Anything but Ordinary

Tsobinar Tadevosyan
Gulag Survivor, Teacher | Yerevan, Armenia

I was born on July 6, 1930, in Tbilisi, Georgia. Both my parents were Armenian. They were survivors of the genocide of 1915 in Turkey.

In Georgia, in 1949, the KGB started arresting Armenian families. All the intelligent, educated people were being arrested. They just disappeared. It was happening all around us. And every day, when we'd see someone we knew, we'd give each other hugs and start crying. We were so happy that we were still there, that we had not been sent to prison.

I had not met my husband yet, but on June 14, 1949, the KGB arrested his family. They were arresting whole families and sending them to Siberia. It was not a prison, but a forced relocation. Those who resisted were arrested and taken to the KGB building in Tbilisi. There were trials, beatings, killings, and disappearances.

My brother knew that they would eventually arrest him. He said if we didn't do anything, we couldn’t change anything. He decided to print brochures warning people to be careful. He denounced what the KGB and the government were doing, crying out that it was not right. In the mornings and late at night he would post these brochures on walls around the neighborhood. After that he started going to theaters and cinemas. In the middle of the show he'd throw the brochures from the balcony.

I think he was right in what he was doing. He was one of the few who stood up. He knew that they would catch him. He sacrificed himself for the nation, not only for Armenians.

When my brother was arrested, I was teaching at a school very far from Tbilisi. There were no telephones. I didn't know what was happening to my family. Two days after they had been arrested, the KGB came to my village and arrested me. They just came into my classroom and took me away.

I arrived in the Gulag on October 12, 1952. All my family had been arrested, and they received longer sentences than I did. I got ten years in prison and five years probation.

I was in a building that had two floors filled with bunk beds. We were packed like fish. The room was made for fifteen people, but more than fifty lived there. They gave us black wool clothes to wear, and we were taken to the woods where we worked cutting trees and draining the swamp. Ten months of the year it was snowing. Ten months! Every day I prayed. I was praying for my mother. I was praying for my brother - I didn't know that he had already been killed. I was praying for his children.

In prison I always had big, big hope. I knew that everything would be okay in the end. I was always telling my friends, "The time will come. Our lives will change. It will not always be this way." My nickname was the Idealist. All those years in Siberia, I was trying to take something from life, to learn something. I practiced my Russian. When I saw someone doing something interesting, I would try to learn from them.

Though prison was hard, the people there were the best people of our country. They were the thinkers, the scholars, the artists and poets - some of the most moral men and women. They were the ones who dared to speak out against injustice. It was a profound and even joyous experience to be among them.

I stayed in prison for four years and eight months. It was only because of my Heavenly Father that I survived. Only my faith and my prayers saved me.

At the time of Stalin's death in 1953, the government was giving amnesty to some of the prisoners. But not me - they were not going to let me go yet.

In 1956, I was called in a second time before a panel of nine people. They started asking me questions, so I told them my story. They asked me, "Was your brother right? Did he do the right thing or not?" I said, "Yes, I think that he did right." I told them, "I'm not guilty of anything. I want to be a normal citizen, and if you think I'm guilty just shoot me. I don't want to live without any rights. And I don't want to speak with you any more because nobody will understand me."

Another one of these men had once been a prisoner. He said, "No, don't think that way. I was in prison, too, and I understand you." This old man said he knew my case.

***

In the beginning, there had been four thousand women in the prison, and now there were only forty remaining. One day [after the second hearing] I kneeled down on the floor and started crying. I couldn't take any more. I prayed, Please open one window for me and help me get out of this prison.

And it was the next day that the panel called me back again - my birthday, July 6. They said, "We have decided to let you go." They let me go.

The years I spent in prison . . . it was like a big school. All the people who went through this school got cleaner inside. It was a purifying experience.

My advice to others is that when they have hard times - and there will always be hard times - be still. The first thing to do is pray. Always pray. And have faith and hope.

*In 1997, following years of Church activity, Tsobinar traveled to Salt Lake City to be baptized with her son, where he and his family had emigrated. She passed away in 2006.

Carol Gray
Homemaker, Humanitarian | Sheffield, England

My parents joined the Church when I was about five. It's challenging to be a member of the Church in England. We have to work hard for everything, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm the sort of person that when my back's against the wall and I've got a challenge, that's when I fight my hardest.

[The Spirit] has prompted me many times in my life. It [came to me] one day when I was watching the Balkan War on the news. We were watching the awful things happening there day after day, night after night, and although I didn't want to see it, I was compelled to put it on every day to see how things were going off.

One particular night, I was watching a program on all these women who had been released from the Serbian camps. I saw the looks on their faces. I felt I needed to do something, but I didn't know what.

I spent three or four days on my knees - not all the time, obviously, but a lot of time on my knees - pleading with the Lord to help me know what he wanted me to do. I rang up several charities that worked in Bosnia. I asked them if I started collecting donated items, what would be helpful, and would they take it on their convoy?

It was just before Christmas 1992, and I went and saw my bishop and proposed that the Relief Society sisters get involved in some compassionate service outside of our area. Within three weeks we had collected thirty-eight tons of aid. We worked day and night boxing and packing all the stuff. People who would never walk into an LDS chapel came in and stood side by side with the Latter-day Saints - sang with them and laughed with them as they boxed and packed.

I'd already arranged with a local transport company to deliver the cargo to London, where a charity was going to take it off our hands. Two days before, the charity rang me up and said that they were sorry, but they couldn't take it. So now we had all this aid and no way to get it to Bosnia. I was absolutely devastated.

Then there was an article in the paper that my husband noticed. It said, "Convoy of Hope bound for Bosnia. Anyone wishing to join the convoy should ring this number." I rang them up, hoping they would take our cargo. They wouldn't. Instead, they said, "We would love for you to join us."

I phoned a lot of friends, both inside and outside the Church, who had big vans and trucks, and many of them came and joined my convoy. One of my daughters came, too. There were 110 vehicles on that first, humungous convoy. It took ten days of driving; 2,500 miles.

We arrived in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, and there was a large meeting held. There were four hundred drivers altogether. We were asked if any of us would volunteer for the crisis area. My daughter and I looked at each other and thought, We've not driven all this way to stick this stuff in some warehouse. We're off to the crisis area to give it to the people.

That first experience was unbelievable. We went through minefields. We went through an area where almost four hundred people had just been killed. It changed me completely. Nothing could have prepared me to see all the people with their sunken, hollow, lonely eyes. On our journey back, I realized that somehow the Lord had gotten me into something I couldn't turn away from. A month later, I organized another convoy, and the month after that, another one; and that's how it went. I've been on twenty-three convoys. We took more than four million pounds worth of aid.

I've learned a lot [through this experience]. I've learned that as individuals, each of us can make a big difference, regardless of how small we are or how insignificant we think we are. I'm just an ordinary English housewife who got involved in this crazy adventure. I've learned to love my Savior very much. It's been quite an incredible experience.

***

My last convoy to the Balkans was in 1999. Then in 2000, I was invited by LDS Humanitarian Services to visit Africa. We flew to Ghana to assess the situation and see if we could help in any way.

I always had a dream to build an orphanage in Africa. There are so many children who grow up without their parents due to the AIDS epidemic, other diseases, and poverty. I wanted to give these children an environment that would be as close as possible to being raised by a family.

I returned in 2001 and bought thirty-six acres of land. [Through my charity, Hugs International,] we began building houses that would each accommodate ten to twelve children, a momma, and another caregiver. We called the site Mmofra Tromm, which means "children's garden."

In 2006, we opened the school, and from its small beginnings it has grown and flourished. It now hosts four hundred students. The next plans are for a medical center that will reach out to forty villages in the surrounding area. We will always try to shelter and protect those in need.

Maria Consuelo Dimaya
Former Communist Guerilla Medic, Teacher | Santa Rosa, Laguna, Philippines

I've been a member of the Church for almost twenty-seven years. I have nine children - seven are living, and I lost two in infancy.

I was raised in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. I grew up Catholic. I studied at an exclusive girls' school and later transferred to a private high school. Afterward, I went to the University of Santo Tomas and studied nursing for three years. I never took it up as a profession because in 1972 I got involved with a movement that was fighting against the Marcos dictatorship. I became involved because my cousin, whom I was rooming with, was a leader of the MAKIBAKA. This was a woman's organization that was the counterpart to the men's organization opposing Marcos.

I recognized that there were social problems in my country. I saw poverty all around me every day. But I thought, Well, that's life. There's nothing you can do about it. But after reading my cousin's literature, I realized that you can do something about it. So I decided to join my cousin in the movement.

My cousin was blacklisted by the government and had to leave school. Not long afterwards, following a major demonstration, I was blacklisted and jailed, too.

My father did not visit me in jail, nor did he bail me out for fear of associating with me. When I was released, the police followed me everywhere. My cousin contacted me and said the movement would pick me up and take me into the underground. I wound up in a safe house in Manila, and that's where I met my husband.

We learned that we would both be sent to Angeles City, Pampanga, to staff a hospital that was being built by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). We worked with doctors in the operating room, learning first aid procedures, but at the same time we were providing support for the CPP and its military wing, the New People's Army (NPA). Any of their people who were wounded in encounters with the military were sent to us.

After a while, my husband was sent to the mountains, where people were being shot. I was already pregnant with our first child and I stayed behind, running the hospital. What I didn't know was that one of our patients had been caught by the government and tortured. He finally gave in to the pain and told where the hospital was located.

One afternoon I was alone in the hospital and I locked it up to take a nap. Somehow the troops broke in and I was awakened by a gun barrel poking me in the face. Ten men in army uniforms surrounded me.

"No sudden movements," they told me. "Just stand up and turn around." They were looking for one of our commanders and I told them, "He's not here. Go ahead and look around, but there's no one here but me."

Often female prisoners were raped or even killed, but for some reason they didn't touch me. But I still didn't escape torture. I was beaten with the stock of an M16 rifle. They wanted me to tell them where my husband was.

I was taken to the military camp in Angeles, Camp Olivas, for tactical interrogation. They asked me questions, and if I didn't give the answer they wanted to hear, they slapped me. I withheld my real name, so my parents never learned that I had been taken.

I finally had to tell the military that I was pregnant with my first baby. They sent me to a hospital to make sure that the beatings hadn't damaged my baby. Luckily, everything was fine. When I got back from the hospital, they kept me with the other female prisoners.

After the birth of my first child, we lived in the prison for another year. I applied for amnesty on grounds that prison wasn't a healthy place to raise an infant. After a series of conferences, the military agreed to grant me amnesty on the condition that I report in weekly. They wanted to make sure the child was well and I was no longer with the opposition. My husband heard through underground sources that I had been released.

Eventually we managed to set up a meeting. My husband promised to find a way we could all be together again in the underground. One day he sent word that I should pack my belongings and meet him at a certain time and place. I went there and waited, but he never came. I learned through friends that he had been taken prisoner and was being tortured. Even today, he still feels some pain as a result of his beatings in prison.

***

My husband was held prisoner for eight months. After he was freed, we went to Cebu City, where his family lived. It was about this time that we first became acquainted with the Church. My husband's cousin was working for the LDS Church Educational System, and he was transferred to Cebu to help establish the seminary program there. He and his wife told us a little about the Church. Later, we met the missionaries. About a year and a half later, in 1975, we were both baptized. Eventually my husband and I served a mission in Tacloban City, in the Visayan Islands.

We found that the Church gave us opportunities to work to improve the social conditions in our country. One of the most important factors in changing the culture of poverty is the change that is made inside a person, and the Church showed us that if you have the desire to make that change, everything outside will change, too.

I taught seminary for eighteen years and LDS Institute for two years. That experience taught me so much. In fact, I've learned more through my experiences in the Church than I ever did from my experiences in the hills.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Historian, Pulitzer Prize Winner | Cambridge, Massachusetts

Sugar City, Idaho, was lively for a tiny little town of nine hundred people when I grew up there. The whole town washed away in the Teton Flood of 1976. By then, my parents had moved to Idaho Falls, but we went back that year to visit. There were two or three buildings standing that I could remember. Even trees were washed away.

My mother was the only one in her family who was active, even though she wasn't baptized until she was sixteen. Her father was never a member of the Church, although his parents had been among the handcart pioneers.

Because my dad was a teacher and school superintendent, there was always a strong emphasis on learning in our house. [I escaped] our tiny little town through books and magazines.

One day something came across [my dad's] desk about scholarships and SATs. In those years, they didn't give the SAT or ACT at our high school. My dad thought, Oh, why not? He was always very proud of us. "Why don't you take this exam, and maybe you could get a scholarship?" They had to set it up especially for me. I was the only kid in Madison County who took the SAT that year.

I [received] a national scholarship. It asked me to list my first-choice school. By then my older brothers were out of the military and at the University of Utah. My grandparents still lived in Salt Lake, so we just wired back, "University of Utah." That's about as much thought as I gave it.

Eventually I found my way to the English department. I received a good education at the U, but my assumption was that I would get married and have children. After that, I didn't know what else. I was perfectly happy. I was active in the LDS Institute of Religion. I met my husband, Gael, there and we married while still in school.

When we married, there was never a thought that I would quit school. The way we saw it, I had a scholarship, I should use it.

After I graduated, we moved to Massachusetts and our first child, Karl, was born. Gael was doing his PhD in chemical engineering at MIT. We lived there through the 60s, and in a way it was my second education. Even though I was never in a classroom, living in Boston was my graduate school - being part of the LDS community, with the civil rights movement taking off and being involved in that in a modest way.

One experience that was important in terms of my development as a writer was editing a Church-sponsored guidebook called A Beginner's Boston. There was a continual flow of students and other newcomers, and the Cambridge Ward was always organized to orient people.

By that time I realized that there was life after marriage. Although I loved doing things in the Church, I always tended toward overkill. At some point you realize all your energy is not going to fit into that little package of teaching once a month in Relief Society. I think that happens to a lot of women.

So Gael and I came up with the money for me to take one college course. We thought that if I got a master's degree in English, at some point I could teach part-time. It was a one-year program that took five years for me to do.

Now, an important point here: in the early 60s, the women's movement was gradually starting. In 1963, I read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and I think that had a lot to do with my direction. The way I read it was maybe not the way everyone read it, but I read it as saying, "You have a long life and you need to have a 'life plan.'" So getting this master's was my life plan toward sometime in the indeterminate future when I might not be totally engaged with my children.

***

Gael and I always had a great partnership, but it had been pretty traditional in the way we divided things. In thinking through all of this, it became clear that there were lots of different ways to live your life.

I absolutely adore learning and have always felt comfortable doing it - not that it isn't hard work. So Gael and I worked out this deal. We figured he was perfectly capable of making breakfast and getting the kids out to school. I'd be upstairs working and I could hear everything going on downstairs. It meant I could work from five in the morning until 11:30 a.m.

I got my BA in English in 1960, an MA in English in 1971, and my PhD in history in 1980. During those years, Gael and I raised five children.

Our kids are good kids and have succeeded in part because I wasn't a stereotypically good mom. It's kind of ironic. If I had known that when I was younger, I'd have been much more peaceful about my life.

At first [after earning my PhD] I had an adjunct position at the University of New Hampshire in the humanities program. I did that for about four years. By then my first book, Good Wives, was published. Then I went into a full-time faculty position.

My second book, A Midwife's Tale, which was published in 1990, changed my life. I won the Pulitzer Prize for that book in 1991. I had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship the year before, just after my book came out, and there was a blank in the application that said "Awards." I remember typing "None." And in the next year I had almost every award that you could get for that one book, which is sort of bizarre. The Harvard professorship [that followed] was an unexpected opportunity.

And so I say to women, go out and change the world. Whether you're seven or seventy, there's work out there to be done, go to it! But you have to be educated. If we listen to our general Relief Society presidency and do what they're saying, we'll be in great shape.

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