When you sign up for the World Race, you kind of expect empty rooms with sleeping pads and your pack and your team to be your living situation. You expect bugs and lizards and the occasional rodent. You expect hot and sweaty days with bucket showers to cool you off at night.
Up until this month, my race has been really boujee, with no sign of the actual “roughing it” that one expects when you sign up to do the race. I have had a bed to sleep in and running water for showers. I have had access to wifi just a 5 minute bus ride away or at the hostel where I was staying. Then I came to Myanmar…
Myanmar is quite possibly one of the dirtiest countries I’ve ever been to (I’ve only been to five so that’s not saying too much, but its dirty). When we got here, it was hot and sticky and muddy and trash covered the streets. When you breathe in you get a mix of smoke, sewage, and other unfavorable smells. The air pollution here is no joke. I’m not gonna lie to you, after walking across the border and then walking a couple more miles to our bus, I was terrified of what this month would bring. I kept whispering to the Lord, “You’re gonna have to give me the strength. There is no way I’m doing this on my own.”
However, a ten hour bus ride later, we arrived to our host home.
My team and one other is living on a compound with a mission college and an orphanage. We live in one of the dormitories. It consists of two bedrooms, a large open area, and a locked door that we aren’t sure what it’s hiding. All seven of the girls on my team are living in one bedroom, and the other team of six is living in the other. We use our sleeping pads and camp out on the floor. Often that comes with ants and mosquitos, lizards, and on our very lucky days, we’ve got a rat that joins us.
We have an outdoor kitchen. It has one long table and a single gas burner stove. We eat eggs for breakfast, ramen for lunch, and rice for dinner every day (curtesy of the great chef Camille Tyree). The bathroom is outdoors, and it consists of two squatty potty toilets and an empty stall in which we take bucket showers. The water we shower with is dirty, like with actual dirt in it. It’s the same water that we wash our clothes in and do our dishes.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “yikes,” do me a favor and don’t do that. Because I can promise you that’s not how I’m feeling at all. Since the second I stepped on this compound, I have felt more peace than any other time on my race. I have about 6 hours of ministry a day. We teach English the whole time, excluding the first thirty minutes (thats a chapel), and at night we have another thirty minute devotional.
This ministry, these people, it’s just right. God is giving me glimpses of actual heaven. The first day of ministry, I got to teach in the chapel service. I gave my testimony and then a little scriptural application to college aged kids (I keep calling them kids.. I’m literally younger than most of them. I don’t know why I can’t stop doing that hahaha). Honestly, I didn’t feel like I did a great job, I rambled and stumbled over my words. I talked too fast at some parts and I didn’t enunciate my words clearly enough; but the crazy awesome part, it doesn’t even matter. My God let me do that. I had the platform of speaking in a chapel in front of college students and then for the rest of the day, I got to be their English teacher.
I know most of you know that I want to be a teacher, but I literally cannot even explain to you the absolute joy I felt when I was actually in front of the class. In Guatemala, I got to teach English and I truly loved it, but this is different. It’s an actual classroom setting and seriously, I don’t know how to explain it except I know that I was meant to be there. It was a gift to me straight from God. I think he knew that after last month, I needed something to help me keep going. He gave me Myanmar.
Its the halfway point of my race, like actually today as I write this (probably not the day I post it but when I’m writing it), and halfway points either give you a burst to keep going, or scare you to death to the point that you think you can’t do it. Myanmar is giving me that burst. I am more excited right now than any moment before preparing to come on the race or any moment thus far on my race.
The mosquitoes, ants, lizards, and even the rat are all worth it when it means that I get to encourage these students who are in school to be missionaries. If it means that I get to teach these missionaries English so they can better reach the people of the surrounding countries, I can promise you I’ll shower with dirty water whenever and wherever. This is bringing Kingdom, and seriously if people knew just how fun it was, I don’t think anyone would ever stop. Because no matter what your initial reaction is when you hear about the living situation, dang, our God is good, guys. He is faithful and He is bringing me so much radiant joy and peace during all this.
Myanmar truly is my place of peace so far on my race.
Love you guys,
K
