Josh and I are sitting on a porch, in the middle of whoknowswhere. We were heading to the border of Myanmar, to get our visas renewed, when the pickup truck we were riding in stopped. We were on a windy mountain road, and Josh and I had finally gotten the back of the truck situated so we were comfortable, our bellies were full of sticky rice, chicken legs, teriyaki pork strips, ‘mayonaisse seafood’ flavor Lay’s potato chips, blueberry and strawberry dewberry (we are calling them another type of dberries) cookies. We had been waving at all the people riding their mopeds and scooters, and our driver pulled over. The engine light had come on, but it all seemed OK, so we pushed on.
Then we pulled over again, this time because the brake pedal was going to the floor. All the fluid was gone. As I type, our other truck has driven back to town to get help and we are sitting waiting. We wait a lot out here, and when a national contact says something like “twenty minutes” we know we will be sitting around for a few hours. We just used the internet in town, I finally got my email working again, and I had not had the time to post any blogs and I felt lazy about that. So now that I have had time given to me, and I have 2 hours left on my battery, I decided I might as well take advantage of this opportunity.
It has been difficult for me to put my mind to writing lately, inspiration seems to come in bursts, and with the focus on the book, I have gotten a little cooked with writing.
I have felt a little tired today, and the heat as I type makes my arms slide on this table, sweat dripping down. We just left Bandin, which was the little village where we cleared a plot of land for a church building.
When I heard that we were going to do this manual labor, I was excited. I love being able to actually see results for the work, and was looking forward to putting in some time and energy for the kingdom. I would rather swing a hoe anyday over sit through another meeting or service. I would rather work until my blisters are leaking interstitial fluid than stand in front of another crowd and smile and say my name and where I am from.
When we arrived in this town, I wrote a couple blogs, then we heard we were going to go check out the land we were going to clear. We slid and scrambled up a slimy mucky trail and then we came to a plot of land which had already been flattened and cleared and just had some weeds popping through the soil. This was an area about the size of the inbounds of a volleyball court, and when I looked at it, my heart kind of dropped. I said “what are we going to do, spend a coupla hours pulling weeds?”
Then our contact, an american from Colorado, named Ray, pointed at what we were going to do, and I realized how much work we had ahead of us. Ray pointed out an area of jungle and mountain and said we would use machetes and hoes to clear it and level it. Whoa.
So the next day we worked with a bunch of the villagers to swing hoes into the incline and throw the dirt, or tow it on the empty rice bags, and dump it in the low spots until we had a flat surface. We worked hard, and we got so much work done, that the villagers decided to take a couple of days off. So we only worked 2 days, but my hands are still sore.
Then we went on the hike, which I will write about in the next blog, and then Sunday we had church and rested and this morning we packed and now here we sit.
