Elder Greg Vs. The Rat

The countdown is on for the return of the current Elder Haws.

Next week, I will be posting the results of his final phone call home and, next month, I will be posting about his awkward return to post-mission life. So I have decided that now would be a good time to revisit my most babiest of brother's run-in with a rodent of unusual size.

Elder Greggie had only been in Portugal for a few months and was serving in a trio of Elders, one of whom had not yet developed a testimony of housekeeping.

Now, my baby brother has a testimony of housekeeping. In fact, when he got to Portugal, the stock in local hand sanitizing and other cleaning products skyrocketed.

The other missionaries really liked to have him transfer into the area because, when he got to an apartment that looked like this…

…it wouldn’t take him very long at all before it looked like this…

But even with all of Greg's cleaning, it just took one messy elder and some disguarded crubs to create rodent-inspired chaos.

Anyway, the Elders woke up one morning and discovered that one of the apples on their table had been nibbled upon. Greg wrote, “We were all confused until we looked closer and saw that it looked like a bird or something had been pecking at it. We didn’t think much of it so we just ignored it and went to district meeting.”

After the district meeting, the missionaries went about tracting and teaching as usual, the nibbled-upon apple all but forgotten.

The elders came home that evening and were in the process of cooking dinner when Greg walked into the living room … just in time to see a long tail slither under the couch. Greg wrote, “I stopped and said, ‘Dude, I just saw a tail...’ Then we all freaked out.”

After spending the next few minutes screaming like little girls, they decided to lift up the end of the couch so they could have a better idea of what they were dealing with. Well, the rat did not take kindly to having its lair disturbed, so it ran out into the middle of the room, prompting the elders to 1) drop the couch 2) jump up on the non-rodent-infested furniture and 3) start screaming like little girls yet again.

The screaming continued as the huge rat ran around the room. When the rat was finally able to squeeze its fat gut under a bookcase, one of the Elders sprang into action. He ran into the kitchen where he grabbed, not a broom or a knife, or any other sort of universally accepted rat-battling device, but a Tupperware container.

No, you didn’t misread that. The elders decided the best course of action would be to TRAP the rat in a Tupperware container. After few more minutes of chasing and screaming and uttering some non-missionary-ish words, the elders came to an important conclusion: they needed a bigger Tupperware.

Elder Greggie wrote, “We finally got a big Tupperware, scared it out one last time, and somehow caught it. Kind of. Elder Davis had managed to drop the Tupperware on it, but he was so surprised that he actually caught it, he took his hand off it. Then, remembering what he was doing, he put his foot on it.”

But it turns out that catching the rat was only the start of their problems. Now they had to decide what to do with it.

Their first thought was to take it down the block and let it go. But the thought of it finding its way back to their apartment with vengeance on its mind dissuaded them from that particular course of action. I think that was a pretty wise decision on their part. I mean, think about it for a moment. Even with the combined brain power of all three missionaries, it took quite a while for them to catch the rat and then they almost let it go again. If they had decided to turn it loose, it would most likely have beaten them back to the apartment, locked them out, and updated their area book.

So, with rodent relocation removed as an option, the elders decided that they had no choice but to kill it. Being city boys, none of them had ever killed anything bigger than a beetle before, so this presented a whole new set of concerns.

They decided that shooting it would be the quickest and easiest way to dispose of the rat, and then they spent some time deciding who would pull the trigger before realizing that they didn’t actually have a gun.

Other methods of execution were then discussed, but most were vetoed due to the perceived pain those methods would inflict upon the rat. Greg wrote, “We all felt really bad about it because we had all seen Ratatouille (the movie with that rat that cooks) but it had to be done.”

Searching for some wisdom greater than their own, they called the office elders who told them that the easiest way to kill the rat would be to put it in the freezer. They theorized that, as it succumbed to hypothermia, it would just drift off peacefully. Of course, the rat didn’t seem to be enjoying his time in the Tupperware OUTSIDE of the freezer, so the elders doubted that it would find its situation any more tolerable IN the freezer. They made an additional decision: they would get the rat drunk first. Then it surely wouldn’t suffer.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, they decided to GET THE RAT DRUNK. So that it wouldn't suffer. Really.

Being LDS missionaries, the only alcohol they had on hand was rubbing alcohol. They poured some in and then watched as the rat sampled it. Now, please don’t ask me how they planned on determining the rat’s level of sobriety. I don’t know and I really don’t want to know. All I do know is that, at some point, the rat-filled container did go into the freezer.

Greg ended his weekly e-mail with this statement: “So now we have a Tupperware in our freezer with a giant rat in it.”

The Tupperware containing the rat was removed once a few days later for a post-mortem photo shoot, then it was replaced… so it could be discovered by the next set of missionaries to inherit the apartment.

So what is the moral of the story? Actually, there are several, but we are going to go with this one: If the Church wasn’t true, the 19 year-old elders and 21 year-old sisters would have destroyed it long, long ago.