Order in the court!

I got back from Church in Cairo (which was awesome, thanks for asking) and settled down to write a blog post for my new LDS YSAs blog. I didn't get very far when Michael came running in and yelled, "Tom, I need your help!"
"Does this help require me putting on a shirt?"
"Uh, yeah, we're going to court."

Apparently the guy who messed with Sarah and Katie (full story here) is going to jail for seven years. Sarah and Katie felt that was too strong, so to reduce the sentence they had to go to court to say that they "forgive" him, and the sentence drops to three years. That's where we come in: translators.

We grab Sarah from the hospital, leave Katie there to recover, and head over to the court. Now this was a trip. Inside this terribly dilapidated building were several guards, all concerned about where we were going. I don't know the cause for alarm, the only things in the entire court were piles of trash (seriously, literal trash) that the police were guarding. Maybe killing the pigs of Egypt means that trash has to pile up in the courthouse, too.

So we translate (mostly Michael) and we're about to go when they realize that Sarah is in fact not Katie, but Sarah.

If that's confusing to you, try being there simultaneously translating.

They finally sort out which girl we've brought with us, and we take off. Back home, we all relax (mostly I'm doing the relaxing, after all, it's been a long day in Cairo). Sarah gets a call from Katie. Now they want Katie to go to the court to make a statement. Katie is at this time (9:30PM) recovering from her appendicitis surgery, so she hands the phone to the nurse and I tell the nurse that under no uncertain terms is Katie to be removed from the hospital. Of course the nurse can't understand my accent, especially on the phone, so I hand it to Michael and he gets the message across.

I feel like I used a lot of parentheses in this post.

I also feel like I don't have to lie to make my life sound interesting and exciting.