You step off the bus after a 26 hour travel day. It’s nighttime, and you try to get your bearings in another new city, another new country. It’s like any other travel day, except this time there’s no host waiting to welcome you. There’s no one prepared for your arrival, no schedule already made, no translator hired to help you make your way.
Welcome to our month.
This month presents a new level of challenge and flexibility to the World Race. We intentionally weren’t set up with established contacts – we focus on meeting people and getting involved in the community. It sounds like a daunting task, but it’s a great opportunity to make new connections. Months like this are a time to grow in flexibility and being comfortable with not having plans. It’s a little intimidating, but also exciting to land in a foreign country and be open to whatever you find there.
When my team and I arrived in Laos we headed to a hostel that we had picked on the internet while we were still in Thailand. We realized as soon as we got to it that we would definitely be looking for a new one, but that’s where the flexibility sets in. We spent one night braving the bedbugs and general sketchiness of our rooms, and the next morning began scouring the city on foot, looking for new housing. This is the first time we’ve had to arrange our own housing – it’s a slightly unsettling feeling to be in a foreign city with no idea where you’re going to sleep that night!
Fortunately, this is a tourist town so we were able to settle into a new place by lunchtime, leaving us free to start exploring in the afternoon. The question we’ve been discussing the last several days is what exactly this month will look like. It’s pretty wide open, leaving us with a lot of freedom to be creative in making connections and building friendships. One thing is clear – this month we will do a lot of exploring. Our first full day in Laos, we met a group of locals and were invited to a gathering they were having. Now when they said “gathering,” they meant party. We spent the next hour or so laughing, eating, and singing with our new friends. Several of them spoke English, so we were able to get to know them a little and learn about this area.
We’d been in Laos for less than 24 hours at this point. So much for it being harder to make connections this month!
There is a lot of uncertainty that comes along with being the teams on the ground seeking out new contacts, rather than the teams coming after to work with people we already know. There’s also a lot of freedom in it. I can’t even express how excited I am about getting to wander around this intriguing city, meeting locals and looking for what’s going on in the area. It only took a day here for us to see the kinds of opportunities we can have.
I literally went from expressing my concerns that we wouldn’t be able to connect the same way this month one day, to sitting around joking and celebrating with about 25 locals the next day. These are the kinds of things that happen when you’re put in a position where you have to relinquish all control! My team has great excitement for this month, and no expectations. If we’re counting on anything, it’s that we will be led to people we never expected to find, given opportunities we never thought possible, and that we will grow and be stretched in a lot of cool and challenging ways.
Every time we go outside, a tuk-tuk driver always asks, “Where you going today?” in hopes of giving us a ride. That’s a great question – it sums up my life pretty well right now – and usually my answer is, “I don’t know yet.” But I always know it’ll be somewhere good!
