Me and My Escuchante (Volunteer Listener)

Today (May 30), I gave a missionary lesson to a volunteer listener ("escuchante") who played the role of an investigator. I have now given parts of the lessons to about six different listeners, all Spanish-speaking returned missionaries, with five of the six from Latin America. The listener today was Loordes, a young woman from Honduras studying civil engineering at BYU. I chatted with her (in Spanish, of course) for about 10 minutes while waiting for my tutor Rodrigo to get things set up for our tutoring session. She is such a bright, charming young woman. We told each other about ourselves and joked and laughed--especially when I couldn't think of a particular word in Spanish. (Here we are after the lesson.)


Before the lesson, Rodrigo gave Loordes specific instructions to give me some hard questions during my lesson with her, which she did. Because the questions were about the gospel, and because I have a good Spanish gospel vocabulary, I was able to answer her questions satisfactorily.

But then, with Loordes still present, the three of us had a lengthy discussion about chemistry--the description of the field, the various sub-disciplines within chemistry, the types of reactions (both chemical and nuclear), and the definitions and descriptions of various chemical terms (compounds, ions, alpha particles, nuclear reactions, protein structure and function, etc.). The two of them asked me lots of questions and fed me vocabulary words when I guessed wrong about a word that I didn't know. This turned out to be a great exercise in pushing me beyond my comfort zone. I love these types of exercises. They are exactly what I hoped would happen during my pre-mission language study at the MTC.