This past month I spent in Bandung, Indonesia, which if you look at a map is around 3 hours outside of Jakarta. I spent my month with my co-lead, a team of 6 and 2 girls on a special trip that allowed them to spend one month with us on the field.
In order to sum my month up in a different way I decided to write about ten different things I experienced to paint you a small picture of what life was like! I hope you enjoy it 🙂
-Feeling like a celebrity. In our month in Bandung I think I saw one other possible American (they could have been European for all I know). So, wherever we went people were shocked to see us because only locals lived in this town. So, we were constantly greeted with people yelling “buleh” at us (meaning white person) and asking to take a photo with us. We took photos with random people on the streets, in parks, in the mall, in alleyways pretty much everywhere we went. Our cheeks would often start cramping from smiling so much. I have never felt like a celebrity in my life until this month.
-Living out training camp. Last August before launching on the world race we had a 10 day training camp where we took bucket showers, slept on our sleeping pads, had to pack up everything up we had each morning in our packs and move it etc. This month we got to do each of those things PLUS use squatty potties haha. What an experience. In this I saw that when you’re circumstance change drastically it can be hard to adjust but after around a week most things seem normal and I can proudly say that I think I have mastered the bucket shower this month. 🙂
-The Muslim faith. This month we entered a country where around 90% of the population is Muslim and where some extremely unreached places of the world are. It was so interesting to live in the midst of this culture and hear the calls to prayer that happened 5 times a day- the earliest sometimes before 5am and the latest around 7pm. To see so many mosques around the towns we would visit and how many people would fill them during times of prayer and sit outside them during the rest of the day. The MOST interesting thing though was meeting Christians who were raised in the Muslim faith and hearing their stories. Hearing how the Lord would come to them in dreams. I have read stories of this for years, but hadn’t met anyone with that as their reality until this month.
-Being completely stuffed all the time. This speaks of the wonderful hospitality of the people and our hosts this month. They fed us so many times this past month. They would buy food for us to all eat together, they would take us out to eat at like 10:30 at night for a second dinner, they would buy us snacks while we were hard at work doing different things around the school we lived at etc. I definitely don’t think I was left hungry much this month, which is something I can’t usually say.
-Trying to learn two languages. Almost every month we are faced with a new language to learn: Spanish, Sesotho, Saswati, Thai, Khmer and instead of one language this month we had TWO. Bahasa and Sudanese and man was it confusing. If I learned a few words in Bahasa and begun to try them out with different local people I met and found that sometimes they wouldn’t respond. I then found out that maybe they didn’t speak bahasa but spoke Sudanese instead. I never knew just what language people spoke.
-This month we also had the privilege of adding two new members to our experience this month: exposure girls. The world race has a one month trip that people can sign up for from the ages of 18-21 (I believe) and they can raise money and spend one month with us on the field getting a taste of what the world race is like. This month we had two awesome girls join the team I was with: Sammy and Liz. They both were excited to experience Indonesia with us and learn more about the world race. It was fun to spend time with them and do life with them for a short month!
-Traditional Indonesian clothes! During our trip we got the opportunity to spend two days in the village of lembang up near the mountains where we got to try on beautiful traditional Indonesian clothing. Clothing that they would wear at a wedding or another important occasion. The shirts and shirts were made beautifully and had so many details within them and were bright colors.
-Singing the banana song in many schools. We got to spend a few days in the school classrooms where we lived where we got to play games, do a few bible skits and sing the banana song. We sang that song so many times last month that we started to think of new fruits/animals to add to the song haha.
-A weekend trip to Bali. We found out that we would be only a short plane flight away from Bali and found some cheap tickets so we ended up spending a weekend in Bali. We went surfing, watched the sunset at some beautiful cliffs and tried the famous Kopi Lawak coffee made from a civet cats poop (if you haven’t heard of it you should google it). It’s the rarest coffee in the world and can go for a $100.00 a cup in the states (don’t worry I didn’t spend anywhere close to that for it).
-4 different birthday parties. This month in our team of 10 we got to celebrate 4 different birthday parties: from dance dance revolution and karaoke at a nearby mall, to a game night, to cooking our own Thai food (YUM).
Now, I am in my LAST MONTH of the race (which makes me quite sad to think about) in the Philippines. We are at an awesome ministry that has a school, a children’s home, does feedings and bible studies in villages all around the area and so many more things. We get to participate in these three ministries as well as doing manual labor on their site. We will be here for another 10 days and then we will spend the second half of the month traveling up to the the rice fields where we will go on a trek to process our trip and meet/share with people along the way. I am the most excited about this because I have been waiting to do trail ministry this whole time!!!! YAY.
And then we will finish with a final debrief before we fly back into the states!
This month is going to fly by BUT I plan on cherishing every moment. I will never get this specific month in my life back so I am going to squeeze every sweet thing out of it that I can 🙂
