...while on a mission in Brazil the Brazilians would often give newer missionaries crap or crap to missionaries who just couldn't get Portuguese down well. Or they'd even just assume based on our whiteness (we were in an almost exclusively black area) that we couldn't speak Portuguese well.

One day we are walking along contacting and a Brazilian in response to our contact from my somewhat new comp started shouting at us in garbled Portuguese clearly to be mean and make fun of us (by the way my Portuguese was and is pretty solid if I do say so myself). Well, rather than be the mature, kind representative of the Church that I should be I shouted back in garbled Portuguese and then spoke in fairly solid Portuguese that we speak just fine and there was no need for him to treat us that way. Well, his buddy pointed out that this individual is hearing impaired, so he doesn't realize he speaks loudly and the impairment means he never himself was able to master correct pronunciation.

So I guess if someone had a video of that exchange it might be a bit like the embarrassing, "shut the [insert fake swear] up." moment that TJ had.

I still feel bad about that moment. I had been conditioned to be certain he was mocking us and instead I became the mocker by accident. Ugh.