Monday, July 30, 2012

Christian songs

This past week, there was this huge Christian Gospel Jubilee Crusade in Gulu that lasted five days. Starting like a month ago, they were hanging up posters for the crusade everywhere. They stuck posters advertising the event on everything they possibly could: buildings, trees, statues, poles... The posters were not just in town, but when we rode out to any villages outside of town, we would see the posters all along the way and in the outside villages. If that wasn't enough, like a week before the crusade started, they built stands to display these humongous posters in a few places around town. Everyone I talked to said they were planning on going to the crusade and how they expected to see me there.

But here's the thing. As soon as I saw a poster advertising the event, I turned to Jaron and told him we needed to be out of town during the whole event. Every time we go to Kampala, we ride this bus called the Post bus, it's the bus associated with the post office and it's by far the best bus because it leaves right at a certain time, instead of waiting hours until the bus is packed full before leaving, they say a prayer before leaving, which is definitely needed, and it's clean on the bus. The only bad thing about this bus, and it's a really terrible thing, is they play this video of some Christian gospel music event that takes place in the U.S. They play the same one every bus ride and if the video doesn't work, then they just play the music. They don't just play it as background music, they pump it up sooooo loud that you can't possibly block the noise out and not only that, they replay the video or CD over and over again for the duration of the entire 6 hour bus ride!

So a few weeks ago in church, our closing hymn was Nearer My God to Thee. Sister Woods, a senior couple here from Idaho, was playing the piano. The whole song was like this battle between the piano and the congregation because Sister Woods was playing the song according to how it;s written in the hymn book and the congregation was all singing the song according to how the lady in that Christain gospel video they play on the bus sings the song. The solo singer from the video sings it with all this emotion and with different rhythms to make it more dramatic or something, but since everyone here is familiar with that video/music, they all sang the song how they know it. Jaron and I could tell that's what was going on because we've heard the Nearer My God to Thee version everyone was singing on the bus so many times. It was pretty great.

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