[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’s 6, 7 & 8 as I am running out of time!]
NEPAL
Month 6 was our first month officially as squad leaders, and I spent this month with Team New Kids on the Block (NKOTB). We arrived to the airport to travel from Myanmar to Nepal and were told our flight had been cancelled lol, our first day as RSQLs was off to a trying start. Thankful for a quick response from our friends in the US and a few credit cards for getting us emergency booked onto a series of flights that would eventually have us end up in Nepal 24 hours later. In one day we travelled through Myanmar, Thailand, Kuala Lumpur and eventually Nepal! We arrived and spent the first few days together as a squad and Breier, Tay and I led our first leadership development weekend.
Team NKOTB and I set off to a small town just outside of Kathmandu alongside Team BARE and Breier, to meet our host Deepak, to begin our month with High Adventure Ministries. The name of the ministry did not lie and within a few days we were on a bus to our first ministry location of the month, Chitwan National Park.
I wrote a blog about the bus ride to Chitwan, you can find it here;
https://chloeclendinning.theworldrace.org/post/are-you-willing-to-suffer-for-me
Needless to say from the title, it was a BAD travel day on the Race, which is strange because we honestly get so used to travelling and long bus rides doing this life. We eventually made it to Chitwan and it was unlike anything we had experienced thus far on the Race. Chitwan National Park is vast, home to animals of all kinds, and home to many small villages of local people living a simple & quiet life. We lived in a small wooden home for 9 days and during the day we trekked miles and miles to even more remote villages than ours, which was honestly kind of unimaginable, and we told people the gospel of Christ, some hearing it for the very first time. It is really hard to explain how hard yet incredible this week was. We came back to Kathmandu and it almost felt like the previous 9 days had been a dream. I wrote a day by day blog of that time, you can find it here;
https://chloeclendinning.theworldrace.org/post/a-week-in-the-village-nepal-edition
We spent a few days in Kathmandu before we took off again, this time to Pokhara and the surrounding Himalayan mountains. We got dropped off at the base of the Annapurna Trek and spent the next 3 days hiking 26 miles, most of the time in the pouring rain. The first night we stayed at a mountain top hostel and the second night we stayed with locals in a small village.
The second night was the most authentic experience I probably had the whole race. We ate around small cooking fires with local Nepali families, we slept in little wooden cots, we told people our mission and why we were there, and we got eaten alive by leeches no matter how many protective measures we took.
This was one of my favourite months on the Race, which I adore because it was definitely the most physically and mentally exhausting. I learnt this month that hard and good aren’t mutually exclusive terms, and that God grows us so much more in the midst of incredible hardships.
INDIA
Month 7! We celebrated this month being a little over half way done with the Race. We arrived as a squad in Hyderabad and spent a few days in orientation at the AIM Base before splitting up with teams and travelling all over the country. I spent this month with Team BARE and I honestly have never felt more a part of the team or more at home than with these women. We had a disappointing start as initially we were to spend this month with Sarah’s Covenant Homes, a ministry in India of multiple orphanages specifically for children with complex medical and special education needs. God has been massively growing my heart this year for children with special needs so I couldn’t help but feel this month was going to be incredibly special. Unfortunately just before we left to go there we had a change of plans due to the home having multiple critically ill children and too many other commitments.
Instead, we went to a small village in Southern India and worked with a Pastor and his wife there. We spent our days pretty much just as a team inside, because it was a pretty unsafe area and the one time we ventured out alone we ended up in the newspaper for being harassed by a drunk man on a motorbike.
Evening times we went into multiple local villages and did house visits and prayed with multiple families per night. After that we would usually go to the house that was hosting the prayer meeting and one of us would give a message and two of us would tell part of our stories. We would then eat more food than we could possibly imagine and they would continually pile our plates high full of food. We all left this month with a few extra lbs of weight and few too many kurtas that were pretty tight!
We rounded off this month with 4 of us taking a trip up to New Delhi to visit the Taj Mahal! We had an amazing few days relaxing and soaking up the incredible culture of Northern India before travelling to the US for a 24 hour layover in Chicago. I spent 24 hours with my ridiculously amazing fiancé who flew over to spend the day with me before we said a teary goodbye for another 4 months.
BELIZE
We arrived to Belize after a bliss filled 24 hours in Chicago and officially made the transition to Central America after 5 months in Asia. I also arrived incredibly sad from my goodbye with Charlie and absolutely loaded with a horrible cold, so the first few days were anything but ideal.
Belize is a beautiful place and was starkly different to India. It is filled with palm trees, sand, hammocks and colourful houses. We lived as half of a squad and I spent the month with Team Frontline. We lived and worked for Camalote Camp, a camp that houses short term mission teams and links them in with multiple different local ministries in the surrounding area in Belmopan. I primarily worked with Emerge, a local literacy programme ran by wonderful Ms Alicia, and with the Camp itself. Other ministries included a pregnancy centre, a home for girls ageing out of government care, a foster family network, a children’s home and a church. This was a month with a lot of freedom to move around ministries and get to experience so many different set ups and see the incredible work happening in such a small area in Belize. Lives are truly being changed there with the work of A Better Belize and our hosts Joey & Heather were incredible and looked after us so well.
We finished the month with Month 8 debrief and our final round of team changes for F squad! As a leadership team we had spent almost 6 weeks praying over these new teams and their formation and to see them come together at the end of Month 8 was a beautiful and incredibly fulfilling moment.
