Month 2 of this 11 month trip started two weeks ago. My squad, “S squad”, arrived in Nepal on February 7 & 8. We stayed in a really hip part of Kathmandu called Thamel where a lot of backpackers and tourists hang out. Our squad of 55 people stayed in a hostel for about 5 days and debriefed our first month on the mission field. We had one-on-one meetings with our leaders and meetings with our team. If you forget or don’t know, my team is made up of 5 girls and we named ourselves Themelios which is Greek and means “belonging to the foundation” (which is Christ) or “laid down as a foundation” (our team wants to lay down the foundation for others to know Christ). We had nightly worship sessions and messages and breakout sessions. It was also a fun time of exploring the shops and cafes in Thamel and relaxing on real beds and taking real showers!
Although, (kind of) funny story…the first morning I tried taking a shower and the water was freezing cold. Stubbornly and reluctantly, I decided to save my shower for a different day. So two days later, instead of freezing cold water it was scalding hot! At this point, as you can imagine, I needed to bathe so I used my new innovative bucket shower skills that I had picked up the month before and used the sink water that had both hot and cold water to fill up the bucket that was in the bathroom. I’m definitely becoming more adaptable thanks to the World Race. My fellow squadmate and roommate for debrief, Caitlin, even wrote a blog about the new definition of luxury that we have all begun to experience. She’s one of the 3 unicorns on our squad from the Northeast! She is hilarious in real life and her blog doesn’t disappoint to shed some light on the humorous realities of the World Race: http://caitlinhunter.theworldrace.org/post/the-changing-definition-of-luxury
This is S squad’s “all squad month” which means that our whole squad gets to live and do ministry together! We are staying in a different part of Kathmandu and partnering with an organization that does a lot of stuff in the city and in the villages of Nepal. Their main ministries are children at risk and women at risk. They have an informal school in two of the slums that are in Kathmandu. An informal school is for “slum children” who aren’t able to go to school to receive some sort of education. The organization’s goal is to open one informal school in each slum of the city (they mentioned the number but I forget). I went with a group to one of the informal schools and we sang songs, played games, and did a skit telling the story of David and Goliath for the kids there. The kids loved jumping on us and being tickled and played with. This organization also prioritizes leadership development as a ministry for the city’s missionaries to rest, refresh and renew. Another thing they do for children at risk is every Wednesday morning they gather the street children, teens, and young adults and play soccer with them, tell a Bible story and share the Gospel, and share a meal with them.
They don’t want to call it a feeding program where they are seen as superior but they want to “break bread” and share what they have. I think that’s such a great mindset to have when we’re giving and helping people “less fortunate” than us. Words are powerful and have an effect on the way we see the world and what we believe about certain things. Sometimes we get lazy with our words or we just don’t know of a better term. Instead of calling them underprivileged, let’s change the way we think and call it something different: they are under-resourced. It’s not their fault they don’t have the same resources as us. And its not our fault that we were born in America where we do have lots of resources. But what can we do with the excess of resources that we do have? We can share. I was reading the book Scary Close by Donald Miller last month and one of the things his family does is with the money they’d spend they’d always ask whether what they were buying would help them restore each other or restore other people. I think that’s a great way to look at what we spend and start budgeting our money with that mindset.
February 28 (my birthday!) through March 6 will be spent in the mountains and the jungles of Nepal! Our squad will be split into two groups of 4 teams and will be going into villages. It’s a day-long bus ride to get there so we’ll be leaving February 27 and getting back to Kathmandu on March 7th. We don’t know exactly what we’ll be doing when we get there but please pray for my squad as we go out to these villages and talk to the people there about Jesus and pray for them. **Please pray that we’re able to empower any Christian leaders, believers, and churches that may be there. And please pray for safety and good health! There were a couple of us in and out of the hospital last week with bacterial infections and some others have colds. We are excited (and nervous) to go on this adventure and do some trekking in one of the most adventurous countries there is! So many people come here to trek the Himalayas and do extreme sports and its exciting to finally be part of some of that!
