Launch began at the Holiday Inn in Atlanta, Georgia. Here, we are prepped with sessions and team bonding for the 11 months of adventure, hardship, excitement, kinship, etc., that we are going to face. After 4 days at the hotel we headed to the airport to sit for 3 hours waiting to board our flight to go to Chicago. After a 2 hour flight, my squad and I continued to sit in the Chicago airport for 10 hours waiting to pass customs just to sit for 9 more hours on our flight to Turkey, where we sat again, for another hour before landing in Sofia, Bulgaria.
We’ve made it! We’re in Bulgaria, our first stop of 11 on our World Race. Surviving off little caffeine, adrenaline, and the sheer realization we are no longer in Kansas anymore (Wizard of Oz reference), my squad makes it through customs. A few teams are greeted by their ministry host for the month while the others of us head to a hostel nearby.
Good thing we had the opportunity to practice walking two miles with our packs on in the Georgia heat at training camp, because after walking from the bus stop, we are welcomed to the hostel with three flights of stairs. Once the stairs were tackled, I don’t think anything was said or discussed, bags were dispersed throughout the room and we all quickly became best friends with our eyelids.
The two other teams that stayed in the hostel with us quickly left the next day to make it to their final destination while my team stayed behind exploring Sofia and exhaustingly trying to find a place to stay in our designated UH* town of Pleven.
After what felt like several hundred phone calls, emails, and a brief intermission, we reconvened with the consensus that Pleven was not where we were to be, but we were to head to Lovech, a quaint town of, now, roughly 13,000 residents.
Lovech was once a booming town that housed 45,000 people, but since the fall of communism, many of the younger generations have moved to the larger cities to find work and start families. This left behind the older residents resistant to change, including the desire to learn English, leaving my team and I having a hard time finding a place to stay, or contacts to make.
We are now in our third hotel in Lovech continuing our search for something more permanent, but when do we get to experience the miracles that are talked about so frequently? When do we get to post the heartwarming pictures with children that light up when we walk into a room? What about those pictures of teammates cooking dinner with a local elder of a village we are helping improve? Do we have to wait until we are placed with a ministry host before we can share these marvels with everyone else, or before we can even experience them?
Day 2 and 3 of the race, I probably would have answered yes because the struggle of living with 5 unfamiliar women, in a different county, with no place to stay was taking its toll on me and it has not been pretty; walking up in a new hostel 4 different times has not been Instagram worthy, but I can tell you today not all miracles can been shown with a mere picture. Miracles are found when every door to contacts are closed, but somehow they all lead you back to one church. They are found when that church graciously opens their arms and continues to tell your group you are like a present they so desperately needed, and we haven’t even done anything but show up.
These next few days we are taking some personal time to regroup and regain the slightest bit of normality you can find on the race before embarking on a 50km trek to a nearby village with a church for three days.
I’m not sure what is to come of this journey, but if it is anything like the last 24 hours of doors continually opening, I can tell you big things are going to happen with Shalom Church and the World Race.
More miracles are going to come, they may be Instagram worthy, they may not, but if you are interested in finding out, subscribe to the blog. Who knows, maybe you’ll be one of those miracles!
*Unsung Heroes, or UH, is the ministry my team and I were given this month. This basically means we were not given a contact, a location to stay, or a schedule to follow. We are responsible for finding all of that on our own while staying within a budget the best we can. We are placed in a town to essentially meet new contacts for the World Race to partner with to send future racers.
