Each month on the Race, I’ve been averaging around twelve hundred photos on my camera. I almost completely filled a 128 gig SD card before leaving South America. It’s been a lot to sort through. However, if you read my post the other day, you know that our month in India was much more laid back than we had been used to. I hardly took any, because we really didn’t go anywhere. However, one thing that I really wanted to do was document what most of our days looked like, because it was such a unique month for us.
Every morning, we were usually up early enough to see the sunrise. It was a combination of having no way of blocking light from entering our room, and the crows and water buffalos (pictured below) that were yelling outside our windows before it was even light out.
Our mornings always started with Chai Time, which also happened two or three other times throughout the day. I usually am not a chai person, but I was a huge fan of whatever they did to it in India that made it so much better than what I was used to.
All of the kids in the village woke up even earlier than we did, so by the time we were all awake and starting our day, they were anxiously awaiting getting to spend time with us. It was exhausting, but so much fun getting to know them. We only had to kick them out of our room a couple times when we really needed a break.
Our days were pretty free, since we only had scheduled ministry in the evenings, so afternoons were filled with time with the children, lots of naps, and spending time with our hosts. That looked like helping with cooking, doing laundry, visiting the baby cow next door, doing photo shoots on our rooftop in our traditional Indian outfits (all pictured below), and a variety of other things. I thought I would be bored here, at first, but I was pleasantly surprised.
Out host didn’t have a car, and our ministry involved visiting churches in all of the surrounding villages, so he rented a tuk-tuk to drive us around in all month. The drives were gorgeous, but it was a tight fit. We made it work anyway. The tuk-tuk also broke down pretty regularly, and among other adventures, one night we drove an hour with our phone lights out the windows because the headlights died on our way home.
Ministry itself was an incredibly growing experience. For more details on that, check out my last post, but in short, it involved a lot of prayer ministry and preaching in different village churches every evening.
Our incredible translator, Anil, was one of the highlights of the month. We got to spend a ton of time getting to know him over the three weeks we spent there, and he was truly a joy to be around. One afternoon, he asked me to go on a photoshoot with him outside the village, and it was one of my favorite memories of the month.
We ended every day by eating dinner together as a team, and with our hosts. Sometimes that wasn’t until almost midnight, but it didn’t matter as much when we were able to rest for most of the day anyway. On the last day, our hosts even bought us a cake as a going away present!
Overall, our time in this little Indian village was an experience that I will not soon forget, and an experience I will likely not have again. I saw the side of India that tourists never get to see, and I loved it.
