BEIRUT

It's 2:14 in the morning and I am at the missionary's house in Monsoureah, Beirut, LEBANON. I just got off the phone with my mom, wishing her a happy mother's day.

Today I went to church in the Beirut branch. They have church on Sundays. I translated the meeting into French for Alexandra, the branch president's wife.

It was District Conference, so all of the missionaries were here. In fact, I have been hanging out with them quite a bit. Oh how I love senior couple missionaries.

I saw a picture of Dil Parkinson with the members he taught. I have known his son Levan for the past 2 months, sine the Youth Conference. So cool. They are Armenian.

Bro Akiki and his wife took me on a mini-tour of Beirut. We drove around and saw the methaf, les corniches (the boardwalk), American University of Beirut, a statue for martyrs in the main square near the mosque and the old roman ruins, the parliament, centre-ville, Lebanese American University in Hamraa, and Hezballah protesters in tents under a bridge of the main highway.

Lebanon has a really unique history. It is so different from Jordan. I feel like I'm on vacation. I feel like I'm on another planet. I feel like...this is PARADISE to me. I understand everybody. They speak Arabic, English, and French.

"Tboste fe lbnan?"
"NAAAM, fa'alen" - a possible conversation when I get back to Irbid.

Irbid. Millions of years away.

I LOVE LEBANON. I will write more about this later.

When I was a 16 year old exchange student in France, I promised myself that someday I would live in Paris. I decided to promise myself the same thing. Someday I will live in Beirut. It might be wise to wait until after the new US Presidential elections, though.

Service Project

We just finished a service project here. It was really interesting. When I lived in the dorms as a freshman and then an RA, I had the chance to be involved in making the humanitarian aid kits. Today, we unloaded a gigantic truck full of boxes of them (and other stuff, like blankets and food). Humanitarian aid stuff, pretty much the only kind of missionary work that is allowed in the Middle East. You know, laws and traditions against converting to Christianity on pains of death make the whole proselytizing thing kind of hard...the "container" - the term for the truck with all the boxes in it - was unloaded in the village of Habika, which is in the poorest region in the Jordan. It was a neat experience. We had to take out all the boxes, count them carefully, and put them in piles so the various NGO's could take them. At the very end, we opened one of the boxes and gave some humanitarian aid kits to the little Jordanian kids who were helping us. Let me tell you, being on this end of it is completely different. You see how much it matters.