Dawkins

I mentioned Dawkins in yesterday's entry, so I might as well complete that thought.

As I mentioned before, Dawkins was an intelligent guy who was used to being the best at everything he did, no doubt because of his intelligence and because he was insanely competitive. I cannot help but wonder if his short stature also had something to do with his competitive drive. Anyway, whether it was playing his instrument or learning a new language, he always wanted to be at the top of whatever the game was.

After the MTC, Dawkins and I lived in the same apartment when I was about halfway done with my mission. His Cantonese had greatly improved since the MTC, but it was still a little quirky, as was his personality. Dawkins was always given to doing weird things here and there, such as ignoring the usual "golden question" and discussion routines and asking people first thing if they wanted to get baptized and/or receive the priesthood. Not exactly normal.

There is little doubt in my mind that he was ecstatic when he was called to be the AP (assistant to the mission president). He always had ideas about how things should be, and it became apparently very quickly that he wanted things in the mission to change. Memos started coming out about stricter rules and what we could and could not do, and although they were signed by the president, we all knew where they were coming from. Morale started to decrease, and we were getting increasingly frustrated.

A mission conference was held in the Ho Man Tin stake center a couple months after Dawkins became the AP. The week before the conference, David became Dawkins's new companion. David was asked to conduct the conference. After a few opening remarks from the president and his wife, they left the chapel and David got up to speak. The purpose of his talk was to discuss some of the new rules that had come out of the mission home and to lay out even more rules. This is when the meeting got weird. Missionaries sitting in the congregation began to stand up and challenge the rules. Even one of the elderly couple missionaries stood up and quoted the scripture from D&C about "teaching people correct principles and letting them govern themselves." Badger and Cronkite heckled and made jokes from the back of the room. Another friend, Sis. Oscar, who was new at the time, stood up and told everyone in shakey Cantonese that "she didn't like this feeling in the room." I don't think I've ever been in a group of people as angry as this one. Not exactly a model church meeting.

I felt bad for David. Everyone knew that he hadn't come up with these new rules, and that Dawkins had thrown him under the bus by having him deliver the message. Dawkins sat behind him the whole time with an angry scowl on his face, never offering any kind of support to his new companion as he was attacked from the audience.

The president came back in the room later and said that he had purposely left the room so that he could get an honest reaction to what was being proposed. The reaction was certainly honest, but despite what had happened, most of the new rules went into effect anyway.

I don't even remember what the biggest complaints were now, but I believe that among the changes were rules stating that we could no longer go to dinner appointments at members' homes with the sister missionaries (almost every ward/branch had both elders and sisters), and that we could not walk next to the sisters on the sidewalk. Our morning preparation time was also cut back by 30 minutes (because of the difficulty of the language, we had always gotten 30 minutes more than the white handbook had prescribed), and we were now required to begin proselyting at 9:30am. Anyone who's ever spent time in southern China knows that the country is dead at 9:30am, so going out earlier wasn't exactly the best use of our time. I wish I remembered what the new rules were more clearly, but things changed so frequently in HK that it's hard to remember when exactly which rule changed. The conference was, however, quite memorable.

As one might expect, we were not happy, and Dawkins, who had never been the most popular guy in the mission, was now a pariah. The president apparently understood this, because Dawkins's tenure as AP ended not long after the conference. He was sent to the corner of the mission where he could do the least harm and the fewest people would see him: Macau. If you've never heard of Macau, well, it's not in Hong Kong. It was, at the time, a Portuguese colony and thus another country.

I've learned over the years that piling rules on people doesn't necessarily make them behave better or like you more. A little extra trust and faith in others, on the other hand, often does wonders for relationships of all kinds. Dawkins learned it very well that day, I'm sure, and hopefully has never forgotten it.