Overflowing (photos!)

My heart is full. So incredibly full.
It is my first month living in a village. I wasn't sure what to expect. Sure, other teams had told me of their village, but expectations leave a lot to be desired, so I dismissed their stories to find my own.

 We have the squatty-potty outhouse, which we flush by filling a bucket at the hand pump we get our water from. We have electricity, but is it rare as we are on load sharing with neighboring villages. We are back to hand washing and hang drying our clothes (my team had a washer and dryer in India), and we tell ourselves it gets them cleaner…(simple lies we tell ourselves to get through the dirty work 😉 ). 
Our living conditions are…well…cold. We live in a square brick room in the school our team is teaching in this month. We sleep on our sleeping pads on a cold, dusty cement floor.The days are warm, the nights are FREEZING. While our campus is quite large, there is almost no where to find alone/quite time. And while sometimes things get hard…
I wouldn't change a single thing

When I signed up for the Race, I chose a route based on desire to go to specific countries (namely Ireland). I then decided to read blogs and watch WR videos. I watched many about Nepal. Every time, every movie, I cried. I don't mean a tear trickled down my cheek, I mean I bawled, sobbed, had to pause the video so I could see through my tears, cried. Why? My only answer to this day is: they were so beautiful. 

 

When I got the email about prayerfully considering switching to a different route (because the number of people on each squad was uneven) God immediately told me that one of the two routes to choose from was out of the question; because Nepal was not on it. I ended up switching squads to the one that did have Nepal. 

So here I am. Knowing full and well God called me here, still unsure of why this specific country, but I am so thankful to be here. I do not know if God has called me here for February 2014, or if He is calling me to come back one day, but what I do know is that I was right-the people here are beautiful. They are probably the kindest people, as a whole,  I have met. Their faces light up when they see us. We greet each with a warm smile and a slight bow with hands in prayer formation "Namaste". 

Walking through the village the other day, I instantly thought I was in a commercial for child support; the children were surrounding each of us hoping to hold one of our hands, to get a smile, to find a memory of the one time the "white-faces" came to visit. I was walking with a baby on my hip and two beautiful girls holding each of my hands and multiple children all around me while my team was many yards ahead of me.

I was made for this!