Komodo village… where do I even begin with this place. To start, I have never felt such a draw to a place. I loved every bit of my time here. Komodo is a small village within Komodo national park (yes, the dragons go in the village). The village is flooded with children…. flooded. Everywhere you go, you will get a “hallo!!”, high fives, and huge grins from adorable little ones. Komodo Island is always hustling and bustling with noise. Between the daily prayer calls, roosters crowing, kids laughing, and goats “bahhh-ing”, there is rarely a quiet moment here. It is primarily a fishing village, so the men go out and fish during the day and the women stay home with the children.
My teams personal experience here was absolutely amazing. We stayed at two local homes for 11 days. Tourists staying a single night on the island is a rare experience, let alone 11, so people were rather confused by us. Despite their confusion, they treated us like family anyways! The home I was in had 5 people staying in it, a mom and dad, two daughters (close in age to our team), and a little boy. We loved our time so much with this family! They were beyond kind and hospitable. The father was the headmaster of the local school and the daughters taught at the school. If you remember my previous blog post, our team felt called to kids ministry so we had an automatic in, thanks God!
As we figured out what our ministry was going to look like here, we made trips to the school to get to know the children, played volleyball with the girls, and began to build relationships with the locals. It turns out, a man came 10 years ago and taught English for a month to the locals, so there was a presence of English on the island! We found out there were only 4 Indonesian-English dictionaries in the whole place, so it was hard for them to learn anymore than what was already known. My team found our first ministry! We had the privilege to teach English in the schools while we were here to the 6th and 8th grade classes, we also were able to ship dictionaries to a larger island for the locals to pick up on their next trip there!
When we weren’t at the school, we were making prayer walks around the village, befriending locals, publicly worshipping, and eating delicious food. God opened up the door for us to share the gospel with people, pray healing over people, and build lifelong friendships! We saw Jesus perform large and small miracles, and we know that much of what was done here will echo far after we leave! Seeds of the gospel were planted, friendships were formed, 4 people were miraculously healed from pain and sickness, memories were created, our team experienced so much unity, and GOD SHOWED UP! There are so many crazy stories, so I will post a few more blogs to go into more detail, but that is a basic overview of what happened in the past two weeks!
