Get Me to the Church

    Upon reflection, I realized that I have attended 6 different churches in the last week! Do you think I'm saved yet? Two of them, admittedly, were actually of my own denomination, but the other 4 covered the Islamic, Coptic Christian, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant faiths. The last shall be first here, though, because I have had some requests to describe the district conference which occurred in the Irbid/Al-Hussan branch yesterday.

   Everyone from Amman (the Amman Arabic speakers, the branch president of Irbid, and the BYU crowd) took a bus (kindly chartered by the Church) to Irbid, which is where I go every week, although it is about an hour and a half away.
    I was especially excited for this conference because, after a month of stress and two very intense rehearsals, the choir I had been asked to put together would be performing. Dress code had been a bit of an issue--"Sunday best" is a foreign (pun intended) concept in the Middle East, so I was really hoping to use the performance as a teaching opportunity for good church attire.
   When I arrived, however, two of the BYU girls in the choir told me I was wearing the wrong clothes, so my roommate and I had to rush into the church, find a restroom, and switch her long black dress for my blue one---all the girls in the choir were in a black dress or skirt, and all the men were in white shirts and slacks.
   The choir sounded lovely. I was so happy with what we able to accomplish. All of the unmarried people in the branch were part of the choir. Most of them were late/barely on time so I spent 45 minutes in fear of no one coming, but almost everyone who had rehearsed with us came. It was the first LDS musical number in Arabic by the branch in Jordan! Conducting choir rehearsals in Arabic was a huge challenge that left me fairly exhausted, and none of the Arab members read music at all, but we sang, "How Great Thou Art" in Arabic, and it was beautiful. Here is the choir (or at least as many of them as I was able to tear away from the food for a photo), standing in front of the church building:

 

   The conference itself was really neat, as  it was the first district conference in Arabic. The only English was from the members of the 70 who came to speak to us. We even sang the hymns in Arabic, led by yours truly. 

   Of course, there were a few interesting moments: The piano decided to turn off right as we tried to begin the closing hymn. I was very glad that they fixed it, as I am not ready to sing "God Be With You Til We Meet Again" in Arabic, a capella, in front of a roomful of people which included several general authorities and my entire Arabic class! We also laughed when one of the 70 (most of the talks were about appropriately mixing local culture with the Gospel) emphasized the need for gender equality in marriage. The district president from Lebanon, who was translating, stopped, laughed, and told him that he didn't even know of an Arabic word for gender equality!

   My other religious experiences included: a musical prayer meeting in Arabic (hallelujah!), a visit to the beautiful Al-Abdullah mosque, singing hymns with some classmates to try out the gorgeous acoustics in the Coptic church, a branch social in Amman, and a party at the Greek Orthodox Church, where they handed out pomegranates (they symbolize church unity--the individual members are the seeds inside the whole) and played the bagpipes!