Augulis Experiences Culture Shock at UCI : Basketball: After two years abroad on a Mormon mission, this 6-10 player is readjusting to the game and campus life.

Dan Augulis has returned to UC Irvine after spending two years in Romania on a Mormon mission.

Now he really feels like a stranger in a strange land.

Bill Mulligan, the basketball coach who recruited him, is no longer at the school. Khari Johnson is the only player remaining from the team he practiced with as a redshirt during the 1990-91 season.

“Actually, I met Coach (Rod) Baker before I left,” Augulis said, “and he said, ‘We’ll talk when you get back.’ But I just got here.”

And Baker has been on a recruiting trip to the East Coast.

“I really don’t know much right now,” Augulis said. “I don’t know too many of the guys. I haven’t seen who’s on the team.”

And when practice begins, Augulis still will be lost.

Let’s see . . . now what is that hoop up there for?

Augulis didn’t get to play a lot of basketball in Bucharest. A few pick-up games with some fellow missionaries he coerced into spending part of their rare days off on a playground or in a gym.

“I’ll probably be pretty rusty,” he says, smiling sheepishly.

Safe bet. It’s also unlikely he’ll be particularly impressive when conditioning drills begin Tuesday. Augulis is 6 feet 10--”two meters without his head” is Romanian slang for tall person and he heard it a lot--and weighs in around 200 pounds these days. He lost 20 pounds during his mission, but it wasn’t because he worked out.

“I could walk all day, I’m fit, but that’s not the same as basketball shape,” he said. “There’s no way I could run to stay in that kind of shape. For safety reasons, we’re supposed to be with our companion all of the time. So if I wanted to run, he had to run, too.

“If I suggested we get up at 5:30 and run, it was always, ‘Get out of here.’ ”

Then there was that nutrition problem . . .

“We ate some weird stuff, like raw pig fat on bread. But generally the food wasn’t too bad.”

Augulis took German and Spanish at Shawnee Mission South High in Leawood, Kan., and he has no idea how he ended up in Romania. The church works in mysterious ways.

“You don’t get to pick where you want to go,” he says, smiling again.

Augulis went to a missionary training center in Utah, where he took a two-month crash language course, then left to help establish the Mormon church in Romania.

“When I first got there, they paired me with a guy who was one of the first missionaries in Romania,” he said. “There were only eight of us in the country when I first got there.

“But after two months, I was paired with a guy who came over at the same time I did. We were by ourselves in Bucharest, and basically, we learned to get along by the seat of our pants.”

Romania was still under Communist rule when Augulis arrived, and even though it has since held free elections, the country has not really embraced democracy and Western business and culture the way many of its former Soviet Bloc neighbors have.

“When I first got there, it seemed so gray and dirty and depressed,” he said. “But as time went on and people saw their freedom being increased, the atmosphere seemed to get a little more cheerful. But most of the people are really struggling economically.”

There, under the auspices of a humanitarian organization, Augulis and his fellow missionaries worked in orphanages and taught English by day and then met with people who expressed the desire to learn more about their religion at night.

“We kind of had to keep a low profile because the government wasn’t that keen on us being there,” he said. “We were there to try to make the church legal in Romania and we didn’t want to blow it by standing on the street corner calling repentance to everybody.

“But a lot of people were interested in us because they had been secluded for so long that the chance to speak to an American appealed to them. You had to try and separate which people were only interested in talking about “Dallas” and the other TV shows and the ones who had a sincere interest in the church.”

Augulis was maturing in ways unimaginable to most teen-agers. He did not leave the country for two years and called home only on Christmas and Mother’s Day. He learned how to adapt to a new environment, how to make the most of what’s at hand and how to endure a daily lesson in patience.

“I’m pretty easy going, so I sort of slid right into the Romanian way of life,” he said. “You know, I could stand in line for an hour for a loaf of bread without even thinking twice about it.”

His basketball skills may have atrophied in Bucharest, but his culinary talents blossomed.

“There are no supermarkets or any kind of processed food. You go to an outdoor market and haggle over the price or you buy tomatoes from a guy who grew them in his garden. If you felt like spaghetti, you went to the guy for tomatoes, bought some onions and spices and made it yourself.

“You had to make everything from scratch.”

That’s pretty much where he’s starting with the Anteater basketball team. If nothing else, Augulis brings a winning mind-set. The last time he played competitively, he averaged 11 points and eight rebounds and his high school team went 24-0 and won the State championship.

“I’m anxious to get going again and see where I am,” he said. “I’ve been running and working in the weight room trying to get ready. I don’t know what sorts of expectations, if any, Coach Baker has for me. I’m sure he’ll want to see what I can do.

“As far as my expectations, I’d like to play. If I get a chance to compete and I’m skillful enough to deserve to play, I’ll play. That’s just how it works.”

Augulis has developed a knack for fitting in, so he figures he can find a niche at Irvine. And maybe the next time he goes to buy bread, somebody will try to cash a check in the express line and the delay will make him feel as if he’s home.