This month started with 48 hours of land travel from Cambodia to Myanmar. If you know anything about Southeast Asia, you will know that Cambodia and Myanmar do not touch, therefore you would have to drive through Thailand in order to get to Myanmar, but not only that we had E-visa’s for Myanmar which are only allowed through three border crossings. To top all of that off, “my partner in crime” for travel days is not going to the same country I am, she was going to Laos. The other difficult part of this month was, not a lot of teams have been to Myanmar, and our host was a first time host, they have never had a world race team before.
When we arrived, our host was not there, but his wife, Nancy, was. We were greeted very late at night and sent off to bed not too long after. The next morning we woke up to a very large compound with goats, puppies, Bible college students and kids! We were staying in our host’s house, which was small but enough room for all of us. There was a kitchen and a bathroom with a shower and a western toilet.
The thing that seemed the hardest at the start of this month was, when we drove through Thailand we got a taste of Thailand and it was wonderful and westernized and things were in English, it was sweet. But as soon as we crossed over into Myanmar things changed, no one spoke english and everything was so confusing, people wore stuff on their faces, it just seemed like such a distant place. Thailand was also the place where my mom was coming to see me, which made Myanmar seem like it was going to take forever and that it was in the way of me being in Thailand and seeing my mom.
Ministry involved preaching twice a day everyday from us, we had a rotation going so we didn’t have to speak everyday, and teaching English to the Bible College students. We were also asked to play volleyball in the afternoons with the Bible College students.
My attitude at the beginning of this month was rough, it was “get through this month and the rest of the race will be easy.” It was a terrible attitude to have in a foreign country that needed God’s love and I was not there for the first week. I feel really crappy about that now, I was not letting the Lord into what He was trying to teach me. Being present is something that i’ve been struggling with and this was no exception. I wanted to be in Thailand with my mom.
Luckily I have a very strong team leader, who was also struggling but she was the one who turned it around for our whole team, and it turned out we were all struggling. So we finally got to get internet and talk to our families after the first week and we got a SIM card for our phone and we were able to communicate with the other teams in Myanmar. Once we got past that first week and over all of our attitude problems and really poured out into the people at our ministry, it was a great month.
A part of this month that I was not expecting was to enjoying going to the market with our host mom Nancy. It was so much fun to back to the same vendors every other day and make friends with the people we bought our eggs from and our carrots. A few times when we didn’t go Nancy would come home and tell us that people asked where we were that day. It was a lot of fun to shop in the market and eat food that was grown locally by farmers we got to meet.
We based teaching English around Disney/Pixar movies so that we could have movie day on Fridays and the students loved it. We watched Frozen, The Incredibles and Finding Nemo, so you can imagine the vocabulary for each of those. We got creative and the students had a lot of fun and their English improved so much from the time we got there to the time we left.
We also committed to playing volleyball everyday at 3pm with the Bible College students. Turns out they have some mad skills and are really good at volleyball. I must say my game improved because I played with them. They really know how to play as a team and I think that’s really cool. As students of the college they also lived in community like we live in community on the race.
At night we got to share a short devotional with the orphans that lived in the compound. We had a lot of fun singing with them every night and some of the young boys even translated for us to practice their English. We all fell in love with a little boy named Itapan, he LOVED kisses and man did we love on that kid. He came to find us every night before bed to get his goodnight kisses from each of us.
In the compound we also had three puppies and a mom and a dad dog. The day we got there I named the smallest one Harold, he was my little buddy and I made sure he ate lots of food. Then the next smallest was Chaco, she was so sweet once she warmed up to us. And then there was Kilo, he was the biggest and kind of a bully and he ended up not making it.
This month was crazy good, the stars shone really brightly in Myanmar. The night we left our host surprised us with a huge gathering and prayer, everyone from the compound was there and we all prayed together before we left. We said goodbye to each and everyone of the students we had. Our hardest goodbye was to Nancy, our mom, she is the sweetest woman and she took such good care of us.
This month the Lord taught me to be patient and calm, the future will come but right now is all you have so be present. It was hard to leave, and I didn’t think that would have been true on the first day we arrived. The Lord is funny and He knows how much i love humor.
