[As the title suggests, I wanted to write 11 blogs summarising my 11 months of The World Race, one by one. I want to be able to look back in a few years time and remember every detail, but I also want you to be able to live the memories with me. Each week I am going to share a blog post about a country, and also my top ten photos from that month (on my social media). I hope it gives you more of a look into what our lives have looked like this year. This is a look into Month 1.]
Month 1 of The World Race.
You leave Atlanta, Georgia, with your new family for the year and so much excitement for the incredible journey that lies ahead of you. The World Race was something I had dreamed of for years before I finally made the decision to apply. I followed every person on Instagram that I could find who was currently on the Race and I searched through #11n11 posts until I had completely caught up with all the recent photos.
We set off for West Africa in early January, when it was freezing cold in Georgia, and we arrived in hot & humid Africa after a few days of travel. We stayed together as a squad for the first night before departing early the next morning in our teams, to disperse all over Cote d’Ivoire. Team Haven (shout out to my OGs) left at 5am to go to the bus station to get a 10 hour bus to Man, a region in the Western area of Cote d’Ivoire. We had no idea what the month would look like but we were glad to have our sweet host Monica by our side.
As it turns out, the 6 of us could have absolutely never prepared for the month we were about to have. The next 30 days were without a doubt some of the hardest days of my life to date. We spent the month moving from village to village, sometimes to areas with no electricity or running water, and evangelising in local villages. Cote d’Ivoire is also a French speaking country and none of us spoke French, and so a year of being translated began.
We preached, we did ministry from morning to night, we walked through tiny villages surrounded by people who had little more than the clothes on their backs, we were hungry, we were hot, we were cramped, we packed our huge backpacks every few days, we took long bus rides, we searched high and low for a glimpse of wifi to tell our families we were ok, we cried, we laughed, we ate a lot of rice and bread when there was nothing else, and we got stranded in one of the villages for 4 extra days because no-one would drive the Americans without charging obscene prices.
We survived, and we were better for it, but it was hard and long and at times we felt pretty hopeless. The 6 of us held hard to each other and held fast to the Lord, who kept our hearts and minds patient, open and full of grace.
Our whole squad now laughs remembering Team Haven’s month one. We laugh that we asked on day 3 what date we would be going home in December, we laugh that we chased plastic bags down dirt roads to preserve our precious bread, we laugh that we didn’t know whether to close our bedroom door or not at night to keep the rats out or let the bats in, we laugh that we asked our sweet squad leader Michelle every single day if every month would be quite this hard, we laugh that we all cried together every time someone got phone service and could call their Mum.
We laugh now because it was the perfect introduction to The World Race. We completely abandoned our comforts from day one, we didn’t have to slowly strip them away. We look back and see how flipping faithful the Lord is, we look back and see how the 6 of us went from strangers to family in 30 days, we look back and remember all the sweet times we sat together under mango trees and washed each other’s hair with well water. We look back at pictures of us with our host’s children and our hearts burst because we loved them so much. We remember our little house in Bangalo and drinking a cold Fanta one day and savouring every little sip. We remember getting matching dresses made as a surprise for us and going to see a school that was being built and was now called ‘Haven’, with 6 classrooms named after each of us. We remember the days spent doing laundry by hand and singing every word to Hamilton as we did it. We smile and cry and everything else just remembering the month.
It is hard to pick just ten of my favourite photos from the month, which is funny because it was without a doubt the hardest month of my Race. But that’s just the way life is sometimes isn’t it, the hardest things we go through also bring us the most joy and the most memories, and that is certainly true for our Month 1.
I have posted the photos on my Facebook (Chloe Clendinning) and my Instagram (@chloeclen92), if you want to see them there.
Love,
Chloe xo
