Which Reminds Me

Why am I being held hostage by this obnoxious little twerp? Certainly I am not guilty of holding anyone hostage. I never had any role in Alan Skogerbo's life. I only heard about this via the grapevine. Hi Alan! That's about the extent of conversation I ever had with Alan at MK Retreat, where he was dating Debbie Bowman at the time. He was an MK in Peru who later became a magician. He wanted to go as a single missionary to Latin America, and he even did that partway as a MAPS worker, and had a girlfriend there in Costa Rica, a native girl, and then dumped her because he apparently decided that he did not want to get married, and then her family made a big stink about that and accused him of being gay, and then the missions director, I think John Bueno was his name, counseled Alan about the advisability of missionaries being married and how a good wife is a good thing and a blessing for a man in his work and life. And then Alan made a big fuss, saying that he was being forced to get married before he could get his  missionary appointment. He only wanted to be a single unmarried missionary, not a married one, apparently, and he felt that her family was being unreasonable. So then he was forced to quit the mission field, by then having become a persona non grata in Costa Rica, and moved back to the U.S. and did children's church work at some church up north somewhere and became an activist for the cause of single missionaries until finally later he quit church work and disappeared from visibility. Alan's argument that he should not be forced to get married in order to get missionary appointment was a sort of red herring, detracting attention from the fact that there is actually no law against single missionaries, whether male or female. For example, Harvey Vail was a single unmarried missionary man for many years in Yucatan, Mexico. There are many more examples of women single unmarried missionaries because, obviously, there are more women than men. So obviously there is per se no law against single missionaries. However, perhaps Alan's possibly immature behavior somehow ran afoul of church authorities and thus his services as a missionary were no longer needed for some reason. I really don't know all of the details on that. Like I said, I only heard about this third-hand. I just think that probably Alan was being too demanding in trying to pose himself a martyr for the cause of bachelordom. I would not want to comment beyond that point because I really have no idea. Susie knows Alan better than I do. Perhaps you could get more details on this by asking Susie. I really don't know very much about anything, only a little of this and that.