My team and I just finished our stay in the beautiful city of Hai Phong, Vietnam. Our experiences there were challenging but we grew as a team and individually. The country itself was heavy with a spirit of darkness that is hard to explain. As soon as I stepped off the bus into the city, I was overwhelmed by the feeling of brokenness and hate radiating from every direction. With that being said, it was difficult for me, at times, to sense the good parts of the city and country. After praying for God to open my eyes to the beauty around me, I was able to find bits and pieces of light in the darkness surrounding me.
Sight: Within the busy city of Hai Phong, food, fruit, and trinket stands lined the streets. Little women with rice hats and face masks were usually seen manning the stands. Everyone wears face masks in this country due to pollution. Flowers were EVERYWHERE in the city. You could find them all throughout the park, in front of every building, and for sale on almost every street. Thousands of mopeds claimed the streets at every hour of the day, zipping past like swarms of bees. A lot of establishments had dogs chained up by the front door for security purposes, it was so hard for us not to go love on each one of them. In the corner of every house and business, a shrine to Buddha sat. These intricate little boxes always had candles, food, money, and jewelry piled high for the false god.
Sound: As a country girl from the middle of nowhere, I can’t even begin to tell you how much I despise the sounds of a city. Horns honking, dogs barking, sirens blaring, and people yelling all called for headphones every night. It was hard for me to find quiet places in such a hectic environment.
Smell: How does one describe the smell of a city? There are always so many different sents filling the air. Two of the most prominent smells that come to mind are fish and honeysuckle. Due to the fact that the entire country basically lives off of seafood, it makes sense why it is a constant aroma. The flowers I was talking about earlier also helped combat the city smells and added a nice fragrance to the air.
Taste: As I said before, seafood is the primary ingredient of almost every dish. Back home, I normally enjoy seafood, however, it was hard to see how they stored and then prepared the animals. I opted for chicken and beef instead. Pho was my favorite staple food this month, it was cheap (around $2 or less) and you could choose from a variety of flavors. The most culturally different foods I found were probably: black chicken, red bean dessert, and dog. Black chicken is a legitimate chicken with black skin. It is most commonly served in HotPot restaurants where you put the entire body into a seasoned broth and boil it for about 5 minutes. Every part of an animal is used in this country, meaning you could commonly find intestines, snouts, and organs in many main dishes. Red bean dessert was a local favorite. It is almost like cereal but with beans, corn, tapioca balls, jelly, mush, and sweetened condensed milk topped off with ice. I personally could barely stomach the concoction but my teammates seemed to enjoy it. Dog is considered a delicacy and can be found in a variety of restaurants, however, we tried to stay as far away from those locations as possible.
Touch: This people group was extremely difficult for me to connect with, however, one man, in particular, stole my heart. Mark was a homeless man my teammates found on the street. He struggles with multiple personalities disorder, alcoholism, and hallucinations. We were able to get to know him over the course of 4 days. In that time, we prayed over and with him, read the bible to him, bought him lunch, and cleaned his leg. During our time with him, many people came up to us telling us to stay away. “He is crazy,” one man said, “He is not safe for you to be around”. At first, we were nervous, is it really unsafe for us to show love to this man? Maybe we should find someone else to minister to. But then we heard God’s voice asking us “why?”. Why are you nervous when you have Me on your side? He reminded me of the parable of the Good Samaritan and how we need to love those who have no one.
If you haven’t seen my post on Facebook, here is a quick update on his history. Back in 1995, Mark was shot in the leg during a war in his town. He has never been able to treat it due to his lack of funding. He took it upon himself to rap it as best he could with a t-shirt and let it heal. Over the years, the muscle in his leg has deteriorated and gangrene set in. We were able to bless him by purchasing supplies to clean his wound. It was an extremely stretching experience as my teammate Ashley and I did our best to remove the dead skin, put ointment on his leg, and rewrap it with gauze. After the “procedure” we prayed over Mark one last time before we left. Although we will never see Mark again, I have faith that our little bit of kindness, will forever leave an impact on his life.
(I will be uploading photos to go along with this post as soon as I can get to better wifi. Thank you all for understanding!)
