NOVEMBER

MY MISSION STATEMENT

by Ben Hunter

Did you know that early Californians lived in mud huts and that missions were their first real buildings? Missions are interesting to me for several reasons.

Since building my own mission, I’ve learned how difficult they must have been to build. My mom took me to the Lurning Bush, and we bought Popsicle sticks and sticky white clay. The clay kept sticking to my fingers and not the Popsicle sticks. I wonder if the people who built the missions had this much trouble.

Another reason missions are interesting is that the people who built them wanted to be self-sufficient. They had to produce crops and maintain livestock and develop their own water systems.

For me, being self-sufficient is serving myself cold cereal and milk when my mom has an early-morning meeting and can’t force me to eat oatmeal. So I think self-sufficiency is good. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to run away and be entirely self-sufficient. I would eat candy on weekdays, run through sprinklers in the morning instead of taking showers, and hang out with stray cats if I needed company. But I guess I would miss my mom and my sister and especially my dog, even though he gets demon eyes.

A third reason missions are interesting is that they were built close enough together so people could use them as rest stops on long trips. My family and I went on a long camping trip two summers ago, and we had to stop at rest stops. When you have one mom, two kids, and a dog, someone has to pee pretty often. Bathrooms at rest stops usually smell bad. My sister complained that there weren’t any mirrors for her to look at herself or hot water to wash with or paper towels to dry her hands. My sister would not have done very well in mission days.