Thank you, sexy German teacher.

How sitting through 3 years of German class, not understanding a single word, just staring at the beautiful teacher, changed my life forever.

It’s true: You don’t appreciate what you have until you lose it.

I grew up in Hawaii, just a block from the beach, and yes, it is paradise.

The beaches are perfect, white and hospitable, the water clear and blue, with just the right amount of salt tanginess in your mouth and violence in the current of the crashing waves. You walk outside out in shorts and t-shirt and sun warms you not only on the outside, but on the inside, makes you feel free and unthreatened, as if some benign God were smiling down upon you.

When I got to Europe, I learned that the whole world isn’t like this.

The beaches are mainly rocks and weeds, and the water is full of goop. To walk outside you have to wear socks and shoes and several layers of clothes and heavy winter coats and carry an umbrella. The weather feels like a more ominous message from God: You are here on Earth to suffer.

And yet, as a teenager growing, I wanted nothing more than to escape from Hawaii and live in Europe.

Boy, are you dumb when you’re a kid.

I knew what I wanted, but I had no idea how to get it.

It was a daunting problem for a skinny teenager with no money and no self-confidence. Europe was halfway around the world from Hawaii, not only physically, but spiritually: What made me think I could follow in the footsteps of Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Who was I to think Sartre and Camus would offer me a seat at their table in that cafe on the Seine?

But there was a strange little coincidence of my life that I realized might just work out to my advantage: I was a Mormon.

How a Mormon mission works

If you’re a Mormon and a boy, when you reach nineteen, your bishop – think: pastor – calls you into his office and tells you the church would like to send you on a mission.

It’s a question you’ve knew would come for quite a while and you’ve a lot of thinking about.

If you’re a missionary in almost any other church, you are a professional. You have studied theology for years, negotiated your terms, your expenses are paid and you take your wife and children with you. It is the first step in a theological career.

If you’re a Mormon missionary, you have no intention whatsoever of having a church career. You’re dreaming of starting your own business or getting a good job at Google or becoming a scientist or, like me, finding a way to become a writer. All that – your entire life – is just beginning.

More importantly, you’re enjoying the newfound freedoms of adulthood, exploring new ideas, making interesting new friends and learning about who you really are and your place in the world. And you’ve just met a girl.

That’s the worst possible time in anyone’s life to break it all off and go on a two-year mission to a place far away from home and friends where you will be working all day and living like a monk.

Missionaries don’t watch TV, don’t go to the movies, don’t go to parties, don’t talk to girls, don’t make friends.

And it’s a thankless job.

By the time the bishop asks you that question, you’ve talked to enough returned missionaries to know that a Mormon mission is best described in two words: Rejection and homesickness.

Who knew? For some reason, people don’t appreciate being approached by complete strangers who want to talk to them about Jesus Christ.

And if there’s a girl in your life before you leave, you know what’s going to happen sometime in the next 24 months.

They call it a “Dear John letter.”

A male missionary usually receives it about three to six months into his mission. It comes from the very girlfriend back home who had tearfully promised to wait the full two years. Now she’s writing to tell him that she’s met someone else. These letters don’t start with “My Love,” or “Honey Bunny,” or “Hey Big Boy,” they start a bit less passionately with something like “Dear John.”

And you pay for it yourself. The church neither pays you for your work nor does it pay your expenses. I knew my parents would help me out – my savings wold only pay for a fraction of the costs – but where as I going to get the money to go to college after?

You only go on a mission if you really believe.

I believed. I went to church every Sunday and prayed every night. I wanted to serve and please God. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to do it in this self-flaggelating way.

I thought about it all through my teens, torn between going and not going, and one detail always stuck out:

You don’t decide where you go. The church sends you to whatever part of the world it need you, and you only find out where after you’ve agreed to go.

But here’s the catch: Because there are far more American Mormons than from other countries, most potential missionaries speak only English. So the church is always looking for potential missionaries with language skills.

If I spoke a foreign language, there was a good chance I would be sent to a country were that language was spoken – for example, Europe.

A language that refers to a girl as „it“.

Kailua High School offered, if I recall correctly, three or four foreign languages, including Japanese, Spanish and German.

Learning Japanese would not get me to Europe and Spanish would probably get me sent to South America. That left German.

I knew nothing about Germany. I had seen Heidi and the Pink Panther movie with the Oktoberfest scene, and I knew that it was neither England nor France, which were what I imagined when I imagined Europe. That was it.

So I signed up.

Of the many things that tormented my in my teen years, German class was way up there at the top.

Even today, decades later, I still feel the dread and despair each morning upon entering the classroom, knowing full well I was inflicting yet another hour of failure and defeat upon myself.

This is a language completely liberated from any kind of logic whatsoever. What it lacks in sense, it makes up for in unnecessary complexity. A German  sentence is much like a mathematical equation, and by the way, I was failing  math too.

In German, I learned, words have genders. A table is masculine, milk is feminine.

“What’s feminine about milk?” I asked.

“Nothing,“ the teacher replied.

“Then how can you tell it’s feminine and not masculine?“

“There’s no way to tell“, she said. For every word you memorized, you had to memorize its sex as well. A dog is a “he”, a cat is a “she”, and a girl is an “it”.

“Seriously? They don’t really say that, do they? Call a girl an it? Like in: I know that girl. It’s name is Suzi?“

“That’s exactly how they say it,“ she said.

Instead of one article – the – there were three, and depending on where they came in the sentence, each one mutated into a different word. Sentences can be endlessly long and you can’t tell what they were about until you get to the end, because that’s where the verb is half the time.

The alphabet had extra letters that were impossible to pronounce – ä, ö, ü and the bizarre Eszett, which looks like a capital B.

The only good thing to compensate was the teacher.

She was the sexiest woman in school, the sexiest woman I had ever seen. And when I say sexy, I mean movie star sexy, model sexy, turns-teenage-boys-to-stuttering-piles-of-jelly sexy.

I already couldn’t concentrate on the impossible language, but watching her float back and forth in front of the chalkboard turned my mind blank.

It was the only thing that made the torment halfway bearable.

So I struggled and fought and slogged through it and at the end of the year I brought home a D.

But the church wouldn’t know how poorly I did in German class – it would only know I took the class.

So I went back the next year, and the year after that, suffering through it, taking home straight D’s every time.

The day the letter came

I was more than a year behind most other missionaries.

After high school I had talked my parents into letting me stay at home for a year so I could write my first novel. While I was hacking away at the electric typewriter, I waffled about going on a mission or not.

Then I knew I had to do it. I was a believer.

I told my bishop Yes and waited.

The day the letter came was sunny and warm and there was salt in the air.

I was just getting home from my part-time job gluing sea shells to cardboard jewelry boxes for tourists. I grabbed a handful of letters out of the mailbox and left my thongs (which is what we called flip-flops in Hawaii back then) outside the front door.

The house was empty. Sand crunched underfoot while I walked from room to room opening the windows to let a little air in.

One of the letters was addressed to me. It was from Salt Lake City, Utah.

Time stood still. I could hear myself breathe. The cat was watching me from the living room table. This was the moment I had worked so hard for.

I ripped open the letter and scanned past the blah blah of the opening paragraphs until I found the important part:

“... Düsseldorf, Germany.”

Suddenly my life veered off its ordained course and sped down a completely new path I could never have imagined.

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E.T. Hansen is an American writer in Berlin, Germany, where he has published a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction in German.