Here is a blog I was going to post a while back but never had the chance to….
I have officially been gone for about 3 1/2 weeks now and I am just finding the time to update you guys on everything that has happened. Starting from the beginning…After Launch was over and we were getting ready to leave for our flight until we got the news that the flight we were on had been canceled because of the hurricane. Instead of going to the airport we got to go to a church in Georgia and stay there for a night with another squad whose flight had also been canceled. The next afternoon we left for Qatar where we had a small layover and then we finally flew into India. Our Squad had to split up in Qatar so half of us were in India and the other half had a 12 hour layover in Mumbai. We were brought to an AIM base where we stayed for a couple of days for cultural training and LOTS of napping to sleep off our jet lag. Then we took a bus 8 hours to the town where we would be staying for our remaining time in India. Usually our teams will split up once we get to the country but this month is all squad month so we are all staying together.
All of the teams split up daily for different ministries that we are doing this month. When our ministry was introduced to my team they called it “mystery box” because nobody knew exactly what we were supposed to be doing. When we finally met our ministry host he explained to us that we would be doing sanitation presentations in different villages everyday and then giving a small sermon in the church. We were all kind of confused about what that would look like and what topics to cover, but we came up with a presentation and presented it to the village the first day. We have been doing ministry for 2 weeks and we have done our presentation once. Everyday looks different for us. We have been talking with people, praying with people, playing the the children, eating with the pastors, going to the beach with kids from the villages, planting trees, giving sermons and so many other things.
Some days can be kind of hectic and confusing but we always get to meet awesome people and it is so much fun. We see God at work here in India in amazing ways every day. There is so much darkness here and it is so awesome to see the work that people are doing in the churches and in the community to share Gods love with the people of India. Driving through the towns and villages it’s really hard to see all of the pain and hardships that people face everyday. I am happy to be doing a small part in sharing Gods love with people here in India. Some days that can look like waving at people from the back of a tuktuk, stopping to take a selfie, playing red light green light non stop with the children in the villages, going into houses to pray with people who are sick or literally just smiling at someone. India has been really hard but also really great and I am really sad that we are leaving in a couple of days.
