On Christmas Eve we had Tobis Christmas dinner described in my previous narration.<\/p>\n
On the 25th we wanted to see what’s going on in one of the many churches we saw already in Majuro. We just picked the first church as we had no selection criteria. It was the United Church of Christ in Uliga, a town or village on the main island of the Majuro atoll.<\/p>\n
We saw many people, mainly in blue dresses, the ladies and girls, and boys and men in shorts of the same color and pattern.<\/p>\n
Suddenly I recognized, that we are in T-shirts and short pants. In the church I visited on Penrhyn Island, this clothing would not have been possible. However, a lady we asked, said that we can enter in our outfit. We also learned the service will start soon. Looking at the many people going in and out of the church and the music we heard from the church, we wondered and went into the church.<\/p>\n
In the middle of the church there was a huge empty space used by a group performing a dance. On both sides and the side towards the door, of the big free space there are about 5 – 8 rows of benches arranged. A friendly man saw us and indicated a place where we could sit down. A very friendly offer because we could see the dancers better and could sit down.<\/p>\n
A group of about 30 – 50 people, kids, young and a few elderly people in white and green colored clothes performed a group dance. The same time they were sin ging. The music, dominated by basses, from a digital sound source had a very fast rhythm. Something like boogie-woogie. The singing reminded me to karaoke, music from sound source and voices are life. Karaoke with a choir.<\/p>\n
At the end of their performance to white-green dressed dancer throw sweets into the audience. The kids were happy about this and collected each sweet on the floor. When one fell close to me I gave it to kid who look at me with big eyes.<\/p>\n
The white-green group left the church dancing and singing.<\/p>\n
After a few minutes the blue dressed people, among who we sat outside in the shade of a big tree outside, came in dancing. A leader in front with a whistle danced and guided the group with hand signs, with showing what the next movements of the dance are, and his whistle to emphasize something I felt nobody needs. Row by row the group came in singing and dancing. The music repeated on-going. Someone must have made an long PC cutting job to created such a long song from rather short elements.<\/p>\n
Also the dances looked a bit different and the songs sounded different, the blue group repeated what the white-green showed before. After the blue group came a red group doing more or less the same as the pervious two groups.<\/p>\n
To me it appears that the whole service is an dancing and singing enterainment time. I assume that the songs contained religious text, which we didn’t get because we don’t speak Marshallese.<\/p>\n
We had enough and went home.<\/p>\n
Back at the boat we had our dinner with its talk time.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately we heard the music until we fell asleep.<\/p>\n
A Christmas event at the United Church of Christ in Uliga.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Christmas Eve we had Tobis Christmas dinner described in my previous narration. On the 25th we wanted to see what’s going on in one of the many churches we saw already in Majuro. We just picked the first church as we had no selection criteria. It was the United Church of Christ in Uliga, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-16"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}