The close of Vietnam….
I apologize in being so long to write a blog. No excuses. Vietnam though to wrap it up was far and away my favorite country we visited. I think this had to do with a combination of things. What we did, who we did it with, the city we live in. Like anything each month is its own beast in the sense that we change contacts, ministries, locations, living arrangements, diets, schedules, and really mind sets going from country to country. Vietnam though was really a great month. Wqe leaved in Ho Chi Minh City which seems like a really cool place and I only feel like we grabbed the edges of it. Seems like there is so much more to experience.
The street where we stayed was indeed very touristy, but all the same, still very cool. It was weird seeing so many white people though, and not just Americans. It was quite the mixing pot of peoples and cultures.
The food was cheap enough that you could eat your meals out on the streets at vendors and places of the sort. My particular favorite was a rice and pork lady who was 5 doors down from our “hotel.” Also for breakfast we found a killer 50 cent smoothy. I had between 1 and 5 each day….. : /
Ministry this month was also very neat as it was a little bit all over the board. Many people spoke English here which also definitely helped. It is a strange thing to be able to communicate so well with so many people. One girl we worked with is even heading off the US to go to college….it’s a small school that I think I’ve heard of before called Yale (I think its on the east coast somewhere, but don’t quote me on that) . But it was a neat thing to spend time with the college kids, most of whom spoke decent English. One part of ministry was in fact going to a coffee shop a couple of times a week where people form all over the city came to work on their English. We would simply have conversations with people, build friendships. It was an exciting time. We worked with both a branch of YWAM as well as a coffee shop called SOZO. Sozo the coffee shop hires disadvantaged workers as well handicap employess and does a great job reaching out to the community. There is also somewhat of a ministry run out of Sozo that works with English speakers, a blind school, children’s groups. It was a very neat piece of ministry to have the opportunity to be involved with.
It was a really hard month to leave, not only because we had A/C but we just enjoyed being there, all of it. Its so weird with how worked up I was going into that month, it turned out to be my favorite one thus far. I got to see that our brothers and sisters in Christ are our Brother and Sisters, no matter where they live. The true Church, the Church of people seeking God’s face doesn’t know politics or country lines. It doesn’t know history, but rather it knows love. It knows that people are people with souls who need completion. I did not see anything miraculous happen while in Vietnam, nobody that I saw was raised from the dead, but it was a fruitful month in my opinion.
We spent time we college kids, we put smiles on the faces of kids at the blind school. And we learned first hand that countries do not define the people.
