I came on the Race for a lot of different reasons. The main one being that the Lord told me that it was his gift to me. Another reason that I came was to serve. I wanted to serve the people of 11 different countries. What I have found, however, is that the people that I have come to serve often bless me more than I could have imagined.
Our main ministry in Vietnam was to teach English. At first I was excited about this ministry- excited to finally use that English degree! Team Summit and I walked to an International learning center everyday and tried our best to teach our eager university students. We played a lot of question games and had a lot of practice conversations. Our goal was to teach them pronunciation, vocabulary and some American idioms (that was their favorite).
Toward the middle of the month I was feeling like I hadn’t really done anything to help this group of students. I couldn’t see the impact that an English class had on the lives of these people. I came to minister to other cultures and instead was feeling like I was just a substitute teacher that hadn’t really done that much.
Almost immediately after struggling with this doubt our students started opening up to us more and more. A few of them invited us for coffee dates, the guys went out fishing with some of the boys in the class; we started building relationships. Because Vietnam is a closed country, this is the way to evangelize- love them through friendships.
Our last week there we had a beach game day for all of the students at the center. About 100 students showed up. It was such a great time to hang out, play games and get to know this great group of people. At the game night a small group of them asked us to meet them at a coffee shop the next day.
The next night I went with the team to Daisy Coffee- our local hangout spot- to meet up with our new friends. When we showed up they presented us with this beautiful traditional Vietnamese meal. They bought us coffee and served us some of the most amazing food. After dinner they turned off all the lights and ran out of the room. A few seconds later they walked in carrying a candle lit cake reading “It Was Nice to Meet You.” They had games planned and sang us Vietnamese songs. Talking to them we found out that a handful of them were Christians which opened up the door to talk to the rest of the group about the Lord.
At the end of the night our new friends excitedly told us that they had another surprise for us. They had us sit in a row, close our eyes and hold out our hands. They had made a leather bracelet for each of us. As they tied our bracelets on us, they started crying telling us how much we meant to them- how much we had impacted their lives.
Even though we came to teach them, they taught us about love that night. We were so blessed by people that we came to bless. It was an amazing, humbling, perfect way to end an awesome month.
