Jump into daily life in India through the various chairs I encounter on a semi regular basis, strange idea I know, but bear with me here.
6:15am: My alarm goes off, waking up my roomates and myself. I reach over and hit snooze and pull the covers over my face. After talking myself into getting up for 10 minutes or so I sit up and reach for my bible and journal. Here I find myself in the first seat of the day, my bed. I am trying to read through both Hebrews and revelation while I am here in India, so far I’m enjoying it a lot.
8:00am- Breakfast tent. We walk about 10 minutes up the road of the seminary school we are staying at to our breakfast tent. Chairs line the perimeter of the colorful tent and here we eat all three of our meals. It’s usually in this area where we all share many laughs and spicy food.
10:00am- Depending on the day, ministry can look very different. Today (the 11th) we walked into the village headed to the setup of a children’s retreat, VBS like, program. A missions team from Pennsylvania is coming to run a program that is expecting one to two thousand kids. We arrived and began to help out where we could, and talk to locals when there was no work for us to do. Some of us girls sat around with some locals on the edge of a planter and started the first day of building relationships with fellow believers.
12:30pm- Lunch time, aka one of my favorite times of the day! We all take an hour off of working and spend timing chatting with each other and with our new friends. Today this looked like eating peanut butter and jelly’s with mango juice while watching the workers scale up a bamboo structure in order to drape tarps overhead to block out the sun.
3:30-5:00pm- We wrapped up ministry for the day and headed back to our dorms. We had about an hour of free time and then had team time. Team time is a scheduled thing six days out of the week that we do as a team, obviously. We rotate through planned out times called journey markers, feedback, blogging, worship, debrief, and one free day. Today we of course had time to blog. I’m currently sitting in a small wooden desk chair in the corner of my teammates dorm room listening to John Mayer and typing this all out.
5:00pm- We now find ourselves back up at the meal tent, I’m usually wrapped up in a blanket because of how cold it can get here once the sun goes down. We eat dinner in our vibrant tapestry filled tent under flood lights, and joke around with one another.
7:00pm- Now this might come as a shock to you all, but around seven or eight pm we are usually all in bed. Ministry wipes us out for the day and there isn’t much to do outside of our dormitory at night. Last night I watched a movie with Madeline and while eating french fries that one of the boys graciously agreed to bring back for us from a cafe. We are allowed to go out after dinner but I haven’t yet been to this cafe, but I can say their fries are yummy!
There you have it, a typical day here in India for me. It’s funny to account my day through chairs but it does serve as an interesting time marker for the day. I hope this gives you more of an idea of what life looks like day to day on the world race. Of course everyday looks different on the field, but there you go!
