1473: A Colombian Immigrant Mormon Story - Laura Schnell Pt. 1
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2021
⏱️ 161 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In part one of this exciting three part interview, Colombian immigrant and former Mormon seminary teacher, Laura Schnell, shares her very unique Mormon story. Laura left South America with her mother and sister in the 90s to Queens, New York, and remembers her time in their small Spanish speaking LDS branch with fondness.
In this episode, she discusses her step-dad joining the family, her time in India with BYU’s International Development Program, and the road she took to choosing a career in the Church Educational System and meeting a friend of the podcast, Marc Oslund.
Show notes and links:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John |
| 0:03.8 | Delin. It is August 11th, 2021 and today you are in store for a super interesting and compelling |
| 0:12.4 | Mormon Stories episode Scouts Honor. I was a star scout. So Scouts Honor. Today we have |
| 0:19.9 | in studio the short version is Laura Schnell. Hello Laura, welcome. |
| 0:25.2 | Thank you. Hi John. Hi, Cara. You guys would have heard Laura Schnell. They're mentioned by name |
| 0:31.1 | or not by name in Mark Ozilin's interview, which was an epic Mormon Stories interview. Shout |
| 0:36.1 | out to Mark. Those of you who are avid followers of Mormon Stories podcast will remember that |
| 0:40.7 | just a few months ago we interviewed Mark Ozilin who grew up as a star quarterback and baseball |
| 0:45.8 | pitcher in Southern California ended up inexplicably converting to the Mormon church around age 16, |
| 0:51.6 | going on to sacrifice his major league baseball career to serve a Mormon mission and go attend |
| 0:56.6 | BYU and when everything all those dreams fell apart he became a seminary and institute |
| 1:00.8 | teacher for the Mormon church and then everything fell apart. So that has been one of the most |
| 1:06.2 | for sure most important episodes of 2021 if not of all time. But there's more. While |
| 1:13.4 | Mark Ozilin was teaching seminary institute in Utah County of all places, he met the |
| 1:20.0 | Laura Schnell, right Laura? Right. Yeah. He mentioned you in his episode, right? He did. He |
| 1:25.3 | mentioned you by name or not. He did not. No. He didn't mention you by name, but what other |
| 1:29.8 | brown co-worker was he gonna be? Bill. Right? Yeah. Yeah. We got hired at the same time and |
| 1:36.8 | we quit around the same time too. So we were together not teaching at the same school, |
| 1:42.5 | but we were together. We knew each other very well and know each other are really good friends. |
| 1:45.9 | Yeah. So like following on the tales of that, we just love to interview former Mormon church |
| 1:53.3 | employees, current Mormon church employees, but also former seminary and institute teachers, |
| 1:58.1 | CES employees, along with former Abishabes, former state presidents, former relief |
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