Team Illuminate is full swing into ministry here in Malaysia and we are loving it! Our main ministry this month is helping at a center called Kawan, which in Malay, translates to friend. The center is amazing, and everyone that we work with during our time there is absolutely fabulous. There are several facets to the organization, but Kawan exists primarily to provide for the homeless that live in Penang by giving them a place to shower, rest, and providing them with meals three days a week. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday we spend our mornings/early afternoon hours monitoring the shower rooms to make sure no one is doing anything illegal in there, greeting people at the door as they come in for the day, and helping prepare lunch in the kitchen. On Wednesday nights, we also do street ministry. This can look different depending on the week, but usually this entails walking around our extended neighborhood and trying to connect with homeless who have not yet been reached and invite them to Kawan. Over the past few weeks, we have been able to invite several new people to come to the center, and I have also had the opportunity to do some ministry to sex workers on the streets at night. Look for a blog coming soon on how the opportunity to do night ministry has completely changed my life!
During our daytime ministry, I am almost always in the kitchen helping to cook. Usually preparing for lunch takes just under two hours to do. We serve about 90 men and women each of the three days that we are there, so you can imagine the amount of food that we need to prepare in order to do that. We have an extremely busy schedule this month, and do not have a lot of time for processing, so I have found that most of my processing of our ministry and our lives in Malaysia in general happens when I’m chopping vegetables for lunch in the kitchen at Kawan. It’s funny, actually, how you can have 10 other people running around you trying to prepare a meal, and in that moment, you realize on a daily basis how crazy life on the race actually is. Put yourself in my shoes for a minute: I’m chopping carrots (or sometimes chicken feet) in a tiny kitchen on an island off the coast of Malaysia to prepare some random Indian food that I’ve never had before so that we can feed 90 homeless people the only meal that they may get to eat that day all the while a little Chinese-Malay woman is criticizing my chopping skills in a language I don’t understand WHILE trying to teach me to speak Malay, Hokkien, Tamil and Mandarin all at the same time. I mean really, that is CRAZY! Who gets to do that with their lives? In these moments, I realize how blessed I really am to be able to experience all of this. Malaysia is amazing, I love everything about this place, and I’ve completely fallen in love with the people I’ve met here.
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I still need to raise at least $2,891 by December 1st in order to stay on the race. If you would like to give, please follow the support me link to the left of this blog! Thank you!
