An interesting thing happened at a
riverside restaurant last night. My teammate Liz and I were eating
and watching the Germany-Serbia World Cup game (HORRIBLE game by the
way! What happened, Germany?!). The tables in front of the screen
were full, so the waiter led a foreign couple to our table.
“Oh, hello,” said the woman.
“Do you mind if we join you,” said
the man, a tall handsome guy with a scruffy black beard.
“I’m sorry?” I said. I couldn’t
hear him over the din of the game.
“Do you mind if we join you?”
“Oh, yes, of course. Please!”
They sat down and ordered, and then the
woman turned to me. She was American, but Asian, maybe half-Chinese.
She asked us where we were from and we had a nice conversation about
our travels. She had been abroad four months, spent two in
Australia, and two in South East Asia. I asked her about Malaysia
and Laos, we haven’t been there, and we told her a bit about Vietnam,
where she was going next.
Finally, the question came which I
always sort of dread and sort of get excited about at the same time.
“So what are you doing, like a school
thing?”
“No, actually we’re with a missions
organization. So we do some church work and some humanitarian
stuff.”
“Oh… OK.”
And then she turned back to her dinner
and date and we didn’t talk again. When Liz and I got up to go they
didn’t look up to say, “It was nice meeting you,” and the
presumption is, and this is where I could be wrong, that they didn’t
say it because it’s not nice
meeting missionaries, even cool, soccer watching, table neighbor
ones. Missionaries, Christians for that matter, are a drag, kind of
like clouds covering the sun on a beach day.
