I am currently sitting in a pool of sweat on a train heading across the country of India… literally across the country. I will be on this train for almost 2 days straight. 43 hours to be exact. When I say train, don't picture a nice air conditioned Amtrack… picture the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Let me tell you how I got here…
To sum up my last few days, they have been some of the hardest days of my life, and it's not over yet. My squad left from Malaysia on Tuesday and had a wonderful 5 hour flight. We landed in New Delhi pumped to be in India. Many of us have been hightly anticipating India because we know it will be the first of our 'challenging' countries. What I mean by that is some of us have been a little spoiled in Southeast Asia and Austrailia… some teams have had Air conditioning, internet, hot showers, and meals cooked for us. Now we are in India, with Nepal, Swaziland, Mozambique, and South Africa to follow. Something tells me our 'honeymoon' months of the World Race are over.
As we stepped off the plane, grabbed our bags and headed out into the waiting area.. it hit me.. we don't even know what we're waiting for right now. This is how the World Race goes. We literally don't know what we're doing from minute to minute sometimes. So we wait for about an hour at the airport, I'm asking aroudn what we're doing, and nobody nows at all. The last they heard, we were trying to get in touch with a 'contact.' Does anyone know where we're staying tonight? No.. oh okay. Well… our ministry this month is in Bangalore, which is in Southern India… we're in New Delhi.. northern Inida.. how are we going to get there? Oh, hopefully we'll be able to get train tickets tomorrow. Oh.. okay.. hopfully?
Okay, as you can see, what's going through my head is: where am I sleeping tonight and when can I get these 70 pound bags off of my shoulders. Oh, and when will we actually be at our ministry site. You know, small questions like that.
After a 45minute ride in something I can hardly even call a 'bus,' we stopped on a random road. Okay, half of us are staying at this 'hostel' and the other half are staing at an orphanage tonight. Oh my gosh. God has an interesting way of working things out, I am learning. I am staying at the orphanage!!
Let me tell you a little bit about ASHA Children's home (my home for 2 days). We get to bed around 2am. We set up our sleeping mats and pass out on a rug in the middle of this building. We're crammed side by side and we fall asleep quickly. 5am. I hear a little pitter patter and some whispers.. then they go away. A few minutes later, I hear dozens of little voices singing 'This is the day that the Lord has made.' I swear I was in heaven for a few minutes. I drifted back to sleep because I was still pretty delerious at this point. 6am. The whispers are louder and this time I can feel people stepping on my sleeping mat and all around me.
I open
my eyes to see about 20 pairs of little eyes staring at me. My heart melted.. this is my first experience in an orphanage. I couldn't lay there for one more minute. Rachel and I both jumped up and went up to the roof where they sleep. They were cleaning up their rugs and getting ready for school and we proceeded to play/talk to them for the next hour or 2. To make a long story short, I had 2 of the most amazing days of my life being with those children. They were so sweet, I just wanted to spend every minute with them. I took plenty of pictures of them, as you can imagine. That little angel in my arms is Varum.. he and his brother are living at the orphanage because his parents are Lepors and they don't have enough money to take care of them.
The next day, we ended up getting train tickets, praise the Lord, although we were informed that all of the Air Conditioned cars were full so we had to go in the 'budget' section. 🙂 Ahhh I love the World Race.
We travel in style.
Unfortuanately I found myself in a funk a lot too because of the extreme heat. Thiswas the hard part for me. Even though I'm used to being in heat in the other countries, there was always breaks with Air Con that kept me sane. The heat in India is hard to describe. It's the kind of heat that warms you up from the inside out, if you can imagine that. Just imagine a desert, with buildings built on it. That's India. I didn't even realize that we were not too far from Packistan… hours away. I've never been to this part of the world. It has such a middle eastern feeling… the buildings, the people, the heat…. and the cool thing is that all of the women here only wear the traditional clothing, which is beautiful.
So we say our sad goodbyes to the angels at the orphanage and promise to come back someday… we grab our things and headed to the train station…
So, that brings me to now. The train. The train is a whole blog in itself. At the train station, we got stared at so much, I think I got a taste of what it's like to be a celebrity. I mean these men lurked over our shoulders and stared straight at us without blinking. At first we were so creeped out, but then it just got comical. We had a 5 hour wait at the 'train station,' and we were getting stared at the entire time, so we made a game out of it.
We had 'staring contests' with the guys… they 
always won.
And they didn't think it was funny. They were very serious about their staring. Anwyay.. so here I am on a train getting a tour of India which consists of tan, square buildings (picture Aladdin) slums, people sleeping or laying around in any random location, vendors and beggars walking the isles, sick people, straw huts, desert plains, dried up trees, trash EVERYWHERE, and some of the most beautiful people I've ever seen. Oh and how could I forget the toilets… they were squatty potty's with a hole that lead straight down to the tracks.. oh yes, we were going to the bathroom on the train tracks. The best part of these 'toilets' was that when we stopped at a train station, we got to smell and SEE what comes out of the toilet. Oh, and then 
we were all starving so we bought some deep fried cabage thing.. you can imagine what it did to my stomach… I spent a lot of time on that wonderful train 'toilet.' Welcome to India. I can't wait to start ministry tomorrow!
