Nokkrar trúboðamyndir í viðbót (Just a few additional missionary pictures)

I have just received the following three pictures from former missionaries and an Icelandic member or two who went through their photo albums for me. In this entry I thought it would be fun to name all the people. So in this first one from a 1980 zone conference in Iceland we have on the top from left to right: Bret Leifson, Court Skabelund and Mike DeYoung. On the middle row L-R: Danish AP, Curt Hutchings, Orell Anderson, Kevin Barton, Ted Davis, another Danish AP and President Jensen from Denmark. Bottom row L-R: Grant Grow, Arthur Hansen, Bob Farris and Bryan Beck. Bryan is one of only two missionaries (of the 163) who has passed away since the mission opened in 1975. He died of cancer some time ago. The other who died was David Chadwell, who I taught in the MTC, who also died some time ago a few years after he was married.

This next picture was taken in early 1993. On the top from L-R: Danish AP, Chris Smith, Eric Ball, Mark Patey, Andre Geurts, Thomas Eastmond, Joe Staker. On the bottom L-R: Ben Johnson, Kristján Mathieson, Phillip Papenfuss and Nathan Taylor.

This last one I really like. It is from May 1980. From left to right on a great day of baptisms in Iceland: Snorri Einhversson (ha ha), Bryan Beck, Jóhann Karlsson, Gerhard Guðnason, three Icelandic girls, the little one named Halla, Bret Leifson and Ýrr Bertelsdóttir, the mother of Halla. I remember Snorri, Jóhann, Gerhard and Ýrr from my mission from 1984 to 1986. All together, a good looking bunch of Icelanders and faithful servants.

Svo Mörg Orð (So many words)

There were so many Icelandic words that missionaries had to learn quickly upon arrival in Iceland if they wanted to be able to carry on the most simple of conversations. We had to know the difference between sæll and sæl when greeting people. You didn’t say “sæll” as a greeting to a woman your first time in church trying to make a good impression for example (I never did that, of course).

As we went along, we learned lots of new words from our companions and from the people we met with. We frequently would go to our dictionaries in the mornings during companion study and write down 10 new words that we thought would be useful to learn and try to use them during the day. Every missionary new the following Icelandic words or phrases in a very short time and how to inflect them:

Ég skil ekki = I don’t understand
Aftur = again
Áfram = onward
Áætlun = plan
Að þekkja = to know
Bók = book
Drukkinn = drunk
Erfiður = hard
Að gefa = to give

I was having a hard time focusing in a meeting one day at work about a year ago and I decided to write down all the Icelandic verbs I could think of. I don’t remember how many I wrote down that day, but I remember it being a lot. Every missionary hits a plateau though, being able to communicate well in almost every conversation without feeling stupid, but never being able to get close to a native’s ability because we usually spent most of our time talking about spiritual topics.

I loved certain words or names like:

Sáluhjálparáætlun = plan of salvation
Frón = Iceland (the way poets said it)
Hlakka til = look forward to
Hallgrímur = (a man’s name)
Ævintýri = adventure

On my 2004 trip to Iceland, I was walking through a churchyard early one morning and saw a number of names on the gravestones that I really liked but that were not so common in Iceland any more. One was Guðfinna (one who finds God) and Friðfinna (one who finds peace). They sound really nice in Icelandic, but say them with an American accent and they sound stupid. So needless to say, only one of my children got an Icelandic name and it is her middle name. She still says it is hard to say, but I am letting her grow from the experience. Kristjana.

Helmingur Trúboðanna (Half of the missionaries)

I have been gathering a collection of photos over the last 3 or 4 years of all the missionaries who have ever served in Iceland as Mormon missionaries. There have been 161 of the young missionaries to have served thus far since 1975. I have at least one photo of all but 13 of them. Still working on getting at least one of these elusive thirteen.

Here is a collection of 14 pictures which include about half of all those who have served.

1975-1989






















1976-1980























1979-1982

1983-1985

1984-1987

1988-1990















1989-1992

1990-1993

1993-1996
1999-2005

2000-2004












2003-2005

2004-2007

2006-2009

Trúboðaskór (Missionary shoes)

Back in 1984 when I went into the MTC, I remember thinking how cool my missionary shoes were. I thought they would last forever they seemed to be so well built. This picture shows pretty much what they looked like at the beginning of my mission. The sole was about 3/4 of an inch thick (it seemed) and looked like it could last even through an entire two-year mission in Iceland. I ended up being mostly right. They did last my whole mission and I could have worn them home. The missionaries of my day had a tradition though. Sometime in the last week or two of our time in Iceland we would take the bus down to one of the nearby rocky beaches with two pairs of shoes. We would wear our old worn out shoes to the beach and then change into the pair we would go home in once we had arrived at the beach. Then after a bit of nostalgia-filled expressions of shoe appreciation, we would tie the shoelaces together of the faithful pair and chuck them out into the ocean.

We thought doing so was an appropriate rite of passage, one that all missionaries there should go through. Maybe I would not do the same thing today, being the environmentally conscious fellow that I am now, but there was something very satisfying about sending those shoes to the cold Icelandic depths. In a way it was tangible evidence that we would soon be able to leave the cold behind and rejoin lives that were somewhat distantly remembered by that time but were dearly missed. It was also a physical act that allowed each of us to symbolically and in reality leave the pain and hardship of the past two years and start another life, one that focused a bit more on each of us as individuals after two years of the opposite. I remember the beach being very rocky that day, as most Icelandic beaches are, and the water and constant wind very cold.

I wonder where those shoes are today 22 years later....

Næðingur frá fortíðinni (Blast from the past)

Okay, so the translation leaves something to be desired. The one disadvantage of not having Icelandic be my native language is that when I want to translate a unique English colloquialism like this one, doing so ends up proving quite difficult. The Icelandic-English dictionaries out today are better than we ever had on my mission. They provide tons of common phrases using many of the individual words in the dictionary. This helps a lot when we are trying to know the proper ways to express these unique phrases. I am happy to know though that even advanced speakers of their second language often do not understand these unique phrases which do not translate word-for-word.

I got a very cool picture in an email today from a returned missionary who served in Iceland named Rob Mikkelsen. He was there from 1976-























1978, about seven years before me. I've attached it here. This is a picture of Gerhard Guðnason the day he was baptized in the summer of 1978. He has German and Icelandic roots. The missionaries in the picture from left to right are Doug Brinton, Jerry Ohrn, (Gerhard), Rob Mikkelsen, David Knechtel and Kevin Barton. I don't know the whole story behind Gerhard's conversion to the Church back then, but I know that every one of these missionaries was very happy that day. They are even happier today because 30 years later, Gerhard is still active. I saw and spoke with him two months ago on my trip and he is doing well. It is people like Gerhard who help to keep things stable in the Church in a land, like so many others, where people come and go spiritually. Golden for these missionaries and all who have known him since.

Skeljar (sea shells)

I don't recall ever seeing seashells while I was a missionary in Iceland back in the mid eighties. I went to the beach with my companions a few times, but it was never to get in the water, of course. We weren't supposed to get into the water. It was too cold anyway, so that was okay. But then in 2004 when I went the second time to Iceland, I spent a little time walking along the shores of the Westmann Islands off the southern coast of Iceland. The main island isn't that big so there weren't a whole lot of places to stop and see the sea, so to speak. One of the beaches had a bunch of little shells strewn all over it like in this picture. I got this picture from a missionary couple who lived in Reykjavík there in 2006 and took the picture sometime while serving there for 18 months. I don't know what beach it was from though. To me it looks just like the one I walked along when I was there in 2004.

I spent part of my early years growing up in Florida. We would go to the beaches on occasion and see lots of different kinds of shells. But they were never like these. If you look closely at these, you will notice that most look "thick". I brought a few home and added them to the aquariums I had who's occupants lived in much warmer waters than these shells came from. It made sense to me that these shells would have to be thicker in Icelandic waters to keep out the cold when compared to the Florida water shells which often seemed so delicate and thin.

After having collected a number of these shells to take home, I began to think of how similar most Icelanders had been to these shells. Most had a pretty thick shell and were trying to keep warm in a land that had been cold spiritually for a very long time. Trying to break through those shells was hard when the people had spent so much time growing them so thickly. But on occasion, one or more would come out of their shells on their own and gladly feed on the spiritual food that was being provided. Those were the people and the experiences which kept us warm as missionaries as well.

Ferðagætni

Ég verð að segja að ég er meira en dálítinn spenntur við að geta farið aftur til Íslands á fyrsta mars. Ég hef aðeins getað farið til baka einu sinni síðan ég kom heim í fyrsta sinn frá trúboði mínu í 1986. Nú fæ ég að fara til baka í 2008. Fyrst hugsaði ég bara um að sjá meira af landinu og taka margar fleiri myndir. En nú, eftir að hafa haft meiri tíma til að hugsa um ferðina, vil ég bara hjálpa trúboðunum, ef þeir vilja fá hjálp mína. Ég man eftir tíma þegar ég var trúboði þar þegar maður einn kom til Íslands sem hafði verið trúboði áður. Við vissum ekki hvernig að haga okkur meðan hann var hjá okkur. Við vissum ekki hvort hann ætlaði að koma til okkar til að segja okkur hvað við áttum að vera að gera í verkið. Kannski eru trúboðarnir að hugsa að ég ætla að koma til þeirra og gera það sama. Nei. Ég vil bara gera það sem mun hjálpa þeim gera verk sitt þar. Ég hef ekki verið kallaður (núna) til að prédika eða stjórna verkið. Ég mun hlusta fyrst of fremst, og hjálpa ef ég get á eftir.

Ég er í raun að fara aftur! (I'm really going again!)

I am really going again! I bought a plane ticket today. On March 1st I fly from Salt Lake City to Boston, and then from there straight to the Keflavík airport in Iceland. I arrive early on Sunday, the 2nd, just in time to clean up and go to church in Reykjavík with the Icelanders. I expect the view could look something like this first picture, but likely with a little less snow over the whole island--and not from so high up. We'll be staying the first night at the Sunna Guesthouse--inexpensive and clean. I haven't stayed there before, but the senior couple there now, the Wohlgemuths, use it for all the guests and church members who come to visit.

I hope to spend some time with each of the six missionaries who are there right now. Their names are Elders Teodoro, Lyon, Redford, Brockmann, Higgins and Soelberg. This is a picture of the six of them with the Wohlgemuths who help to lead them while there. They are all standing in the same apartment that all the senior couples have used since almost the beginning with the first couple, the Geslisons. I stood in this same room many times over twenty years ago.

Church with the members. A fireside that night put on by my traveling companion, Fred Woods. Lecture at the University of Iceland the next day. Visit with the missionaries. Travel around the hringbraut to take pictures and record oral interviews with people along the way about what they know about the Mormons. Good weather hopefully. Mun vera afar ágæt til að ganga um göturnar og landið þar aftur!

Ferskar myndir (Fresh pictures)

New pictures. I was sent a bunch of new pictures form Iceland in the last little while from those who are currently serving as missionaries for my Church there. This first one shows three missionaries in the foreground with President Ólafur Grímsson. The elders from left to right are Doxey, Balla and Mortensen. President Ólafur has always been very kind to us as a Church.

This second picture is of Bjarni and Regina, two Icelandic kids who are a part of our church in Selfoss with their parents. When I was a missionary in the 80's the farmers did NOT wrap up their hay (or whatever is inside these things) in these monstor-sized marshmallows. Now in the summertime wherever you go in the country you will see huge marshmallows dotting the countryside. I thought it looked funny but cool at the same time.











Everywhere you go there are these cool little nooks and crannies where the mountains and grass are so characteristic of Iceland.

Tveir Trúboðar (Two Missionaries)

Two missionaries. When Elders Christianson, Benson and I arrived in Iceland to be missionaries in September of 1984, there were seven missionaries on the island at the time. We made the number 10 for a few months. I got put with Elder Dale Tanner to begin with as I have mentioned before. It is common for our "trainers" to spend a few weeks to a few months teaching us everything they know and how to catch on in the language as fast as possible.

I remember going to the bank one day though with Elder Ed Hunt who was from Farmington, New Mexico. I only got about four photos of him total in the few months he was still in Iceland after I arrived. I really like this one that I just got converted from a slide that was 23 years old. We were in a Reykjavík bank exchanging U.S. dollars for Icelandic Crowns (or Kronur). Something about this with Elder Hunt on the right and the Icelandic woman doing some bank paperwork made me think of the James Bond movies I had seen as a teenager before going on a mission for my church. Some of you may recognize this bank. Which is it? I can't remember. We did go in though about once a month to change dollars into kronur. There was one specific woman who would often be at the counter when we went in to exchange our money. She was very efficient and polite. We happened to knock on her door one day after I had been in Iceland only a few weeks. My trainer spoke to her for a few minutes and then she invited us in. I was new enough that I only caught a few words here and there, but Elder Tanner caught everything. The woman was a little too friendly with us (from what Elder Tanner said later) so we didn't stay long. I've always thought this was a cool, 007 kind of picture.

This next picture is of Elder Hunt again with my training center companions, Elder Benson and Elder Christianson. The picture was taken on Christmas Eve 1984 as I recall. We had tried to get into Landakotskirkju for the midnight mass, but there were so many people we didn't have much luck. We stood at the back of the church for about twenty minutes crammed in with loads of others and then went out into the kirkjugarðinn where I took this picture without a flash. I didn't really understand the intricacies of photography but wanted to have some kind of record of the things I was experiencing, so I brought my Canon AL-1 with me. Elder Hunt still lives in New Mexico and works for FedEx.

The second of the two missionaries who are the focus of this entry arrived in Iceland with Elder Hunt. His name is Neil Taggart from Phoenix, Arizona (at left in this next picture). They had been in the missionary training center together. I never worked with him personally while I was there, but I have always wondered what happened to him and where he was today. Elder Hunt told me when I tracked him down that he had run into Elder Taggart once and that he was living in Scotsdale last he knew. The two of them were in Iceland for about a year with us before they went home.

Wondering about people like Elder Taggart is like wondering what happened to people you knew in high school that you haven't seen for a long time--except that the work we did in Iceland teaching the gospel was completely different than the things high school friends spend time doing, so the bond is somewhat different. There have only been about 155 men ever serve as missionaries in Iceland for the LDS (or Mormon) church. We are a tight-knit bunch for the most part. Any of you know this Neil Taggart and his whereabouts. Ég get ekki fundið hann….

Hinn kennarinn (The Other Teacher)

The other teacher. A few days back I was mentioning things about my MTC teachers. I had pictures of Eric Kristjansson and Paul Lewis at that time, but none of my evening teacher, Curt Hutchings. I got some today though. Curt lives down in southern Utah now with his wife and kids. He's the one on the right in this picture with Bret Leifson. This article makes a point of mentioning that the two of them just happen to be "Western Icelanders". This means, of course, that their ancestors left Iceland some time after 1851 and before 1914 and immigrated to Utah. Bret's parents still live in Spanish Fork, Utah I believe. Spanish Fork was the place where most of the Mormon Icelandic immigrants moved when they left Iceland and crossed the plains.

One or two of the missionaries from my day had Icelandic blood. Elder Peter Nordal was one of them. Haven't been able to track him down yet. He is originally from Canada, but none of those who served with him know where he is today. I've looked all over in the cities in Canada where his companions said he was from, but no luck. If you know where he is, let me know.

I remember specifically thinking how genuine Curt was as our teacher. He taught us in the evening like I said. Things were a little less formal during the evening class, though we still worked hard. He and I have gotten back in contact in the last few years. He was instrumental in getting me in contact with a good number of the other missionaries who served during his day as well.

I always felt a little bad that I couldn't say that I had Icelandic blood, or that I had relatives from some specific farm in Iceland. One of my sisters is good at researching family histories, so she told me she would work on trying to find an "Icelandic connection". When we were tracting or talking to people downtown, it always seemed to be easier to talk to people if you had ancestors who were Icelanders. In this gray apartment picture, my trainer for all of three weeks, Dale Tanner, looks like he is knocking on some stranger's door, but it was really our apartment during my first three weeks. It had two floors above ground with a basement. The missionaries lived in the basement most of the time, but there is also a door in the shadow to my right that goes to the upper floor. We were there for a time.

The owner of the apartment was a friend to the Church named Halldor Hansen. He let us live there, against the wishes of his family. The bizarre thing about the upper apartment was that it had wall-to-wall shelves with old classical and opera record albums in every nook. Halldor's main floor had newer records sitting all over the floors with just enough room between them for a path to his sound system. Most of the upper-room records were the old brittle, thick records from the 50's and earlier. This was all before plastic records and CD's . Half of you will have played vinyl records in your youth. You could walk two blocks west of this apartment and be at this pond and the downtown area. That was a nice place to live if you were working the 101 area in Reykjavík. This apartment was just behind the trees you can see to the far right in this picture.

There were a lot of people who made a difference for the better in my mission. These were three of them: Halldor, Elder Tanner and Elder Hutchings.

Erfitt verk á Íslandi (A Difficult Work in Iceland)

A difficult work in Iceland. I used to feel bad on my mission at times because I found myself marking off the days on the calendar during certain months. The weather was bad, we spent most of our time tracting, lots of people were rude to us when we knocked on their doors, etc. But then as I have started to get in contact with a number of the missionaries who had served before me, I began to realize how easy I had it--comparably.

Two or three years ago I began to compile a list of all the missionaries who had ever served in Iceland from 1975 to present. I now have contact information for over 90% of the 160 missionaries who have ever served, including the 19 or so senior couples who have served in that time. Eventually we had our first mission reunion where we invited all the missionaries we could find of the 160. About half who ever served came to the dinner in April 2007 held at BYU. To get everyone there I did a lot of emailing and calling to help everyone know about the details and be there if they could.

After the dinner and program were over, we all went our separate ways. I then started to get emails from missionaries who had served in all eras of the mission. Some had attended the reunion, others had not. One or two of the emails struck me. One was from a fellow who had served early on when there was no Book of Mormon in Icelandic, no missionary tracts to hand out, nothing. He told me that even though he couldn't come to the reunion, because of my sending him out emails and photos of those who came, he had for the first time contacted some of his old companions from 30 years ago. Apparently some of the early missionaries had had such an exremely difficult time serving in the beginning that they still had emotional scars from that period. But the option of a reunion for the first time for just those who had served in Iceland (we didn't fit in with the Danish mission reunions, even though that, technically was our mission) had brought some together, at least by email, who had for years been blocking out the pain or at least the extreme difficulty of those years. These first two pictures are of one of the early missionaries, Mike Little, who survived those tough first few years with a number of others. The second picture is of him and his wife. The are Canadians and were only prevented from coming to the missionary reunion because their grandchild was being born that same day (and grandchildren always take priority over mission reunions).

I don't think that I would be able to find a single missionary who served in Iceland who would not say that there were some extremely challenging times while serving there. I suppose if we had had more people interested in our message then those times would have been fewer. One of the recently returned missionaries was Gayle Waters (at left). He got home a few months ago and visited me in my office. I always get their pictures when I meet them. "Waters" will be heading back into active duty in the military for two years and then possibly coming back to BYU for school. He had some really tough times on his mission, just like we all did there. But there were incredible times as well with lots of people that he ended up loving.

In the end it matters who you serve, not where. I had a friend serve in Hawaii with another in the Marshall Islands. They didn't have the cold, snowy weather, but they had their own problems. And just like it says in the Book of Mormon, there must be opposition in all things. If not we would not be able to learn to choose between right and wrong or understand the difference between joy and misery. When it is eight below on the Celcius scale in Iceland you can be pretty miserable, but if there is no wind that day, s-allright. The glass is more than half full.

Númer trúboðanna á Íslandi (The Number of Missionaries in Iceland)

The number of missionaries in Iceland. I got another old slide photo converted this week to digital from 20 years ago. It is this one at left. I was 20 years old and at the far left. With me from left to right were Elders Hansen, Benson and Worth. I ended up in my career as a university administrator, Elder Hansen is in the construction business, Elder Benson has worked for years as a city planner in central Utah and Elder Worth is a doctor who started with the military and now has a practice in New Mexico. Elder Hansen was my second-to-last companion. We had a blast together and worked hard. I remember we worked a lot on the language together in the mornings. Elder Hansen wanted to learn the language well so we studied a lot of the English rules of grammar so he could learn Icelandic well. The four of us in the picture represent half of the missionaries who were serving in Iceland at the time. My whole mission there were eight missionaries in Iceland at any given time, but that was not always the case.

In the early days of the mission in Iceland (mid-to late-70s) the Geslisons brought their two sons who had both already served missions in Asia and got the work started. As I was looking at the dates of when missionaries arrived and departed (I've compiled a full record of their arrivals and departures), I noticed that early on, there were as many as 16 missionaries on the island at once. Finding enough places for them all to live was a hardship, as well as paying for things. Since the mission was new, there was plenty to do. But it wasn't long before later senior couples began to see that the island wasn't big enough to sustain a group of missionaries that large. During the year 1980--five years after the mission opened as a sub-mission of Denmark--10 missionaries went home but only four came out to replace them. By the next year the best number of missionaries on Iceland was set at 8 and stayed there for many years. Eight missionaries were able to keep busy. The number on the island at any given time since my years in the mid-eighties has fluctuated anywhere from 10 to 6. Currently there are six there, which seems barely enough to maintain a useful number who can speak the language and do anything that is asked. This newspaper clipping shows 5 of the 16 that were in Iceland during the late 70's with the senior couple, the Hansens.

Iceland has a great bus system. There were years when the missionaries tried using bicycles to get around, but they were hard to maintain. The weather often was too rotten to ride them anyway, so eventually they always went back to riding the buses. On the left is a typical busstop in mid-Reykjavík right by Háteigs church. I never really used this busstop much. It just happened to be by the church I wanted a picture of. Our apartment at Hátuni was just a few blocks from this church. It has the look of a castle somewhat (which I like) because of its spires. The left picture is from 1984. The right one is from 2004. You can see a few differences if you look closely.

The local churches were usually pretty empty though. The State religion was Lutheran like in most of Scandinavia. Ours, by contrast, was usually full, with little room for more people to join us. A problem we loved having, but had difficulty solving. Our new building from two or three years ago is the last one in this post. The cute little yellow one. It is the first one built especially for us by the Church. It is in Garðabæ, a suburb of the capital, Reykjavík. When you are in it, you feel like you are home.

Að telja á íslensku (og á indíánu tungumálið) (Counting in Icelandic and Indian)

Counting in Icelandic (and Indian). In the missionary training center I remember looking at my missionary name tag for the first time and having it blow my mind. It had my name and the name of the Church in Icelandic on it. I thought that if I could ever even learn to say the name of the Church in Icelandic, I would have really accomplished something. The name in Icelandic was Kirkja Jesú Krists hinna Síðari Daga Heilögu. Not too long after that I remember hitting the section in our language book where we learned how to spell, speak and write the numbers. Again I was dumbfounded at how complex Icelandic was when I learned that, not only were the numbers and the ordinals hard to learn in and of themselves, but that the numbers 1 to 4 were all declined like other adjectives. To begin with, there were eight ways of saying each noun depending on whether it was a masculine, feminine or neutur word. Then there were 24 different ways of saying every adjective--including the numbers one through four to an extent--making sure that any adjective "agreed" gramatically with the noun it modified. Mindblower for a 19 year old who thought he was relatively intelligent. Humility set in, hard work ensued, leaky-brain-syndrome was discovered and the days passed.

These are the 12 ways of spelling the number "one" (you don't get twenty-four since there is no plural of "one"):

m f n

einn ein eitt
einn eina eitt
einum einni einu
eins einnar eins

Be careful with the number six, too (Enough said). Even our buddies learning other Scandinavian languages felt sorry for us because of the difficulty of the Icelandic language system. We persevered though and by the time we got to Iceland a total of two months later--we knew Icelandic so well that we thought we were hearing Japanese when we arrived.

Our teachers made all the difference though. We did not have natives from Iceland who were teaching us, but returned missionaries who wanted to make life easier for us when we got there by giving us a good foundation in the training center. My teachers were:

Paul Lewis (before and after. The tall guy on the left was Gerald Dunlop, also an RM who served in Iceland)

Eric Kristjanson (with before & after pictures. The "afters" include twin grandchildren)

Curt Hutchings (no pictures for him yet)

I came home from Iceland in 1986, married in 1987 and had my seventh daughter of seven children in 2005. Shortly after I was married though, I met my wife's grandfather, Harold Reed of Thatcher, Arizona. He required all of his grandchildren to learn to count to ten in "Indian". I thought, since I was marrying into the family, that I should learn to count to ten in Indian too. So I did. I must admit though that there is something fishy about his way of counting....It was much too easy to learn when compared to learning to count to ten in Icelandic. Here it is:

-

one zaw

two zaw

zig-zaw-zan

bobtail

dominic

tee-taw-tan

words of Mary

Haileum, scailium

zeencum peencum

buck

-

You must draw your own conclusions about this. Either way, I learned it in Icelandic and was able to survive in Iceland and then learned it in "Indian" and was "in" with my in-laws. A plus on both counts. The more languages a person knows, the better.