Day 38

Today was District Conference. I slept in past breakfast, because I still had some halla bread and an apple in my room. It was so nice- I didn't wake up til 10. It's been over a month since I've slept in that late! We had some really great speakers- the theme was temples, which was a little bit different than when we talk about temples at home, because there isn't a temple near enough to go to here. The first session was really good, there were a ton of members there from the Tel Aviv, Galilee and Beer Sheva branches.

We had an hour break, and then we had the Relief Society and Priesthood sessions. My friend Ashley and I translated the session for some of the Hispanic sisters who were here from other branches, and it was a really cool experience. Normally when we translate for Hermana Dulca in our branch, it is pretty easy because it is one-on-one and she helps us out a lot. But today we sat in the back with a microphone that was going out to 5 or 6 sisters, so we had to be better about really following exactly what the speakers were saying. It went pretty well between the two of us, but there were a couple of challenging parts. I was translating during the talk by the Jerusalem RS President, Sahar, who was speaking on the importance of genealogy work as something we can do here in Jerusalem since we can't do work in the temple. It was going ok until she started getting into all of the technological details about microfilming and indexing and all of the different websites and computer programs that you can use to do genealogy. I think I got most of the gist of it. I felt bad for Ashley, who had to translate the next talk which had some pretty blatant comments about what the law of chastity involves. There were parts where she just kind of looked at me and we both shrugged and then she would say something like "you should just never do things that are against the law of chastity." It was definitely a unique experience.

After Conference we had dinner, then we watched some movies and had an info meeting about our trip to Eilat tomorrow. Everyone is going, and we are all so excited! So I'm working on my Palestinian midterm right now, trying to get done as much as I can so that I don't go crazy next week trying to get it finished. 2 single-spaced pages down, 12 to go.