledge. I feel steadfast. I feel stable. I didn’t feel those things before. Our brains are so small, but our spirits are capable of so much more. It’s good to think and not be a blind sheep, but there’s such a need for a spiritual connection. So I am trying to do the best I can to maintain my spirituality and my relationship with God, including attending the temple regularly. I also want to help other women who are struggling to come to the Savior and be healed. At A Glance Name: Elizabeth Perry Location: Livermore, CA Age: 24 Marital status: Married (with baby #1 on the way!) Schools Attended: UC Davis (BA in Linguistics), Brigham Young University (Masters of Communications) Convert: November 2008 Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” Interview by Katherine Wilkinson.

Crystal came from a tumultuous upbringing, passed from foster home to foster home before settling with her grandparents as a teenager. It wasn’t until she was a young single mother that the missionaries knocked on her door and brought a whole new light into her life. Now she is a successful cellular molecular biology professor, a devoted mother, and advocate for women. Crystal embraces every opportunity to teach others the joys of science, of being a woman, and of the love Jesus Christ has for them. My mom was barely seventeen when she had me. Later, she got together with my stepfather, and she had five of us all together: three with my dad and two with my stepfather. I’d always been a spiritual person. I believe with all my heart that people are given spiritual gifts from God. I remember specific examples from when I was young when I knew without a doubt that Jesus Christ loved me. I had promptings to get my brothers out of situations before bad things happened or promptings to take a certain way home from school one day—like a sixth sense. My mom and dad were huge partiers, so they never took us to a church service, but they did find out who in the community had a church bus and sent us to whatever church service it belonged to. So I went to lots of churches when I was young. My mother was very abusive to all of us. When I was almost thirteen, my mom threatened to give us older three kids away, so my dad—who I later found out was not my biological father—came and got us. I was brokenhearted because I had to leave behind my baby brothers who were only one and three years old, and I had been their primary caretaker since they were born. I remember my dad driving away and looking out the car window. My little brother was wearing blue dinosaur underwear and running after the car and crying for me to come back. We stayed with my dad for only a couple of weeks because he didn’t have a stove or running water. So his stepmother, my grandma, took care of us. We were home a lot in my grandma’s house, and during that time, a door and a coffee table were broken. After about six months, she couldn’t handle it anymore and turned us in to state foster care. Crystal Croshaw in Kindergarten When we were put into foster care, yet again it felt like the adults who were supposed to love us gave us away. My parents never wrote or contacted us once while we were in foster care. At that time, I was in Kansas foster care in the eighth grade. In this family, the father was a Lutheran minister and the mother stayed home. Everything we did was either church related or school related. There was no TV and very strict rules about what books you could read and what activities you could do. My younger brother only lasted one day before kicking the foster mother, and he was then taken away to juvenile detention. My other brother, David, and I stayed together for a couple months before he was also taken to a new home, leaving me alone with the minister’s family. The kids were horrible to me at school because I was the foster kid, and I remember praying a lot to God to get me out of this situation. “I’ll do whatever you want,” I said. I was in agony thinking about all my brothers, especially the youngest ones who were still living with my mother. I knew someday one of them would be killed, but what could I do? About five months into foster care, the thought came to me that my mother probably hadn’t told my grandmother—her mother—that we were in foster care. Somehow, I got her address. My grandparents had just moved to Virginia because my grandfather was taking over a company and helping the branch take off. I sent them a letter asking them if there was anything they could do, please help us get out of foster care. Prior to this, I was always afraid of my grandfather because he was not a cuddly man. My grandmother and aunts were always kind to me, but it wasn’t them that called me back—it was him. He asked me a lot of questions, and at the end of the conversation he said, “I’m going to try to get you out.” I felt so much relief. Then he said, “Not so fast. This is a long process. You will still remain in foster care for many months.” He was right. We were there for another year, passed from person to person. My schooling was the only thing that kept me going. Everyone told me how ugly I was and that no one wanted me, but darn if I didn’t get the best grades in science! I was probably the quietest kid in the classroom, but my teachers still recognized something in me. They would pull me aside to say, “You are special. You stand out from the crowd. Will you consider putting an entry into this science fair—or studying for this spelling bee?” All I wanted was someone to be proud of me, and they gave me a reason to try, so I focused intently on the projects and tried to succeed. When I was fourteen I found myself in my second foster home, getting ready to move to my third. The principle called me out of class and said, “I just got a phone call. You are moving in with your grandparents!” I felt so lucky. My brother, David, and I were in two different homes at the time. We finally saw each other for the first time in three months on a car ride to the plane. It was also my first plane ride. My other brother was still in juvenile detention for kicking the first foster mom, so he did not come with us at that time. When we arrived in Virginia, my grandparents made a great effort to show us they wanted us. We had nice clothes and toys, and for the first time in my life, people were nice to me. I was the best child I could be for them, because I was so grateful! I did what I could to make my grandparents proud of me. There wasn’t a whole lot I could offer them, but I always strived to do my best academically. We’d been in the home for a couple months when I asked them if they’d take us to church. They took us to a Methodist church where we continued to go until I left for college. So, I was Christian. I did not become LDS until several years later. When you lived with your grandparents, how did they feel about education? My grandmother was not formally educated, but my grandfather was retired from the Navy, so he had a lot of educational training. I have one of his business cards that says he has a master’s degree in electrical engineering. We never really talked about his education, but they definitely encouraged me to get an education. When I was a little bitty girl, during all this parent craziness, my mom left me home alone for days when I was very sick, and my dad’s stepmom found me. She took me to her house for a couple weeks, and I remember feeling so depressed. I looked at my grandma. We were sitting at the kitchen table, and I asked her, “How can I not have such a crazy life when I’m an adult?” She said, “Get yourself an education.” So when I was seven that became the focus of my life. When you graduated from high school, how did you gain further education? After high school, things kind of changed at home. My grandparents were always very nice and supportive, but very strict. They believed that when a child turned eighteen it was their responsibility to care for themselves. They made it clear early on that they were not going to put any contribution toward a college education. So, I was taking all these courses in high school, but I honest to goodness never believed that I would get the opportunity to go to college, so I looked for other opportunities instead. At the very beginning of my senior year there was a career fair. I saw a brochure that said, “Earn $30,000 by joining ROTC.” I had no idea what it was, so I picked up the brochure and this Marine Corps recruiter introduced himself. He was very in-your-face. It was hard to say no, and the next thing I knew I was signed up for the Marine Corps—not the ROTC. This was basic training, enlisted. I soon realized I did not want to do this. I was doing hard core physical training for long hours every weekend. There was a lot of yelling in my face to break me down, and my spirit couldn’t handle it. One time, I was on guard duty directing traffic. I guess my rifle wasn’t straight enough. The drill instructor yanked the rifle out of my arms and pulled out my back. I was thankfully sent home from the injury. So, about three weeks later I’d gotten a job at a convenience store. All my friends were home for Christmas. I was so humiliated and felt like such a loser, serving them chicken biscuits when they were home from college. So I left and went home to my grandparents. I didn’t have much money, and my grandparents said they wouldn’t help me financially, but I still sent in two college applications: one to Cornell University and one to Mary Baldwin. I was accepted to both. A month after my acceptance to Mary Baldwin, an all-girls school, they sent me an invitation to be part of a scholars program with a nice scholarship. So, I accepted that and was very grateful. With my prayers of gratitude, I went to college to major in biology with a minor in ministry and women’s studies. I got married right before my sophomore year and had a baby that same year. I was involved in spiritual life very much and was always the person they asked to give the prayers. I was president for two years of the Baptist Student Union and went on three mission trips during my summer vacations. We raised money for the trips through the Baptist Student Union, but we did a lot of our own fundraising as well. The funny thing is that I was never a Baptist, but I loved outreach, networking with other Christians, and bringing spirituality to campus. At the end of my college experience, I was blessed and honored to receive a big award called the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award for people who inspire others. What mission trips did you attend? My sophomore year in college I went to Savannah, Georgia, to a Baptist outreach program for inner city kids, and I brought my new baby with me. All the little kids loved her, and she was passed around a lot. Basically, it was like a Big Brothers/Big Sisters programs where we gave the kids something to do after school. We helped organize the brand new building and introduced new activities, games, and songs to them. We played with them, let them braid our hair, and we did a little spiritual conference for them the weekend before we left. It was a great experience. My mission trip my junior year was my favorite. That year, we worked with a Christian group called Charleston Outreach in Charleston, South Carolina, and worked with children who had been victims of lead poisoning. The city had decimated their homes. One of the children had written to President Clinton asking for help, and he’d sent them money to rebuild their home. One day, the husband came home from work, stood in his newly finished hallway and looked at me. I said, “This is your new hallway! Do you like it?” He looked at me and said, “I’ve never had a nice hallway before,” and started crying. It was magnificent. It is, to this day, one of the most amazing experiences of my life. My senior year we flew to Oahu, Hawaii, and put on a Family Life Conference. We worked very hard for that mission trip. I sold all my Beanie Babies just to pay for it. Our leader, Barbara, had a degree in family counseling and put together a very thorough curriculum. We also flew to the tiny island of Lana’i and did another conference over there. Eight of us split up to teach different age groups. I worked with 4th – 6th graders to instill basic core values, like a huge Family Home Evening, while the parents took the 5 Love Languages course by Gary Chapman. It was an experience I’ve never been able to repeat in my whole life. Crystal Croshaw You graduated with a degree in biology and a minor in ministry and women’s studies. What did you do after that? You can’t do much with a bachelor’s degree in biology. I hate to say that if anyone is studying biology right now, but it’s hard to make a living with just a bachelor’s degree. So I had two choices: medical school or grad school. Medical school was $150,000 in student loans. I’d already racked up $100,000 because I’d gone to a private college. (I never should have gone there for that reason alone, but I’m very grateful I went to Mary Baldwin anyway!) I didn’t want to take out more student loans, and I also had a precious two year old at home. I felt like I’d already been absent for a good part of her life, so I chose to go the route of grad school. If you study in the science field, you’re guaranteed five years of support, tuition and fees paid, plus a living stipend. No student loans were necessary if you played your cards right. So I went straight into UVA to study Biology with an emphasis in Embryology. I emphasized in microsurgery on frog embryos. At the time I went to grad school, I’d fully intended to get a PhD. I did my first two years and passed my qualifying exam. But five years into the program, I separated from my husband. The final summer I was supposed to finish the thesis I didn’t get it turned in until October, instead of in July. My boss did not pay me my stipend my last summer of PhD school, so I had spent it working as a nanny and shuttling my daughter back and forth after the separation—which left me no time to write my thesis. Because of that, I was awarded a master’s degree and not a PhD, even though I’d put seven years of my life into that degree. I was grateful they were willing to give me something, but I thought, “Play nice, and when you are finished and your thesis has been published, then petition to get your PhD.” When that time did come, it did not work out to my advantage. At least my friends and colleagues understood, especially those in my lab who knew what I was going through. How were you introduced to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? The whole time I was in grad school, I tried to keep up my spiritual life. I was going to a non-denominational church, and I loved the people, the music, and the ministry. I’d been going there for 4 years, but I kept it quiet around my colleagues because no one I worked with was religious. They felt religious people were ignorant. Not long after I moved into a tiny apartment with my daughter, the LDS missionaries came by. As a new single mom, these two young men were so kind and would let me cook dinner for them, and they played with my daughter. She was so happy when they came over. During this time, I was finishing up my PhD, I already had a degree in ministry, and these nineteen-year-old boys were telling me that a fourteen-year-old boy had seen God, and that all the things I thought were true were not true—that I hadn’t even been baptized by the proper authority. I did not accept their teachings for a long time. But when they showed me a DVD called The Restoration, it was a classic moment where I could not explain the emotional feelings I had. I couldn’t wait for them to leave so I could read the story of Joseph Smith’s experience for myself. I was pretty tentative because I’d been raised to believe that Mormonism was a cult and women were second class citizens, but I started going to the LDS Church and my non-denominational church, despite my reservations. One day in the non-denominational church, we were reading Acts 8. It mentions that two of the apostles needed to go to Samaria so they could confer the Holy Ghost upon the people because it had not been received. My preacher asked, “Now, why do you think they did that?” During that time, the missionaries had been telling me about the Holy Ghost and proper authority. I knew right then and there the answer. I said, “I know why, I know why! Because no one had the proper authority.” And the preacher was like, “I don’t think that’s what it meant . . . moving right along.” Crystal Croshaw and Her Family Before then and since then I’ve had a lot of questions, but that experience is undeniable to me. The two things I go back to are: my impressions watching The Restoration and my Bible study of Acts 8 to give myself strength. I saw the missionaries twice a week for three months before I finally committed to baptism. I was baptized in November 2004 into the LDS Church. Once you joined the church and finished your degree, where did you go? A year after I joined the church, I was still in school and not making ends meet, my car was almost repossessed several times, I could not pay my bills, and my advisor was not sure he could pay me to work in the fall. So, I sent an email to my old advisor at Mary Baldwin College, which was only thirty miles away, and asked for a job. They had multiple lab sections that needed a teacher, so I started to teach there while working on my PhD at the other college. Over time, I was asked to teach more and more. I taught at Mary Baldwin for two years before I completed my degree, but my other advisor found out before I graduated. I knew he was very grumpy, but I had no idea he had such an aversion to me teaching there, which ultimately affected my non-approval of my PhD program in the end. Then, it was like one of those perfect timing moments. I had been in the church for three years when a man moved in from Idaho. He and I eventually married, and he got a job thirty miles the other direction as I finished up my thesis. It was then that my bishop pulled me in to talk about my education. He turned out to be a member of the biology department for James Madison University. He said, “Give me a copy of your resume. We may be able to find a class for you to teach. That would give you a foot in the door.” I wasn’t interested in a foot in the door because I was already teaching at my dream job, even if it didn’t pay much, but I gave him my resume anyway. James Madison University called me and asked if I’d teach one class of cellular-molecular biology lab. I said, “Let me think about this—” but then I took it. I loved teaching at this university so much that I quit at Mary Baldwin. That very next semester, someone quit at James Madison, and I was able to take her job full time. Now I’m teaching all kinds of things. I guess I have the “curse of the competent.” I can’t believe I’ve been so blessed to have this job. I now teach cellular-molecular biology lab, genetics and development lab, microbiology lab, and a viral discovery course. Crystal Croshaw and Her Family What is currently your favorite college course to teach? My favorite course of all—which I’m not teaching right now but wish I was—is biology of women. It was my favorite course to take as an undergrad. It’s a course rooted in educating girls at Mary Baldwin, ages twelve and up, about their bodies: the biological differences between male/female, X and Y chromosomes, and anatomy. Then we study the different stages of life a woman will go through: childhood, adolescence and puberty, pregnancy, menopause and all the options and lifestyle changes that happen to you as you gradually age. Most of the time women are so uneducated about their own bodies. They often learn about their bodies through locker room talk or magazines. That course has changed so many lives, as it also changed mine as a young woman. I would love to teach this course at my current college and have suggested to my university its importance. We have a wonderful women’s studies program here, but no biology of women course yet. At Mary Baldwin, I even had men take the course, and I can promise you that they would say they learned just as much from it as the women did. This summer, I’m teaching at a community college as well, and that committee jumped at my offer to possibly teach it there in the future. How do you feel about teaching as a female professor in biology? I’ve never, once, felt at a disadvantage as a woman teaching biology. Our department chair is a woman, our assistant dean is a woman, and half of our faculty are women. I work with an amazing team. All the women in my family, despite the craziness, have always been strong. I’ve never thought that being a woman was a strike against me. It’s really important that women know they have the same amazing opportunities as men, and you are not at a loss to make any contributions or accomplishments just because you are female. What would you like to see change for women in the world? I hate that there is a stereotype that women and girls are not strong in math and science. This becomes a cop-out: that women and girls are expected not to be good. So when you excel at math and science, you are an anomaly of nature. I think it’s really important not to tell our children that women are not good at math and science because it sets them up for low expectations. It’s definitely been my experience that if you teach a child to have low expectations, they will not disappoint you. Typically, there aren’t too many female science role models. I want my students to see that I care about them, to see me as a role model, keeping up with the literature, and being there for them. It’s been an amazing opportunity for me. My daughter has never known anything different. That is totally a different model than I grew up with. Have you had any experiences where your work related to the gospel? During my first year of grad school, with these amazingly smart people, we were in a classroom, learning about developmental biology with Dr. Barry Condron, an embryologist. He was teaching us about grasshopper embryos. “In the grasshopper, the neural system is pattered in a very cool way. They send out projections called pioneers. The pioneers wind their way through the embryo. In some places they turn left, some right. All the while they’re looking for different signals, or queues, to tell them what to do and where to go. The neurons move through the embryo—pattern the way—and they finally get to their target. What happens when they get to their target? They die…but the tracks they laid down are recognized by all future neurons, and they all follow the exact track of the original pioneer neurons.” I remember sitting there thinking, “Wow. This is like Jesus Christ! He tells us which way to go and what path to follow.” I felt the spirit so strongly. Pioneer neurons. They’re amazing! At that point, I wasn’t a member, but now, I see another layer when you think of the Mormon pioneers, and it is even more relevant. Isn’t it amazing that the same principles play out over and over again in our lives? All we have to do is see them for what they are. I’ve seen so much in my life, but I’ve been able to survive it with a great attitude and a great love for every person around me because I’ve always known the love of Christ. I’ve never denied it, and it’s the first place I go when I’m in trouble or when I’m scared. I encourage everyone to seek for that part of their being, because it is there, and never deny it. At A Glance Name: Crystal Scott Croshaw Location: Broadway, VA Age: 36 Marital status: Married Children: 15-year-old daughter, 3-year-old son Convert: 11/20/2004 Occupation: professor, lecturer Schools Attended: Mary Baldwin College, University of Virginia Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Be Still My Soul” Interview by Jessica Drollette.