How did I get to the US?

"Who would have known, when you started learning English in fifth grade a long, long time ago, that that would be your children's native tongue," my mother once commented to me. I liked English very much and it came easy to me. I even got a little poetry book in English from my teacher, Mrs Eby, at the end of the first year, commending me on my good grades.

So how did I end up in the United States? It probably has everything to do with the fact that I joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was 18 years old. My parents and two younger brothers had already joined the Church six months earlier, but I was a stubborn teenager and did not want to do it on their time. There were two diligent missionaries, Elder Baugh and Elder Nelson, who felt that it was time for me to join, so they gave me the missionary lessons and I was baptized in April. A couple of years later Sweden got a new missionary president, Reid H. Johnson, and he came to a district conference in the town where I was living and he asked if I wanted to go on a mission. He needed a secrectary to work in the mission office. Well, I said yes and then went home crying, worried about what I had committed myself to. In October, on my 21st birthday, I started my mission and had a most wonderful time till May, 19 months later when I was released.

There was this missionary, Elder Jim, who I met on my mission and he wanted me to come over to the United States to see if things could work out between us. I started filling out immigration papers while in the office and everything went very smooth, one paper after another. Usually to get an immigration visa, you have to have a skill needed in the U. S. or someone to sponsor you. Well, I did not have any of that. The only thing I had was a letter that President Johnson had written to one of his friends who held a higher-up position at ZCMI Department Store about me maybe working there.

I left for Salt Lake City, Utah, in July and was met at the airport by my missionary companion and good friend, Ann, as well as Jim and another returned Elder.

I met with the ZCMI director and decided that a position there was not for me. Instead I got a job at the Genealogical Society checking microfilms in French for a couple of months. My friend, Ann, was going to continue her studies at BYU in Provo, so I quit my job and followed her there. We shared an apartment with four other girls at the Seville. I started job hunting and was extremely lucky to get a job at Christopherson Travel Agency a couple of blocks from Seville. The manager had just hired an new girl to work there, so he did not really need any more employees, but he hired me anyway. Unfortunately, he made life not very nice for the other new hire so she quit.

While in Provo, I enrolled at BYU as a Sophomore because of my credits from Swedish schools. I wanted an activity card so I could go to dances and participate in everything BYU had to offer. I took classes in English, Book of Mormon, Russian, German, PE (dance), piano and health. In my dance class, after I had danced with the same guy for a couple of weeks, he asked me out for a date and I declined. After that he did not dance with me anymore, and since there were more girls than guys in the class, I had no one to dance with any more, so I quit going to the class. Consequently, I got a bad grade in that class. I should have explained the situation to the teacher instead.

I stayed at BYU till February two and a half years later when I returned to Sweden with the intention to go back to Provo in the fall. My next "posting" will tell more about that.