We came off the highway and entered the little obscured road leading into a forest. We continued driving along a dirt road, which curves and bends, widens and narrows, at points there is only room for one way of traffic. 
We notice we are getting close because of the rubber trees. This is one of the main occupations of the villagers, collecting rubber. As we drive past rows and rows of rubber trees we can sometimes see full buckets of the sap ready to be collected. The trees are marked with naturally made, downward spiraling contours that the sap of the tree follows into the buckets.
We follow the trail of the road that leads to one village in this vast jungle. As we make it into the village there are many eyes following us as we all start unloading the vehicles. Our first task was to clean out our house. We stayed in a wonderful cabin type of home. It was very unexpectedly large and stocked with the essentials.
The house we stayed in had a “bathroom” and “toilet” – by western standards these might need to be renamed, however they fulfilled the task they were meant for. The shower was a couple of barrels in a concreted floored room in which you used a small bucket to clean yourself. The toilet was, what is known to us now as a “squatty potty” which is a hole in the floor which is essentially hooked up to real plumbing but instead of a sitting toilet you squat over the hole.
So as we acquainted ourselves to our home for the week we split the rooms and started with dinner. The kitchen at first glance looked just like a normal kitchen but after trying out the stove and sink we discovered the water wasn’t on. The guys went to get water from the well, while the women tried to start dinner. Making dinner without running water is harder than you would think.
Each night we would prepare a Malaysian style meal using local ingredients and even knives (machetes are great for cutting up onions). Our program ran so that after dinner we would hold an evening of worship and a message for the local residents.
The first day we were there, we went down the one dirt road that ran through the village and visited each home. My group went to the “upper-class” area which consisted of a cemented house that would hold usually three generations of a family. The houses were all the same – no decorations, no furnishings, only the essentials. The families would invite us in, and if they had a chair would offer it to us. We invited each family to the evening services we held and prayed for anything in specific that they needed.
As the time of season was moving from harvesting the rubber from the trees to nothing at all, a lot of the families were about to face a time of no income. This was a very big problem for the community, so we prayed for each family for Jesus to be their provider. The area also hadn’t had much rain at all and was in desperate need so we prayed for this – that night and every day after it rained at least once a day!
That night we held our service and people came to see what we had to say. One girl I remembered from the house visits we made. She was 16 years old and was the only one at her home when we visited. I remembered thinking she probably wouldn’t come because she was a teen and the rest of the teens we talked to were just not interested.
So night after night Lela came as the rest of the village stopped showing up (well at least in the seats we provided – there were always a bunch of people watching us from the trees shrouded in darkness). Each night we got to pray for Lela and our very last night there God gave some of the girls on our team the same word for her.
God is going to use that girl to bring this village to its knees. She has been given the gift of leadership and even though she isn’t highly educated, God is going to train her and raise her up. Jesus desires her people and she will have the same longing for her people as God does.
We packed up the next morning and drove back down the same dirt road, past the same rubber trees, around the same one way corners and back on to the same paved highway. The Orang Asli people live an isolated life, but God sees them there and is making a way to bring all of his children back to Him.
