After spending a month of traveling constantly, eating the local street food, (usually consisting of a noodle based soup with pork balls-filled with cartilage for majority of the meals) and sleeping in a different place almost every night, I was ready for a change.
So as it says in Matthew 7:7 ‘Ask and it will be given…” Therefore, I prayed. I asked that God would bless us with a month where we don’t travel and are in the same place the entire month. A month where we cook our own food and get to decide what we make. A month where I sleep in the same bed every night and don’t need to repack my stuff every morning. And a month to actually build relationships amongst our team and where we actually have time to do so.
God answered my prayers, every single one of them…just not exactly as I imagined.
So, as we trekked out on our only travel day to our ministry site, we took a 3ish hour bus ride of which an hour and a half of was on a back dirt road out of the city we thought we were staying in, into a village. First, thought was we just entered Africa due to the miles and miles of dry flat land everywhere you looked and lack of any populated areas…O and the extreme heat and humidity.
We rolled up to our orphanage and were shown the building we will be staying for the rest of the month. It consisted of two bedrooms, a “kitchen/dining room” and a living room area. As I started to look around at our living conditions and where we were, I started to think ‘crap’ God answered my prayers, just not how I expected at all. So, we were given a table for our miscellaneous kitchen supplies and a propane stove top because we have no electricity on the property. Which means no oven, microwave, fridge or fans and much more I’m sure you can think of that requires power. Although God did bless us with a generator that runs for 3 hours at night to mostly recharge all of our electronics. Then the second news is we have no running water, just a pond next to our house where they get all their water from for cleaning dishes, showering, and cooking water.
Then the other thing I prayed for was to cook our own food and pick what we are able to eat. In order to get food we need to take a hour ride on the tuk tuk (motorcycle with a big side cart attached) we have to the local market where you can buy from the limited food choices we have due to having no way to refrigerate our food. So our staple foods are rice, potatoes, and eggs. Luckily, you can make potatoes and eggs many different ways which we take full advantage of. So apart from teaching English and doing various physical projects around the property, we joke around that the other half of our ministry is to just survive.
I also prayed to be able to sleep in the same bed every night and once again, God answered it…just not how I had expected again. We were given rickety bunk beds and some mosquito nets due to the abundant amount of bugs of all kinds. But the first night I had some unexpected guest, somehow multiple cockroaches got in my mosquito net and on the top bunk where I was sleeping and decided it would be fun to fly around my face all night and crawl all over me. Therefore, from there on we decided it may be best to just take the beds out and put our tents up inside, which has thus far stopped the bugs.
Finally, I had prayed for time to build relationships with our team and again you know that answer…God gave, just in a different way then I thought. Due to the extreme heat and lack of shelter or places to hangout on our property our house is the only place to find shade. Also, due to being in the middle of nowhere and it being a 30-60 minute drive to any other civilization, we have no other option but to hangout together in our humble abode.
So, in summary God answered every single prayer I asked even though it looks a little, well a lot different then what I expected. Although at first I was a little put back with our living conditions as sweat ran down my face, God slapped me in the face and said look at the blessings I HAVE given you not what you DON’T HAVE.
We have water, shelter, a place to get food and cook, and a home to live life together in community. God is so good and has continued to be as my perspective continually changes each dayfor what I’m thankful for and how much God does answer my prayers.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
