Being on the World Race I have had a lot of new experiences that have really changed my prospective on how I see the world!!
Now I am going to share one of these experiences that I had this past week!! When we arrived in the village that We are staying in I knew the the likeliness that they had an ATM would be very small… So I knew that there would be a day that I would have to travel to another city where we would be able to go to an ATM.
This is where MAN comes in to play. Man is a city that is 30 miles outside of Mahapleu (the village we are in this month). Man is the closest city with an ATM and so this week was the week that I traveled to Man with one of my teammates Oriolyne and two of our hosts.
We jumped on a public bus and we were off!! When we arrived in Man I was hit with realization that I AM REALLY IN AFRICA. This slapped me in the face when I got off the bus and I was the only person that looked even a little like me at all in the entire place!! It really hit me that I might be the first person that people have ever seen with light skin and blue eyes. People were taking pictures of me, gawking at me, and stoping what they were doing just to look at me!!
But God really spoke to me in my uncomfortableness! He shared with me the perspective of how others must feel when they come into a new town in the United States and people just stare at them. Or when someone comes into a church and people just stare at them instead of going and talking to them and saying hello to them!!!
So something that I will be really working on in the next few weeks, months, and when I get home is to not just notice when someone new or different walks in but go and introduce myself and show them that I care about them and I really see them a a person not just a new thing to look at!!
So I challenge you to not stare or talk to others about new people put to go and start a conversation or just wave and smile at them. You might never know how much those can change a persons entire day from feeling like a zoo animal on display to feeling like a person that really matters!!!
Also I am going to say Merry Christmas today!!!! We will not have access to WiFi for Christmas because we will be traveling into the village of our host for Christmas and sleeping in our tents and really living life with the community in the village!!
Love
Julia
