For those of you who aren’t familiar with the way The World Race runs things, here’s a short explanation: When we launched in August, there were three squads launching together. Each squad is on a different route. My squad is W Squad, and within our squad, we are assigned to smaller teams of 6 people. My team is HKS, AKA, Lightening and Thunder. We were placed together at training camp by leadership after days of prayer and discussion. On the team are myself, Lacy Vollmuth, Michaela Ward, Ellie Williams, Marianna Harris, and MacKenzie Meadows. A few weeks before we launched, we were introduced to our team leader, Frieda Ibarra.
I’m gonna be honest, ya’ll, we struggled with unity from day one.
At training camp, we struggled with communicating with each other, which created tension within the group, and a couple things were shared that had hurt some feelings. By the time launch came around, there was still tension, and that tension rolled over to our first month in Mongolia.
I don’t know if you know this, but when you’re in a foreign land and stuck in a dusty room with 7 other women, sleeping on a floor every night with no running water and giant holes in the ground for toilets, all the while trying to maintain ministry, your relationship with God, and your own personal stuff, it makes it really hard to stay pleasant and Christ-like. We relied on our own abilities to try and keep the team together, and we weren’t too good at feedback at first. We weren’t giving our all to the team and giving our frustrations to God. There was a lot of distrust, and it lead to a lot of hurt feelings that kept being bottled up until they spilled out. Come debrief, our team was an absolute mess. But after some tough conversations, the unity in our team seemed to be looking up.
As we made our way to China, we were all excited to be going to this new country. However, on the train to the border, we discovered that the hostel we had booked canceled on us because they couldn’t accept foreigners. We thought nothing of it, unaware of the problems that were waiting for us in Beijing. We crossed the border with no issues, then God opened the door for us to take a sleeper bus all the way to the capital of China. Of course, we accepted it! We made it to Beijing around 3 AM, and a couple of the girls got off the bus to try and hunt down a nearby hostel while the rest of us slept. They returned with no luck, and we were officially homeless. We made our way to a nearby McDonald’s to crash while we tried to find a place to stay. Every door kept slamming in our faces, and tensions were running high again. We were scared and stressed, but we managed to keep our cool, and eventually, God worked everything out for us. We were able to go up to a little village that was right next to The Great Wall of China! That will always be one of the most memorable moments from The Race. After some time at the Wall, we made our way to Tianjin, which is where we believed the Lord was actually calling us. We ended up staying in an apartment beside a middle school, and it didn’t take long for the children there to discover where we Americans were staying. We had frequent knocks on our door from the kids who wanted to practice their English, and they invited us to go out and play basketball with them during their lunch break. Several of our days were spent with them, and one time they treated Michaela and me to ice cream! After spending a couple of weeks in Tianjin, we headed out to Lanzhou, which was on the complete opposite side of China. If you’ve never been to China, you should know that it’s A LOT bigger than it looks! To get to Lanzhou took a 15-minute bullet train ride back to Beijing, a game of hide-and-seek with Ellie (it wasn’t fun when it happened), and then an 18-hour train ride, sitting up the whole way with strangers surrounding you and taking pictures of you sleeping. It definitely gets old after a while. The next morning we finally reached our destination and headed to the apartment that a missionary family was letting us stay in. Even though we were doing a lot better than we had been doing in Mongolia, there were still hard conversations that had to be had. They were uncomfortable, but keeping those things under the rug would have only hurt the team even more.
After about a week and a half in Lanzhou, the entire squad packed up and flew out to Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan for a mini-debrief. It was there that one of our teammates, Michaela, was raised up to be our team leader! I was not expecting it, but I was extremely pleased to see her standing up there before us with the other raised up team leaders. I knew team-leading was going to be a difficult challenge for her, and we were all going to have to love her and encourage her well. After two days in Nur-Sultan, the 8 of us (one of our squad leaders, Kiersten, was with us for a week) packed up again and took a 12-hour train to our ministry site on the western side of Kazakhstan, in a town just an hour south of the Russian border. Our host was waiting for us there at the train station with a warm smile and a warm van. We settled in and all introduced ourselves, then listened to him as he explained the troubles of their community and the struggles they faced as believers there. He told us of how much trouble one can get in if you get caught sharing anything about the Gospel without the proper registration, and about how alcoholism and drug addiction were a plague in their town. I don’t know what the rest of the team was thinking, but I know I was wondering what we were getting ourselves into. Little did we know that the time we spent in Kazakhstan would be a tremendous bonding experience, and easily the favorite ministry for many of us. Our host took us to our home for the next month, a tiny apartment that was the size of my bedroom back home. There were blow-up mattresses, a sleeping pad, and two twin mattresses laid out for us, all lined up side by side with very little room in between. Funny story, I ended up with the mattress that wouldn’t stay inflated, so I pretty much slept on the floor the entire month. We had a little bathroom with a washing machine squeezed between the shower and the toilet, and the kitchen was the size of a guest bathroom. I know what you’re thinking. “Eight of ya’ll had to live like sardines for a month?! How did you cope?!” But we were content with what we had because it was more than we had in Mongolia. We had running water, a real toilet, a stove, and we could take a shower without being stared at by the local women. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. We had to use public showers in Mongolia because we didn’t have one. And yes, it was as awkward and uncomfortable as you are imagining.
Anyway.
After showering and resting up, we went to the church and had lunch with our host and with some of the people we’d be working with, and we heard two testimonies of people being delivered from alcoholism by the Lord. Then our ministry schedule was worked out. We were going to get to work in a soup kitchen for the homeless, join home groups with other church members, hang out with kids in a nearby village, and help men in a rehab shelter in that same village. Over the next few weeks, team HKS was slowly transformed. The love we encountered with the people there was contagious, and as Frieda said, their love for each other showed us how to love one another. And that’s what being a Christian is all about. It’s being so filled with the Lord’s love that it spills out and spreads to everyone around you. It’s a kind of love that softens even the most hardened hearts, that conquers addiction and hopelessness, that drives away hatred and bitterness, and it’s that kind of love that finally made us a team. Leaving that community we came to know and love wasn’t easy. Not only were we leaving behind people we loved, but we had to say goodbye to our alumni, Frieda. She was joining a new team made up of the alumni leaders in Kyrgyzstan, and team HKS was going to a place off route: Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan.
After a tear-filled departure, we headed back to the same train station we had first arrived at. It was just the original six, those of us who had been placed together at training camp so long ago. Travel days had always been challenging for us, and we knew we were about to have a long one. We made sure to start it off with prayer, so we prayed there in the middle of a train station and asked God for even tempers, grace, and patience, then we climbed aboard our first train. We had no idea it would be our last travel day all together. About 50 hours later, we were on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. We made it through customs, got a taxi to the train station, and waited as Lacy and Michaela bought tickets for our train to the next destination. When they came back, we discovered our train was leaving in 40 minutes, and we were 15 minutes away from the other train station we needed to be at. We hauled it to the train station across town and rushed onto our train with just a few minutes to spare. But because of this, we had no time to buy food for our next 23 hours on a train. We were stressed to the max, but the team remained in good spirits. The credit for that can go to God alone. We serve a good God, and He meets all our needs. We knew this. He proved that in China. But I guess He felt we needed a little reminder. So when we saw a man coming down the train with a tray of food for sale (which hadn’t happened on our other trains, BTW), I almost started crying. We all got to eat that night, and we were able to buy food the next day as well. Though it was stressful, it was a good time. Finally, after 72 hours, we arrived in Karakalpakstan, and we were taken to our hostel by a man our previous host knew. Over the next couple of weeks, we got to spend time with the Christian community, hear testimonies, and teach English to some of the youth, and play volleyball with almost 30 kids. I would like to say that our time there was easy, but it wasn’t. We lost one of our team members there, Marianna. She went as far as the Lord wanted her to go, and she made the difficult decision to go back home. I am honored to have been on a team with her and for having the opportunity to see her grow. Shortly after Marianna left, I received the news that my Life Group leader, Van Martin, passed away after a battle with Leukemia. It was crushing news and something I’m still grieving over. But just like Marianna, it was time for him to go home. A few days ago, we hopped back onto a train once again. 16 hours later, we were in Tashkent, UZ. We settled in for an 8 hour layover at a bus station. 12 hours 2 border crossings later, we finally arrived in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where will remain until December 7th. Debrief starts on the 2nd, and we will be assigned to new teams before heading to our first African country, Ethiopia.
There are too many lessons share with all of you here in this blog post, and there’s no way I’d be able to remember them all right now. But what I can tell you after almost 5 months of constant community is this: There are people who truly love you out there, but you have to open your heart to receive that love. You have to push yourself out there, not cower back and assume you’re not wanted. You have to take risks. You have to be vulnerable. My definition of vulnerability has changed since coming on the Race. I used to believe vulnerability meant openly sharing your past with the people around you and trusting they will love you all the same. While that is still part of it, I now realize it’s so much more. Vulnerability means letting people inside your mind. It means sharing your fears and your heart with them. It means sharing your doubts with them, and it means giving hard feedback because you love them and want them to be more like Christ. Living in community and doing it well means sharing yourself, every part of yourself, and loving without fear. Isn’t that how God loves us?
Team HKS, thank you for all the lessons you taught me. Thank you for all the laughs we shared, for all the tears we shed, and for pushing me to my limits. Thank you for making me step out of my box, and for loving me despite my faults. Thank you for encouraging me to take ownership, for giving me feedback when I don’t want to hear it, and for pushing me out of my comfort zone. I love each of you so much, my Lightening and Thunder. Frieda, Kenz, Lacy, Ellie, Michaela, and Marianna, you will always hold special places in my heart, and I am so freaking proud of all of you.
Fare thee well, HKS, and godspeed.
