Elder Guteluis is a missionary for the Mormon Church. He has embraced a sacrifice in the spirit of his convictions. He is based in Brussels, but in fact, he is everywhere and nowhere. Born in 1993 in Japan to a Peruvian mother and a Japanese father, his parents divorced a few months after his birth. He spent his childhood between Japan and Peru, eventually moving with his mother to Arizona where she remarried an American churchgoer. At the age of fifteen, Elder went on a trip to Utah where he met missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He is the only Mormon in his family. His commitment to the Church, is a commitment solely to himself resulting from this visit to Utah. The missionaries’ message of faith and the promise of eternal life with his family urged him to convert. “Through praying I received the directions of the Holy Spirit to leave on a two-year mission”, he says. In December 2012, he started his education at the Missionary Training Centre in the outskirts of Salt Lake City in Utah, in the presence of thousands of other believers. He learned a foreign language to open up better to others, in the hope of inviting them successfully to convert. To help people to get closer to Jesus Christ, he received the gospel in the Book of Mormon. He and his colleagues were subsequently sent around the world.
The life of Elder Guteluis is essentially a life of wandering, from parish to parish. In early 2013, he moved to Paris, left for Brussels, went to Chartres, returned to Paris, went to Luxembourg and back to Brussels. He will stay in the Belgian capital until December 2014. His mission of two years ends here, in an apartment rented by the Church, in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert. He will again leave, this time for his home in Arizona. His new life will start there. “I want to study business, and work in the business field”. A new life indeed, but forever as a Mormon.
Benjamin Sandri was orn in 1986 in Nîmes, France.
Studied photography in high school and Fine Arts and Philosophy at the University of Montpellier III, France.
Worked at the Departmental Archives of the « Hérault, France» as assistant picture editor and as a cultural mediator at « La Maison de l’Image » Sète, France.
Currently student of photography at the « Le Septante-Cinq, Fine Arts School » in Brussels, Belgium.
