By Anna Weaver | Hawaii Catholic Herald

SYDNEY

Under an almost full moon, next to Darling Harbor glittering with the reflected lights of nearby skyscrapers, two Hawaii school groups performed on July 16 for World Youth Day pilgrims.

Five members of Kuliouou’s Holy Trinity School beginning band were here to perform as one of many “youth festival” events taking place throughout the week. With band director Anne Martin and three other adults, they traveled with the St. Francis High School show choir.

Martin opened the 5 p.m. program with an “Aloooha!” The students then played a short set of tunes including “Jesus Loves Me,” “Over the Rainbow,” and “Kawaipunahele,” which band member Lokalia Isaia introduced in Hawaiian and danced hula to.

Dozens of pilgrims and passersby stopped to sit on the steps of the Harbourside Amphitheatre — a temporary World Youth Day venue — to listen.

Martin started a band class this school year for sixth to eighth graders in the small east Honolulu school after receiving a general flier last spring announcing a search for student bands to perform at the global gathering.

Though they are a new group, the students performed with plenty of heart. Their pastor, Father Gary Secor, came to hear the results of their hard work.

“It’s amazing because they’ve only been playing for nine months,” he said. “It’s an important experience for them to think back on this time [at WYD] as they become adults.”

The St. Francis School Show Choir performed after their younger counterparts. The singers and four musicians, including one guy, are also a new group, formed by school band and choir director Mary Ann Llamedo within the last year.

The group members looked chilly in their purple muumuus, aloha shirts and bare feet. (They later changed into the slightly warmer ensemble of jeans, T-shirts and aloha shirts.) But you couldn’t tell the temperature was in the 40s by their smiles and energy.

By the end of their half-hour performance of upbeat contemporary Christian music and dance, the show choir had attracted a large crowd who called for an encore. By that time, there were more than a dozen people dancing in front of the stage, including the rarely-seen-to-dance Father Secor.

One pilgrim who caught the performance was Sydneysider Shannon Harley, 18.

“I looked in the youth festival booklet at what was on today and I saw there was the St. Francis School Choir,” she said.

It piqued her interest because she’ll be going to Hawaii in October to visit her mother and see if she’ll move there. She said St. Francis was great.

The St. Francis and Holy Trinity groups also performed on July 13 at St. Ambrose Church in Concord, west of Sydney.

They took in the sights and other experiences as well, including the “bridge climb” up Sydney Harbor Bridge. But their performances at World Youth Day were surely the highlights of their trip to Australia.