Hello from India! I’m currently in the south-eastern part of India. Our last week in Vietnam was spent debriefing the past couple months. It was relaxing and refreshing. It was also slightly boring because we were in a quiet town with nothing to do really besides go to the beach, but I had been by a beach all month. Not complaining though Minnesotans! 🙂 I was excited to get going to India because I felt like I was needing a change of pace. I was starting to lose some momentum and the trip is starting to get long. I was also excited to have some more formal ministry to do as we had a lot of free time last month. I did get some of my passion and momentum renewed when coming to India which is good. The trip is getting long though- I was loving the Race and never wanted to go home until about month 6 around Christmas time and to me 6 months just seems like a long time. It was also hard because I was feeling bad about not being home during my brother’s engagement- I just want to be there to hang out and hear about the wedding plans and help out and go to all the parties. But I know that I can still call them to get updates and help and that I’ll be home for a few crucial weeks before they get married. I know that this is where God wants me to be right now and that He is worth it. And I know that with just under 4 months left that the Race will go by so fast, and I know that I need to soak up every moment of it and remember how blessed I am to be doing this. You always want what you can’t have, so it’s all about being content with where you are and with what God has given you. This Race is seriously like a running race.The time in a race when you’re not at the beginning, but not quite in the final stretch is definitely probably the hardest part of a race. You’ve given so much energy and strength and you’re anticipating the energy and strength to finish before feeling that burst of adrenaline and momentum that you get at the final stretch. The thing about this Race though is that I have a Helper to help me run the race and give me energy and strength.
The travel days from our Vietnam site to our India site were really long and sleepless. I wasn’t really a fan of all the packing up and not getting sleep. We packed from Nha Trang, Vietnam to go to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam for 1 night. Then, we packed from Ho Chi Minh to our debrief location in Vietnam to stay for like 4 nights. Then, we woke up at like 3am to leave from there to get to Malaysia to have like an 8 hour layover in the airport, and I didn’t sleep at all during that. I got to skype with my old teammate James though which was awesome- shout out to James! Then, from Malaysia we flew into Hyderabad, India to stay 2 nights. Then, we packed from there to go to this house for the day until we left for an overnight bus to get my team to Ongole, India, and I didn’t sleep on that overnight bus at all. Then, we were put in a nice apartment to find out 2 nights later that they wanted us to pack up again to go to a different apartment. And now we’re finally where we’re staying for the month! It was about a week (you could even say 2 weeks) though of travelling and not getting enough sleep. I hadn’t experienced that length of travel time on the Race before.
Our first apartment was really nice with some couches, a table, a microwave, a washer and I actually had my own room! There was also some really nice and useful clothes and supplies that previous Racers had left for us to take which was awesome. When we found out that we were moving apartments, I had known that having your own room on the Race is too good to be true haha. The apartment they moved us to is onsite of where we do ministry, so that’s why they moved us. The new apartment was just fine, but let’s just say that it was a bit of a “fixer-upper” haha. The apartment doesn’t have a couch, table, microwave, or washer, and the living room/kitchen area seriously SMELLED and by smelled I mean REAKED!!! Like seriously it was one of the worst smells I’ve ever smelled. It also had tons of ants in the kitchen and bedroom (big ants with wings in my room that I’ve never seen before) and bed bugs in one of the rooms, and we were told that many people have lice here. It was nice after doing all that travelling to get to a really nice apartment, but then hard to be taken to a not very nice one instead. But it’s all about making use of what God’s given you, isn’t it? So we killed the many ants for a few days with different supplies, washed our sheets in boiling-hot water, and after a couple days we found the culprit of the awful smell. There was a decent-sized bin of moldy water behind the fridge that looked like it had built up for like years, so we unscrewed it and dumped it out, and voila! The smell was gone!!!!!!!!!! That seriously made my week. So I am very proud to say that currently our apartment is smell-free, ant-free (still finding a couple here and there, but mostly gone), and seems to be bed-bug free too. The awful smell reminded me of sin- that it smells so bad and that you can try to mask it with different air fresheners, but ultimately you have to get to the culprit of it to remove the stink. We also made a little couch thing by stacking up some of our sleeping pads, and our apartment feels so much nicer now. I’m rooming with one of my teammates and we have a bathroom with a squatty potty which is like a porcelain hole in the ground where you have to squat to use it, and we have a shower head, but if you want hot water you have to fill up a bucket with water, so I’ve been using the bucket instead of the shower head. In all the bathrooms in Asia that we’ve been in, they’ve always had the toilet and the shower area in the same room without anything dividing them. I’d never seen that until getting to Asia. In my other teammates room, they have a regular toilet though and not a squatty potty. Our old apartment and our new apartment both have WIFI which is nice. One of my teammates has seen some lice in her hair, but I haven’t gotten lice yet and I’ve been putting in mousse and oil in it to try to prevent it.
We are working with an organization in India called Indian Christian Missions.www.indianchristianmission.com They do a variety of things including church planting, evangelism, building homes for the poor, offering schooling, and having homes for orphans with special needs. This month my team and I are at a home for orphans with special needs called Sarah's Covenant Homes www.schindia.com. The kids have Indian caregivers called “Ayas” that live here with the kids. We were told that most of these women are widows. Many of the kids also have foster moms which seem to mostly be young American women volunteers. I think there’s about 8 of them living here. So Monday-Saturday for 3 hours in the morning, my group and I has been working with five boys that are around 7-10 years old and 1 boy is 4 years old. The older boys have cerebral palsy, and the younger boy is blind. They don’t appear to be verbal, but they might be able to speak a few words in their language, and they all have to wear diapers. We hang out with the boys, give them massages, do physical therapy stretches with them, read to them, let them listen to music, color, play in water, etc. Then, we have an hour long lunch break, and then for 3 hours in the afternoon we do some type of construction at one of the other homes. We’ve been working with an Englishman who’s in his 60’s during construction. He's working here in India for 2 months. He’s quite interesting- this is his first trip out of England. We were demolishing a wall and hoeing a new garden and painting windows last week. It was pretty funny because we had to wear clothing that’s appropriate for India, so we were wearing like these dressy things that are common in India- it was pretty funny doing that kind of work in those clothes. The place that we’re doing construction has teenage boys with high-functioning disabilities, and it’s fun because they come out to help us and interact with us. I’m going to write a different blog with more about the kids that we work with. Then we eat and have time with the team.
Prayer Requests:
1. Pray for the 5 Indian orphan boys with special needs that we work with- that God would strengthen them spiritually and physically.
2. Pray for long-term Indian foster moms.
3. Pray for the current foster moms and ayas that are taking care of the kids- for joy, strength, and perseverance
4. Pray that my team wouldn’t be lukewarm for Christ- but would be passionate and obedient.
Where in the World is Jacelyn Bendel?
