I’m not sure how many days it’s been since I left America. It’s been a hot mess of a few days. But that’s okay. It’s just a blur of sleeplessness.
On July 3, we left for the airport in Atlanta at 5 am. We were scheduled to fly out at 9:25, so we figured we had plenty of time. Little did we know, somehow half of us ended up on a 6:30 am flight. Which was in 10 minutes. Shoooooooot. But, United is the best, and they BOUGHT us tickets on Delta airlines so that we could all make our connecting flight in Chicago. If God’s hand wasn’t in that, I don’t know where He is. It was the craziest, most stressful start imaginable. But, we all made the flight to India, and began the longest flight of my life.
I watched 3 movies, read a little, tried to sleep, played cribbage, ate Indian food (one thing they served us was pickle and cheese sandwiches with mayo. It was different), drank copious amounts of water, twiddled my thumbs, and other things that you do on a 15 hour flight. Once we landed in India, we had a 19 hour layover and spent the night in the airport. Security was interesting. They had separate lines for men and women, and we had to take out way more things than in America. The airport was really nice, and we found a nice corner by one of the terminals to lay out on our sleeping pads/bags, or blankets that maybe were taken from the airplane, and tried to sleep. I forced myself to stay up until 8 pm India time, which I don’t even know how long that means I was awake for. Then I woke up at 1:30 am, and figured that was as good as it was going to get.
We then flew to Nepal at 7:20 am, and apparently you could see Mount Everest above the clouds if you were on the left side of the plane. Which is pretty sick. Then we landed at the airport, and walked off the tarmac and took a bus to the terminal. Then we went through the visa line, and met our ministry host! He and his family are so nice. They do a lot of different things, and we get to participate in all of them. They focus on children and women, and so we will be going into the slums and doing food/soccer outreach, we’ll be going into the city and talking to “dance girls”, and next week Wednesday we’re going on a week long “trek” in the mountains and doing outreach in little villages, camping along the way. IT’S GOING TO BE SO GREAT!
Once we got to the city, our host’s sons took us out to explore the city. It’s big, and crowded, and noisy, and smells weird. I love it. Our host taught us a few key phrases. One is how to greet people, and the other is “ma bia Gardena” (no promises on spelling), which means “no I will not marry you”. Apparently Nepalese men want to come to America. We went out to lunch today, and got Buff Mo-Mo’s, which are like little potstickers/dumplings that are filled with buffalo meat. You get 10 of them for 60 cents, and then add a spicy, yummy, peanut-y sauce to make it into a soup. It was so tasty! And apparently instead of saying “cheese” when they take pictures they say “Mo-Mo”.
I’ve only been here for a few hours (it’s 6:25 pm on July 5 here right now), but I love the culture and the city already. I can’t wait to explore the city more, and get out there and do ministry and love on the people. It’s going to be a great month, and I can’t wait to share more stories with you!
