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Show Coffee Drinkers Preferred Page 72 of 307 lucky and nab their Return Missionary, RM for short, right off the plane at his homecoming party. The homecoming party is not so much a party as it is an opportunity for the RM to become immediately aquainted with every single girl between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. I'm no sociologist, but it is impossible to live in a community that has such severe customs and not become interested in these customs from quiasi-scientific perspective. Or perhaps that's just me. Perhaps the detachment that I developed was simply a defense mechanism, so that I would not fall into what looked to be an obvious trap. Here's the trap: send all the young men between the ages of nineteen and twenty, when they would naturally be experimenting with members of the opposite sex, away to a foreign land. Then, monitor them twenty-four hours a day by making them live with each other. Missionaries are literally never allowed to go anywhere alone, except perhaps to the bathroom, and then they are chided if they linger in there for two seconds too long. I hope you are getting the impression that there is some small pressure building up in the members of this holy army. At the same time that the young men are becoming as taut as over-inflated helium balloons, the young women back home are being egged on toward matrimony. Their older sisters and friends become sudden celebrities for the eight weeks after the engagements and |