I'm not lost- I'm on an adventure!: All the single ladies

Last weekend I went to the UAE (United Arab Emirates) for a singles conference with my church. I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and we do this kind of thing all the time.

I know, I know, it SOUNDS awesome but..... I have mixed feelings about these conferences. To be honest, I do usually enjoy them. There are usually pretty fun activities, you meet new people who are having very similar experiences to you, and it's pretty much always a spiritually uplifting event. The downside is I am pretty much always reminded how A) old I am to still be single in this church, B) just how very few active LDS guys there are, and C) there are SO many beautiful and amazing single LDS women out there I don't stand a chance. I mean-- have you met Filipino women??! and this conference was about 50% Filipino women.

Meeting a guy to date is always a hope- let's be honest- but it certainly wasn't an expectation on this trip. I've been to too many of these. I went so I could actually visit the UAE, see just who are the single LDS people in the region, and to be spiritually uplifted. The conference was great and it did just that. The timing was good too. I really needed a spiritual boost and distraction last weekend for several reasons. With other announcements and things going on... it was a good place to be I think.

I arrived late because I had to work on Thursday. I missed all the dancing and socializing that happened Thursday evening. I stayed with this really nice family from Rexburg, Idaho- which is just down the road from where I grew up. They have triplet daughters who are seniors in high school and the husband works for Exxon. They were all very nice. A very lovely girl from England also stayed there with me. She teaches in Oman. We totally hung out together for the whole conference. It was very nice to have a friend to go to in a crowd of people you don't know.

There were about 130 singles that attended from all over the region. It was so cool to see so many different people from so many places come together. We are all so different and yet all so much the same. One speaker asked people to stand up for the continent they are from when he called them. We had people from EVERY continent (excluding Antartica for obvious reasons). There was as guy from Iraq- not an expat, but an Iraqi- a Syrian man, a few people from Jordan, and literally people from Europe, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Africa, North America and South America. It was really neat.

We had some great talks and workshops at the church in Abu Dhabi and then we went into the desert to have a literal fireside. For those of you that don't know, fireside chats is the term used to describe a series of 30 evening radio addresses given by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1944. Our church still uses the term for basically an evening spiritual talk. It was really nice out there and Elder Price gave a great talk about burying our own weapons of rebellion like the Anti-Nephi-Lehies did.

The next day we headed to Dubai to the UN warehouse... or something like that... where we assembled 8,495 hygiene kits. The kits were handed out with food at Gurunanak Darbar Jebel Ali Gardens as part of the Diwali celebrations this weekend. It was organized by the Gurunanak Darbar Sikh Temple and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in memory of Dr. Robert Bateman, President of the Abu Dhabi Stake of the church. It was something Pres. Bateman was working on before he passed away suddenly a few weeks ago. It was a really nice weekend. Here's a link to an article about it.

I didn't take a lot of pictures and I may have stolen one from someone on Facebook... but here is what I've got.