My little latin love story, Part 8 of ...

Our relationship began to suffer. Mili was becoming impatient. “Why are they doing this to us? Why don’t we get married here?” (She knew that she didn’t want her children to grow up the same way she did, but she said it anyway. Although I believe that she knew that no matter what they would have a better life no matter where.). The idea was appealing but I had learned that we would have to go though the same process for her to come to the US whether we were married or not, and I felt that I would miss her a lot more if we were already married. She also began to very agitated with little things. For example, if I didn’t write one day she would have a fit and I would spend close to forty dollars on phone cards so that we could talk out our frustrations and be ready to carry on. More than once she had been willing to call off the whole thing, but I would talk her out of it.

Not only was the strain weighing on Mili and me. It was also weighing on those who had to deal with me. My brother sat me down and asked, “are you sure you want to go through this? I mean this really seems like a lot more work than it’s worth. And with all the problems that you’re running into, it might even be God telling you that it isn’t right.”

“I’m sure about this.” That was a lie, at this point I was doubting too. I believe that God has a plan and is always more than willing to give hints on what one should do. My patience was wearing thin and I was looking at all that was going on and asking myself if maybe God didn’t want it to work out. But I was sick of being out of control. I was sick of putting my heart and soul into something and then for some reason or another watching it crash and burn. I had watched my last girlfriend dump me for some stupid reason. I came back from my mission and saw someone completely different inside of the body of the woman that I had loved so dearly. I wasn’t going to allow the government to destroy my hopes. I wasn’t going to allow even God from keeping me from doing everything in my power to make our relationship work. So I put my doubts aside and marched on knowing that more than likely I was going in alone.

The first week of September Mili received a package filled with forms and a list of documents they needed copies of, oh yea and $100. She had to have a complete medical exam done by a doctor at the US embassy in Peru (another $100). I wired her $300 because I had become used to the idea that when working with the government there is always another fee.

My little latin love story, Part 7 of ...

Now the hard part...

The only difficult part about making a big decision, like marriage is all the paperwork that goes along with it. As soon as I got home I began to research exactly what it was going to take to bring Mili to the US. The following week; I sent a form, a set of pictures, and a copy of my birth certificate with $95.00 to Nebraska. We continued to chat and write letters. The overall tone of the letters had become more romantic and we constantly spoke about being together again.

A month later I received a letter from the Department of Immigration and Naturalization (INS). The letter said that they had received my petition to bring my fiancé to the US and that it would be about two months to find out if my petition had been approved or not.

The idea of being without Mili for two more months was heartbreaking. I missed her, and my coworkers and parents were getting real tired of hearing about it. I broke the news and we mourned together. The next day I took my computer to a friend’s house to have a LAN party, when I brought my computer home that night and plugged it in to write Mili, it began to smoke. For reasons that I was unable to understand God smote my computer, frying the Motherboard, the hard drive, the video card, the network card, and the sound card. I was surprised because I had a surge protector and when I told the techs at the computer store, they said, “Wow, really? I never heard of that happening before.” $400, the help of my computer savvy brother and a week later we were able to communicate again on a more regular basis.

In August I received another letter from the INS. They said that they needed more forms, copies of every financial document I ever had, proof that we were engaged, proof that we had spent time together, a letter from a third party saying the we weren’t getting married just so Mili could get a Visa and $145. It took me a week to gather everything up, get it all notarized and sent off.

Dun dun duuuuunnnnn....

My little latin love story. Part 6 of who knows how many.

I'm not going to keep doing this, you guys can just scroll down. Fine, we were in Perú and getting to know Mili, her family and her culture.

I don’t know how long I slept. It was probably only an hour, but when I opened my eyes I was looking right into Mili’s eyes.

“How long have you been awake?” I asked.

“Only a moment.”

“All right,” I rolled onto my back and tried to go back to sleep.

“What are you thinking about?” as it turns out this question is a universal question asked by all women trying to get inside the male mind, little do they know that there really isn’t anything to get into.

“How I wish I could have slept better on the plane.”

“I mean we’ve been together for almost twelve hours and we haven’t really even spoken to each other. You’re only going to be here a week.”

“And you would really like to start to get to know me.” She was right, I wanted to get to know her to. I pushed mute on my body’s whining and we begun to talk.

It was a little hard at first; Mili even suggested that we go to the Internet café so maybe would feel a little more comfortable. I was definitely nervous. We were lying in the same bed and talking. My mom always said that the first step to fall off the chastity wagon was to be lying on the same bed, there was no other place to sit in the room and Mili’s family would want to talk to me if I was out in the open. I decided to start the conversation. An hour or two later during a seven-minute pause, we kissed. It was a quick, soft, tongueless kiss. As far as first kisses go, that was the best one I had ever had.

Later that afternoon we flew out to a little province on the Ecuadorian border called Tumbes. Her mom, step-dad, younger brothers and sisters live there and she wasn’t going to let her potential fiancé go home without meeting her parents.

Tumbes is a small town where everybody knows one another. It was surprising to hear that they had an international airport, at the time it didn’t occur to me that if Utah was it’s own country Provo airport would be international. I would often laugh, as Mili would take me around her hometown, because she would always point to someone and say ‘that’s my uncle/cousin/aunt/2nd cousin/etc’ I was reminded of my mom’s hometown. Almost every summer growing up we would go see my grandma and an assortment of cousins. Often on these trips my mom would take us around town and tell us who lived in each house and how we were related to them.

Mili’s parents were somewhat better off than most. They lived in an apartment that was about 100+ years old downtown. They owned the two-story building but rented out the lower half to a chicken restaurant. The floors were well-kept wood and they had plaster walls, except they had movable partitions dividing the large one room apartment into a three-bedroom apartment.

Her mom was very warm and loving the way only a Latin-mother could be and she would shove food down your throat the way most moms do. Her skin was a lighter color than Mili’s and she had red streaks in her light black hair. I thought that the streaks were dyed but Mili swears that that they are natural and have been there her whole life. I’d heard that some Latin women from the jungle have different colored hair, so I didn’t argue. I also heard that on hot days they walked around with their tops off, but I couldn’t prove that either.

Mili’s step-dad was a great deal older than her mom, about forty. But for a man about eighty he sure didn’t act like it. I’m not saying that he was child-like, more like he wasn’t old-like. Most men in their eighties take lots of pills, shake and ask you to repeat everything. He was very lucid, clear and loud. He was easy to get along with and very patient with the holes in my Spanish Vocabulary.

The week went by too quickly and we couldn't stand to be apart for even a second. It was appearant that we got along very well, too well in in fact.

I asked her hand in marriage the day before I went back to the US. We stayed up late walking on the beach that was only twenty-minutes from her house. We kissed constantly until I left.

Same blog time, same blog channel...

My little latin love story. Part 5 of who knows how many.

We had confessed our love for each other and decided that I had to go to Peru in order to find out if we were compatible.

I flew down to Peru the first week in May and I was going to spend a week. We would spend twenty-four hours a day together (except for the sleeping in the same bed or house) it was going to get a little weird, or so I thought on the way down. When I emerged from customs she was waiting for me. She was much more beautiful than I had envisioned her. She was wearing a long black sudo-leather jacket, a tight pair of camouflage jeans and gray t-shirt. When I approached her I had to stop myself from kissing her and I skillfully dodged to the right and allowed my lips to slip safely past her ear and we embraced. We held each other for what felt like not enough. Her older sister Jessica was there and as we hugged she quietly took my luggage so when I turned around I briefly panicked thinking that my suitcases had been stolen. Jessica didn’t look much older than Mili, the overall body structure was the same; about five foot six thin with long black hair. Jessica’s hair had more of a wave and ran down only to her shoulders while Mili’s hair was as straight as hair could be and ran down to between her shoulder blades. We loaded up a cab and drove home. It was three in the morning and I hadn’t slept all night. Mili’s sister was a chit-chatty kind of person so she continually tried to start a conversation; she never really got the point that I didn’t want to talk.

I had forgotten how humid and polluted Lima was. It felt like a sauna but you have all your clothes on and you just ran a five-minute mile in the gym. When we got to her grandparent’s house I crashed on the couch and Mili crashed right next to me. Jessica went to her room to put on something a little more comfortable. Suffice it to say but in Spanish this phrase has no sexual meaning whatsoever. She went and put on some sweats. I feel asleep with Mili on my shoulder. When I woke up it was about 8:00am. My body had built up enough energy to be uncomfortable and made it known with a crick in my neck and certain body parts that were entering the painful wake-up stage after falling asleep. Mili awoke when I began to stir.

“How are you, heaven?” Heaven? Where did that come from? I stared at her for a moment and thought rapidly about what she could mean by heaven. After a two-year mission I learned that the tone of voice and facial expression would give you a push in the direction of the meaning of the word. Her face had the same expression that my mom would use when she spoke to my father in an endearing way. I concluded that heaven was a pet name, like dear. It made a lot more sense to call someone heaven than dear, after all, dear can easily be replaced with deer. English is stupid that way.

“Still a little tired, but more or less ready to start the day. I just want to shower first.” I had showered every morning since I could remember; I just couldn’t stand facing people wondering what I smelt like. After her aunt Roxana got out of the bathroom, I went in.

For some reason I felt quite at home in this third world bathroom. The plywood door with a latch that Gringos usually used on outside gates, the cheap tile covering the floor and four feet of the walls. The walls and ceiling were made out of concrete, which was normal for Peru in general. They said that it was the best material to make houses out of, and whenever I would mention that houses in the US were made out of wood and a chalk–like substance they would laugh at me. But the highlight of almost every Peruvian bathroom was the one faucet for the shower. This was going to be a cold shower.

We went to the LDS temple later that morning. It was the first time I had ever attended a session in Spanish. When we arrived back home my body was being ever more intolerant about my insistence of keeping it awake and moving. So as soon as we got inside we crashed on her bed, we couldn’t sleep on the couch again because her sister, nieces, aunts and uncles were all moving about the house. I tried to make it as uncompromising as possible but I was just too tired to sin even if I wanted to.

My little latin love story. Part 4 of who knows how many.

Let's see, now I'm going to have to figure out were I left off. Okay, I just brought my own computer and Mili and I had started chatting online.

A month or two of letter writing and chatting and the whole course of our relationship changed. One night we were chatting, it was about eleven p.m. in Utah and one a.m. over there. We were in that state of Mormon drunkenness that people get into when you’re really tired, your speech slurs, you start laughing at the stupidest of things and you sentence structure goes to pot. Out of the blue she says, “I want to be your wife.”

“Sure, when do you want to get married?”

“As soon as possible. Because you are the best man I have ever met.”

“Let me find out how we could do that and I’ll get back to you tomorrow.” Even in my tired state I felt that this was just to weird to be talking about right now.

I thought about what Mili said all the next day. It scared me spitless. I wondered if I really wanted to marry her. And the thing about being on different continents was sort of an issue. I began to make a small list of pros and cons. Pros: We understood each other, we felt comfortable talking about everything, and it couldn’t be lust because we had never spent any real physical time together. Cons: I’d have to give up flirting. Spanish was my second language and she didn’t speak English, she lived on another continent and her culture and background were very different from mine.

The last note on the con list was the one that worried me the most. I had read an article from one of the Counsel of the Twelve that stated in effect that the Church does not recommend that that people from different cultures/races intermarry. I understood their reasoning. Being married by itself is hard enough without adding the friction of different holidays, ways to celebrate birthdays, how to morn and cultural differences in general would only make things harder. After a few days of deep thought, prayer and the avoidance of the subject with Mili, I came to the conclusion that I wanted her to be my wife. It was the first time I had openly gone against a recommendation of the church.

Still, I wasn’t going to become engaged to her over the Internet. Besides, what if we got together and couldn’t stand to be in the same room? What if she had ballooned since the mission? And what if she wasn’t a good kisser? All these things had to be considered. So I made arrangements to go back to Peru so that we could spend some time together. That way we both could come to the conclusion whether we should get married or not. Once the decision was made that we loved each other and that I was going to go back down to Peru we began to size each other up, seeing if we both measured up to what we both wanted from a spouse. Mili even asked for a letter of recommendation from my bishop.

To me continued...