Sometimes there are stories from the race that have nothing to do with ministry and don’t relate to God directly but you just have to share them. I’ve experienced some cool things this past week and I wanted to share some of these adventures with you.
For starters, I was in a movie. No joke, it really happened. It’s been on my bucket list to be an extra in a movie. I figured that this might not actually happen, but it’d still be sweet to have an answer to that question that everyone asks in icebreakers, “What is one interesting fact about you”. Being able to say, “Yeah, I was in a movie once” sounds pretty cool. And now I can actually say that. Granted it was a cheesy, Nepali movie but still, it counts. So how did I end up checking this item off my bucket list?
Thursday night we had squad night and split up girls and guys. For us girls, we were told to get into groups with people that aren’t on our teams and go make a memory. My group planned on going to watch a movie. We found a cab and told him to take us to civil mall. We’re not quite sure where we ended up, but it wasn’t civil mall. The area looked cool though, so we decided to walk around a bit and see if we could find something cool to do. As we are walking down the street, we notice that there are a lot of cameras and lights up focused on a center point in an intersection. Naturally we were curious, so we walked over to a group of men setting up lights and asked what was going on. They said a movie was being filmed and to that we asked if we could be in it. To our surprise, he immediately went to go talk to the director. By this time, even the possibility of him saying yes had made our night. The director comes over and says he’d love to have us and that they would start filming in an hour. Holy smokes. So they take us over to the center and we have tea with the two main actors. They said that they’d really appreciate our help and that we’d make the movie better…as if we have any acting abilities at all. Not to mention that it was around 8pm, we had finished a day of ministry and most were still wearing the same clothes, had no makeup on, and had not touched our hair in a while.
We sat around as they prepped the cameras and got to talk more with the actors and hear their stories. We got to watch as the actors filmed multiple takes of a scene before they came over to us to let us know what we’d be doing. Apparently they had not only put us in the movie, but they wrote in a new scene for us. All we had to do was dance for about 30 seconds and then the actors would come in and teach us a Nepali dance. We did two takes with the music playing and just had fun with it. It wasn’t a big scene or anything and we didn’t have any lines but it was still a cool experience. We stuck around for a few minutes before we said our goodbyes. We definitely think we had the best make a memory experience, minus the fact that when we got ice cream on the way home one of the girls started throwing up from food poisoning. Welcome to the World Race everyone!
For those who are wondering, the movie is called Jhilke and will be out in about 6 months.
Another fun and new experience I had this weekend was riding a motorcycle for the first time. Every Friday night we have family dinner with our ministry and its potluck style, so everyone brings a dish. My team made spaghetti and had two big pots of it. Instead of walking it over, Graham decided it’d be better to ride the bike. So Graham, Rachel, and I get on-holding pots and all-and ride through town in the dark to the house. It was only slightly terrifying at first, but once I got used to only holding on with one hand it was fine. And we only almost got hit by a car once. On the way back though, was when it got really fun. We had gotten some of our squadmates to carry our pots back because we wanted to try going 4 people deep on the bike. Coming out of our contact’s gate was a struggle because we have to go uphill so we were kind of tipping over and rolling backward before we had one person get off the back. We made it up the hill and then picked up another squadmate walking back. The locals we passed must have thought it was pretty weird seeing 4 Americans squished together on one bike. The bike wasn’t very stable, and it could definitely have been defined as sketchy, but it was really fun and one of my favorite memories so far. We made it back safe…and I’d definitely go for round two!
I just wanted to share these experiences with you all! I hope you’ve enjoyed getting some inside info on my daily life and my new experiences. Thank you all who have gotten me here and helped me have these experiences. I appreciate you all!!
