the funeral

I saw my first funeral in Bahrain a few weeks ago. It was quite the experience. I'm glad I was in my car or else it would have been quite frightening. We turned the corner from one of these little side alleys onto one of the larger back roads and were immediately met by a mob of men coming down the street. They were chanting and parading down the street together. We pulled off to the side and watched in confused fascination as they came closer and closer. As we watched, we realized that the men were passing something between themselves. Once the men from the back passed it forward, they would walk up the line to the front where they were ready to receive the burden again. It was only as they got closer that we realized what they were passing: a dead body. It lay on a simple wooden platform, and the body itself was tightly wrapped in cloth; the topmost cloth was a decorated piece of green fabric. They marched down the street in this fashion, displaying the body, all the way to the cemetery, where the body would be placed in a grave. No coffin, no flowers, no nothing. This was the middle of the day, about one o'clock and only men were present. I learned later from a friend that this was really quite common; the cemetery is right at the end of our street and Bahraini's always bury the dead in this fashion; so I guess I shouldn't have been shocked, but it's not really what you expect to see on a random Tuesday afternoon.

the facelift

My project over spring break was to paint my living room. Here is the before and after:

engaged

So here's the story. We were on a camping retreat for the youth group (Rey has just joined the leadership staff), and we are out in the middle of the desert. Now, this camping trip would probably be considered one of the worst ever, by our standards, but the kids loved it. First, as we are driving out to the desert, it starts raining. Yes, it never rains here and the day we decide to go camping, it rains. So we get to our site, which is basically in the middle of no where in the desert. It stops raining for about 30 minutes but then starts up again, so here we are trying to set up tents in the rain with 30 kids who have never been camping in their entire lives. They have no clue how to set up a tent, and we are trying to do it in the rain. Then some of the tents don't have all the pieces so the kids are standing there holding the tents together and I'm trying to tie the poles together with pieces of cloth that I ripped up. We finally get the tents together but there aren't enough for the leaders so we have to sleep in the car. Anyways, we are planning to cook dinner over the fire but the person in charge of dinner forgot to bring lighter fluid. All we have are huge pallets of wood and four lighters. So it takes forever to get the fire going, so now we are wet and starving and trying to cook hot dogs on hangers. The rain finally lets up for a bit so we can enjoy the camp fire but it's still drizzling. Then one of the leaders is getting ready to do his lesson, and Rey stops him and says there is something he would like to share. He starts this speech about why he is joining the youth group and how he wants to support me, etc. and then he pulls out this box and I'm like, WHAT?? All the kids are screaming and oohing and ahhing, so he gets on one knee and asks me and yeah, that was that. :) It was really sweet. So that was the good part of the camping trip. But things just kept going. At about 3 in the morning, it got super windy and one of the tents blew over with a kid inside so Rey had to go rescue him. Then in the morning it finally cleared up but it was sooooo hot. Then our vans couldn't come pick us up so we were stuck in the bloody hot sun for 2 extra hours in the desert, and then we got stuck at KFC for 2 hours because of the stupid vans again. So yeah, that was the memorable engagement story. :)