Luckily we had a full day to spend in Kathmandu with the other teams. After a day of hitting up stores, walking around, eating some good food the night began to close in. As I was sitting in a cafe drinking some hot Nepali tea (good stuff), I looked out onto the street and it finally hit me as to how empty and void this place was. It wasn’t until I started to people watch that I noticed that something was missing here. Something was lost. Something just wasn’t right about it. It amazed me that I hadn’t seen it throughout the day, but then I realized that I had been walking those same streets, walking into the same shops, and looking at the same merchandise. This was a tourist spot on top of that. The heart of this place is ruled by the enemy. As I was processing all of this, I began to see the darkness that engrossed Kathmandu. I saw the lack of identity this particular place had. It was neither totally Indian and nor totally Nepali, but it went deeper than that. Perhaps the identity was found in consumerism, tourism, the night-life, etc., yet the only thing that I could see despite all those things was just emptiness. Everyone outside, whether they were locals and foreigners, looked empty. I began to see how susceptible this place was to creating strongholds. As night covered this area, the darkness and danger became thicker. This wasn’t a safe neighborhood by any means. This set the backdrop to what I would discover about the area around our ministry site.
