Week one on the farm: done. Now, when I think farming I picture big, fun, floppy farm hats, nice gloves and cute little plants in neat rows to take root so that we can see the fruit of our labor a few weeks later. Perfect little farming month ..yay 🙂
…Not so much the case here in our working days in Malaysia. While I did get a fun floppy farm hat, the work wasn’t as glamorous as my dream I envisioned of farming. We hike down a long muddy trail with our new Bangladesh workers every morning to a steep hill covered in brush. We are handed machetes and get to work hacking trees and branches and pulling them into piles that we’ll later burn to get the land ready for new farming area. Of course, the biggest trees are supposed to go in the pile further away than the pile we make 2 minutes later–makes no sense. We are here to help, though, not tell them how to do work, so we do as we’re told. We have a lot of fun with the workers, falling down the steep parts of the mountain, singing and laughing in the hot Malaysian sun. Machetes are super fun by the way. I might invest in one when I get home to blow off some steam.
The next few days we went into a jungle past the steep hill to cut bamboo. I felt like I was in a Final Destination movie where people just die by freak accidents one by one. The men would hack huge bamboo trees and we had to be super aware to noises because a tree could fall on us at any moment. While it was scary, I was secretly loving it because the men were hacking away and the ladies got to sit and chill out and watch. Sweet, my kind of manual labor.
Once again, reality quickly sunk in and we received our task. After the men saw the bamboo shoots into five forearm length fence posts, the ladies get the pleasure of carrying the posts to a pile near our field we’ve been hacking away at for a few days. This may be the most monotonous job I’ve ever done and we tend to get a little delirious by the end of the day. We carry bamboo posts from 9am-1pm, Lunch break, then continue to carry them from 2:30pm-5pm….same path, same fence posts with prickly things all over us, lots of annoying mosquito bites, and a leech story that still gives me nightmares (I ripped my pants in a vulnerable place and I’ll leave it at that haha).
While it’s hard work and manual labor is not my kind of ministry, God ever so gently slapped me with reality. Reality that monotonous, hard, long, sweaty work days are these mens’ lives. They come to Malaysia from Bangladesh to work anywhere from 2-5 years. They leave behind their wife and kids in order to send money home to support their family. They work seven days a week, 12 hours a day…for FIVE years. We worked for FIVE days and I was pooped. I thought it was a right to see your family everyday and live with them, and I’ve realized that it’s a privilege and a blessing from the LORD. They truly live their lives to sacrifice in order to provide for their families when they aren’t even in the same country. Yet, despite the long and hard hours, these men are so happy. They laugh and smile and work so hard…everyday. I can’t help but get really, really excited to think about the joy they would have if they knew that God sent His Son to die for our sins and that we are His children whom He loves to a degree that we can’t even comprehend. The men are all Muslim, but from what we’ve seen so far, not really living it out. We have built special relationships with each of these men so quickly. It’s hard to have deep conversations with them because of language barrier, but we’ve gotten to the point where they understand that Jesus was more than just a prophet.
Pray that the Holy Spirit will empower us to get deeper with these amazing men. Pray that God will show up big time and these men will go back with the joy of Christ in their lives…that they will be different men to their families, in their communities and in Bangladesh. I want them to be a light in a dark country and live each day in the joy that we have in Christ. I want them to see Christ’s love through us. I want them to understand that we came here because we love them as our brothers in Christ. I have faith that God is going to use us to be a light to these men.
Obviously working hard…
