[For all of those who don't know, at the beginning of the Race each team is given a water filter in case of emergency situations in which we do not have access to clean drinking water. Somewhere around month 3, I agreed to carry the water filter for my team. Six months into the Race, we hadn't used the thing once. And while it isn't exactly heavy or takes up much room, it had begun to feel completely unnecessary to carry around. The thought of "we are NEVER going to need this…" began to creep through my mind. Apparently, I was wrong…]
"Choosing joy."
It's one of the many phrases you learn when you go on the World Race.
On the World Race, you quickly learn that your circumstances are not always going to be as wonderful as you hope they are. You are put into tough situations, you are out of your comfort zone, and that 10-hour bus ride to your next location turns into a 22-hour one (that legitimately happened to my squad going from Guatemala to Honduras).
In those moments, you have two options.
1) Be upset and miserable, bringing everybody down with you.
2) Choose joy. Decide that the situation will not dictate how you feel. Learn to show gratitude even in the hard things. And maybe even work some fun into the current "sucky" situation.
Last Thursday, as my team was settling in to our first full day in Phnom Penh, and resting up after my second least favorite travel day, we found ourselves in exactly the type of situation where we needed to choose joy.
By almost all standards, we are living in World Race luxury this month. We live in a real building, with insulated walls, actual windows, and screens to keep out the bugs. We have fans to keep us cool. A tub AND shower with WARM water, free wifi at the corner market, and a legitimate kitchen to do our cooking.
As one of my teammates who I'll leave unnamed (but whose nickname happens to be an article of clothing in Spanish) went downstairs to the kitchen to cook dinner, all that luxury went out the door…
My teammate broke the key inside the kitchen lock. The same key that also opens the front gate.
In a matter of seconds, we were both simultaneously locked out of our source of food and drinking water, as well as trapped within the confines of our housing. And our ministry host, probably not realizing the full consequences of our situation, told us not to worry and he'd be by in the morning with the other key and a saw to cut off the lock.
By all means, we could have panicked, freaked out, and got upset with our teammate. But what we did instead, was choose joy. And, subsequently, that night has become a favorite memory with my team.
We settled in to our dinner of bread and peanut butter (the only food at our disposal), and thanked our team leader, Jade, for sacrificing her peanut butter for us. We quickly realized, however, that we had a big problem….
We were thirsty. Incredibly thirsty (I mean, peanut butter will do that to you). Our water bottles were empty and our only clean drinking water was safely locked away in the kitchen with no way in.
And that's when we remembered…our handy-dandy water filter was sitting in my pack!!
We, then, began filling the filter with water from our shower and filtering it into our bottles.
And we laughed. Oh, we laughed. Month 7 on the Race and we were finally using that water filter…
From there, that night, we sat around as a team and discussed our hopes and dreams for the future. Each time a girl described what she wanted out of life, our teammate, Caroline, would bundle everything we had said up into the most perfect, yet hilarious story that combined each of those elements.
Our night of disaster turned into a night of bonding, of laughter, of JOY.
[My teammate, Raquel, working that water filter.]
