Our third week in Laos was my favorite week of the Race so far. Our ministry host sent us out to a remote, unreached village to prayer walk. So we had a great adventure trying to reach this village in the mountains where very few foreigners have gone before. They are hoping to start a preschool in this village in the near future, in order to be closer to the many unreached people groups in the area. And we got the privilege of going ahead of them to pave the way with prayer.
The day before we went out, we had a meeting with our host, and he gave us the names of two villages to prayer walk and a city to pass through to get to the second village. He gave us his best guess at suggestions for the methods of local transportation we should use to get there. (For the sake of protecting our host’s ministry, I can’t share the names of the places we went.) It felt like we were on a scavenger hunt and given basic clues for how to find what we were looking for. Our assignment was to pray, to take pictures, and to find out whatever information about the place we could, because our host has never been there before. Unfortunately Lindsey and Ashley got sick right before we went out, so they weren’t able to come, so it was just four of us: me, Jenna, Britteny, and Megan.
Day 1 – The first day of our adventure, we took a tuk tuk to the bus station, and then hoped on a bus packed with Lao people. I sat by a sweet lady who knew quite a bit of English and she spent the whole ride teaching me Lao words. Two hours later, we stopped in the first village we were assigned to spend the day prayer-walking. We spent the night in a little home-stay on a coffee plantation. The owner was extremely hospitable, and he even arranged a direct ride to our second destination, the city we had to pass through to get to the second village. He came with us, and even helped us find a ride to our ultimate destination. This first village is the home of a large unreached people group here in Laos. There is another branch of this group that lives in Vietnam, where Christianity has been well accepted and a number of them have become believers. But unfortunately the part of this group that lives in Laos has no Christians yet. They are animists (spirit worship), and their religion is based on offering sacrifices to the spirits in order to appease them. This group is particularly well known for their buffalo sacrifice ceremonies. We got to ask the home-stay owner a lot of questions about his beliefs. He said they believe the spirits are the spirits of their deceased ancestors, and they offer sacrifices to them during big life events such as weddings, births, building a new house, etc. I asked what would happen if they didn’t offer sacrifices, and he said, “Oh, the spirits would kill you.” They believe the spirits make bad things happen, like illnesses, accidents, deaths, crop failures, and things like that. So it’s understandable that these people live in constant fear of the spirits, hoping they don’t do anything to upset them. But we were encouraged as we walked through the houses and prayed that they would know that they have a Creator who loves them, and that they would come to know Jesus as their Savior. We prayed over the river, that God’s Presence would flow through the village bringing life. When we went to bed that night, I had a restless night of sleep. I kept waking up, wide awake. One of these times occurred at 3:00am, and I woke to the sound of drums beating in the distance. I admit I was a little frightened at the thought of being in this remote village, surrounded by spirit-worshiping people as they were worshiping the spirits with drums in the middle of the night. I prayed over myself and my teammates, and for the village, then went back to sleep. I found out the next morning that the drums were monks in the temple in the next village, signifying the beginning of a fast.
Day 2 – We woke up at 5:30 the next morning because the ride that the home-stay owner set up for us was supposed to arrive to pick us up at 6:00am. We were all ready to go at 6:00, but he didn’t show up until 7:30. He is obviously on Lao time. So we set off to the city where we needed to pass through to find a ride to the next village. On the way there we stopped to see a waterfall. Our host had told us before we left that if we didn’t find a ride from the city to the village before noon, we wouldn’t make it that day, so it’s good we got such an early start. We arrived in the city about 11:00, and found a pickup truck to take us up into the mountains to get to the final village. We crossed the river on a ferry, and began the bumpiest, dustiest ride of my life. The ride up was exhilarating. We were going where very few foreigners have gone before. I was seeing with my own eyes the unreached people I have spent a lot of my life praying for, and dreaming of traveling to. I was praying the whole ride for God to prepare the way for the Gospel to go forth, for hearts to be prepared to receive it, and for roads to be built so the people are more easily accessible. On the way up, our driver stopped on the side of one of the mountains at an altar to offer a sacrifice to the spirits for safe travels. I pray that he would see that he doesn’t have to offer sacrifices or fear spirits because Jesus sacrificed Himself to make a way for us to be with God. Four hours later, we arrived at the village, and checked into the guesthouse where we stayed for the night. We set out to explore the village, find dinner, and prayer walk. It’s an extreme understatement to say we were the talk of the town that night. We were met with so many curious stares, hesitant smiles, and excited whispers as we walked around. We split up in pairs to cover more ground while we prayer walked. Jenna and I came across some kids playing a traditional Lao game similar to volleyball, but instead of using their hands, they use their feet or their head to kick a hollow, plastic ball back and forth over the net. We asked (using gestures because they don’t speak English) if we could join, and the kids all smiled, laughed and nodded. So we made a pitiful attempt to join in. But after about 15 minutes, we let the professionals take back over their game and we watched. It was a neat moment of connecting with some of the kids in the community. We finished our prayer walk and met Britt and Megan at the guesthouse. We shared how our prayer-walks went, and worshiped, then we went to bed.
Day 3 – This was the most uncertain day of our adventure. Our host had asked us to explore the surrounding areas and look for nearby villages. They said that we might be invited to stay the night in a villager’s house, or we might be able to set up our tents somewhere for the night. So we weren’t sure what to expect. He just said go where God led us, and take pictures of any signs or landmarks we see. So in the morning, we packed up and set out walking (toward the Vietnam boarder, we think). The night before when we were worshiping, Megan had felt like God was saying “turn right” but she didn’t know exactly when or where. So we took just about every right turn we came across. We walked for two and a half hours up and down the mountainous road, sweating buckets all along the way. Toward the end of that time, we came to the steepest hill yet. We all knew that however far we walked, we’d have to walk just as far either that night or the next morning to get back, so we didn’t want to go much further. We decided to get to the top of that hill and see if we could see anything further ahead, if not, we’d turn around and start heading back. From the top, we could see a few tin roofs glistening in the sun just at the bottom of the hill. We knew that was the village God had sent us to. So about 1:00pm, we arrived to this tiny village that consisted of about fifteen houses and three shacks that sold a few snacks and convenience-shop type items. We bought juices from the first shop, and sat down with the little old lady who ran the shop. We used the phrases in the back of our Lonely Planet Laos travel book to try to communicate. After a few minutes we had reached the limit of our communication, and were sitting around feeling a little awkward. So I got out my guitar and started to play. The face of the little old lady lit up and she clapped her hands when she saw me get my guitar out of its case. I strummed chords while my teammates prayed, and we just sat there, enjoying the company of the villagers and inviting the Lord’s Presence to come fill the place. During the hour or so that we were there, we had attracted quite a few of the villagers, who came to see the four white girls who randomly stumbled upon their village. When we felt like they weren’t going to invite us to stay, and remembering that if we were going to walk back tonight, we’d have to leave soon to beat nightfall, we said goodbye and started walking back to the main village. We checked back into the guesthouse we had stayed in the night before, enjoyed cool showers, had some good team conversation, and went to bed. I will always remember that hour or two that we spent in that little unknown village way up in the mountains of unseen Laos, and the faces of the people there.
Day 4 – We got up early the next morning, not knowing how we were going to find a ride back down the mountains to the city we had to pass through to get back home. We tried asking the lady who ran the guesthouse we stayed in, but communication is pretty limited when your only option is to use Google translate. We did finally realize that she doesn’t speak Lao, so it helped when we switched to Vietnamese. We pretty much ended up just saying the name of the city and pointing down the road in the direction we came from, and pointing to a truck. Then one of the pickups with benches in the back that we had taken up drove by. The security guard jumped on his motorbike and chased it down and brought it back to the guesthouse for us. We grabbed our things out of our rooms, paid for the rooms, and jumped in the back of the truck, and we were on our way. We were expecting the ride down to be just as dusty, so we bought some of the cloth face masks everyone there wears. We were thinking the ride down would be shorter because it’d be all downhill, but it took us five hours, because we kept getting stopped because cranes and bulldozers were building the road in front of us. Also, this truck was a lot more crowded. For most of the way, we had eighteen people crammed in. But we eventually made it to the city, and we stayed the night there. We were so exhausted, we just found dinner and went to bed.
Day 5 – Again, we weren’t exactly sure how we were going to get back “home” to where we were stationed for the month, but we woke up early, checked out of the hotel, and set out to find out how to get to bus station. We walked to the corner store near the ferry where we had found our ride up into the mountains a few days earlier and asked the lady how we could get to the bus station. She motioned for us to sit down while she called someone. We waited for about half and hour, not knowing what to expect. Then two guys in a pickup pulled up, and loaded our bags in the back of the truck and motioned for us to get in the back seat of the cab, and we were off. Sure enough, we ended up at the bus station, which was about a ten minute drive outside the city, and they only charged us about a dollar each for the ride. Then we bought our “bus” tickets, which ended up being for another pickup with benches in the back, but this one was much bigger than the other ones we had taken, so there was plenty of room for all the passengers. A little baby fell asleep resting on my arm on the way. It was an enjoyable ride, and we made it back to our home city around noon.
I am so grateful I had the opportunity to take part in this adventure of getting to prayer walk among some of the most unreached people in the world. Please continue to pray with me for the Gospel to go forth in those areas, for the power of generations of spirit worship to be broken, and for the light of the knowledge of Jesus to shine in the hearts of the people in unseen Laos.
