Here it is folks, my Nepal blog from month 3! It’s never too late to post a blog!
Nepal.
Okay so remember like four-ish months ago when I was in Nepal, in October? Well here is what happened to me while I was there…
Nepal was all squad month, which means we all live together and do ministry together. So literally all 50 of us lived together in a house and did ministry together everyday. We worked with Agape Missions in Kathmandu.
We did a lot of different ministry while we worked with them including prayer walks, manual labor, bar ministry and faith days.
I have shared a few of my favorite memories from my month in Kathmandu, feel free to read one or all of them!
Melamchi:
We went to Melamchi, which is about 40 kilometers outside of Kathmandu. It’s a small village in the mountains that was destroyed with the earthquake in 2015, and we were going up there to help finish some landscaping before the president came to hand over the keys to about 60 new houses.
4:30AM the buses came to pick us up at our house to take us to the village. What I did not know was that Nepal has the most dangerous roads in the world. The roads once we got out of the city were not paved and mostly only one lane. It was terrifying to say the least, the bus was on the edge the entire time and then we started to go up the mountain on switchbacks.
Well what we didn’t know was that the buses we took, were city buses not meant to be on the mountain roads. So on one of the switchbacks we got stuck and our buses started going backwards, and by this point I was crying, panicking, terrified of the heights. I had a panic attack and they let me off the bus with a few other people and we walked two miles up the rest of the mountain. After I got off the bus accompanied by a fellow racer and a squad leader, my very wise squad leader Courtney gave me these words, “Physics says no, but Nepal says yes,” which made me laugh and feel a little bit better.
The crazy thing about mountains is that if you go up, you have to come back down. So I had three days to pray for safety back down.
We did manual labor for a few days, one day we could see some peaks from the Himalayas. We ate some really spicy curry and had some fun down time.
The time came to go back down the mountain, and my prayers had been answered – we were all walking three miles down the mountain at sunrise. It was absolutely breathtaking watching the sun rise over the mountains. When we got to the bottom someone had bought us all donuts and chai tea and one of our own preached in the street while we waited for our buses to arrive.
When the bus got there, my prayers had been answered once again – they were country buses meant to be on the roads that we were on. The ride back was nice and smooth (I use the word smooth very loosely). I knew it was time to “let go and let God” take my worry, anxiety and fear. I knew I was in His hands.
Sickness:
This month I was sick a lot. It turns out that after about a week and a half of being sick on and off my team leader Cat, figured out why I kept getting so sick. It was the oil we were using to make our popcorn and cook our food in. So when I ate at home, I would get really sick and be up all night, but when I ate out I didn’t get sick. So it turns out I have an intolerance to sunflower oil, which they use a lot in Nepal.
Faith Day:
This day I was looking forward to for a while, we were put in groups at random and sent off into Kathmandu with nothing but the clothes on our backs. We were instructed to step out in faith, and so we were off and not even a few minutes in did we find someone willing to bless us.
Two men on a moto came up to us saying that they felt the need to stop for us. We told them what we were doing and that we had no money. So they helped us flag down a truck for us to jump on the back of. They also told us they know of a place that would feed us even though we did not have money.
So we jumped off the truck and walked down the road a little bit and met up with the men again and they got us another truck to jump on the back of and we started up one of the foothills. We got off the truck again and continued to walk up the hill, looking for the restaurant they had told us about.
After walking around and asking a few people we found the place to eat and when we entered we sat down and explained what we were doing there and we weren’t sure if they understood us or not, so after a while we decided to pray and after that prayer we decided to get up and try somewhere else. But as we were getting up they wanted us to sit back down, it turns out they were cooking for us and the food was almost ready. We each got a small plate of food that filled us just enough to keep us going.
As we were walking back down the hill we found a nice hotel willing to let us use the restroom, which usually doesn’t happen and we prayed over the hotel and went on our way.
Just as we were about to leave this small town, we found a small coffee shop that was called “Elizabeth’s” and one of the girls I was with was named Elizabeth, so we stopped and explained what we were doing and they served us each a cup of Chai tea.
After that nice treat we started to head back down and we were looking for a truck to head down in like we came up in, but that wasn’t working so we just started walking when a man on a moto decided to stop and ask us what we needed and he gave us 200 rupees to take the bus down. So we talked about taking the bus but instead we thought we could just walk down and save the money for something else.
After walking for a while a truck for us to jump on finally came and we hopped on to go down the rest of the foothill. And one of the girls in our group felt the need to go to the Hospital right down the road, so we went in and prayed over the hospital and then we decided to donate the 200 rupees to the pharmacy to help out someone to buy medicine if they needed it. And then headed on our way home.
We walked a long way down the main road looking for a truck to pick us up and take us just further down the same road. It was rush hour and there weren’t any trucks that didn’t have anything in it that were willing to pick us up. So we just continued and finally a man in a truck stopped for us and he had us hop in the cab of his truck, he even kicked his friend out of the truck so that he had room for all of us to fit, he was so nice and he got us to where we needed to go.
This was my favorite day of the month by far, it’s so amazing what happens when you step out in faith, He truly provides for His people.
Man of Peace:
So kind of like the faith day, this day’s purpose was to find a man of peace in a certain village and have him put you up for that night. So this was an overnight trip and we started pretty early in the morning. We were instructed to walk up the mountain to Nagarkot and find somewhere to stay for free.
We started right before lunch, hopped on a bus to the base of a mountain and started on our way up. An hour or two in we stopped for food. We got noodles and it took about three hours for all of us to be fed, but it was a nice rest. After we continued on up the mountain, the sun was starting to go down. The group hopped on a truck, and after a few minutes it was too crowded and the one lane was too much for me, I was terrified again. They let me and a few other people off to walk the rest of the way.
What we didn’t know is that we still had about 7 kilometers to walk. We watched the sunset over the mountains and it was only light for about thirty minutes, then we were pretty much in complete darkness. So we were walking up and over the mountain and we started to head back down and then back up and then finally back down and we saw Nagarkot.
When we arrived the teams that took the truck were already there and found a place for us to stay the night. Some of us stayed in the basement of a hotel in a conference room and some stayed on a hill in tents.
We ended up finding out that one of our phones had tracked all of our activity that day, and it turns out those of us that walked all the way to Nagarkot walked 13.4 miles! We walked half of a marathon up a Himalayan mountain (foothill)! I felt so good!
The Dance Bars:
This one is a little different than the others, this once wasn’t necessarily fun. We went back into Themel (the tourist part of Kathmandu) where we had debrief early this month and prepared our hearts for what we were about to see.
Sex tourism is a real thing in Nepal, they have dance bars where you go and buy drinks, watch women dance and can usually buy them for the night. So we walked the streets of Thamel looking at all the dance bar signs we didn’t even know were there because they only came out at night when we didn’t go out. There were so many of them, it was hard to believe. After we prayed over where God was calling us to, we headed into the dance bar with a group of about seven women and one of our men.
The men’s job in our group was to buy us all a coke or sprite and pray over the other men that were in the dance bar. And our job was to talk to the young girls working there. When we walked into the bars, there were a few men there talking to the girls. We bought drinks and waiting for the girls to come and talk to us. We talked to one girl who was only 17 years old and she had been working there for a few months. She said she didn’t really like the work she was doing, but she didn’t know how to get out because the money was good.
In Nepal the dance bars usually own the girls, it’s really hard to get out of the business once you are in. Although we talked to many girls while we were there, we weren’t able to get any out of that trade.
Another group that went to a dance bar was able to meet with some girls they met and were able to give them our ministry host as a contact to keep these women safe. These two women have now been out of the dance bars for several months working towards their dreams.
Summary:
So there you have it, my favorite memories from Nepal! It was beautiful and I was very sad to leave, but ready for the next adventure in India!
