Hey Subscribers! There is good chance you’ve either forgotten about me, or become very worried about me. I don’t blame you. I didn’t blog at all last month, but I’m finally catching up. Month 3 was a whole new experience, and while most of my blogs discuss a truth I’m learning or metaphor I’ve been shown, this one will be more of a summary of my last month. There’s a lot of information here, both on what I did and how I’ve felt. Hopefully it will help satisfy those of you who’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to this December!
I started my month in Vietnam with a chaotic heart. We had LDW (leadership development weekend) for the first few days of the month. This originally felt stressful for me because of my role as logistics coordinator. You can read more about what I’ve learned through this role in my next blog, “domestiques.” Once we got there and got settled in, it was a well needed and appreciated time of rest and of learning. We stayed in a hostel owned by a woman who quickly became a friend to me, and met in an open restaurant space nearby, hidden from suspicious eyes. (Vietnam is a closed country, meaning it is illegal for us to be there as missionaries. It would look suspicious for us to be meeting all together, as a large group of foreigners.) As a group we had teachings about not viewing ourselves as victims, servant leadership, and creating healthy rhythms on the race and in our lives. These truths were presented gracefully, and they were just the things my heart needed to hear moving into month 3. We had a few worship nights and, because we wouldn’t spend Christmas together as a squad, a Christmas party complete with a candle lit rendition of silent night. My squad left for their various ministry sites after a few days, but I stayed for one more with our squad leaders and logistics team as a day of rest, debriefing after a chaotic logistics month, and some FUN! We did an escape room, which I’ve always wanted to do, I got to purchase and send home Christmas presents for my family, and we ate pizza. It was just what I needed to recharge.
Ladies on the race aren’t allowed to travel alone, so my squad leader Mason rode with me on the bus to Vung Tau where I would spend the rest of my month. I was able to hear his testimony as well as share my own, which was great. I arrived and met my sweet team leader, Hillarie, along with our host. Our host didn’t speak English this month, so I wasn’t really sure what was going on. That is sort of a theme of the month. We arrived at our house, a two room, one kitchen one bathroom house, owned by the church we would work for that month. We used one room for all of our stuff, and the other as a giant sleepover space for all of us to share. Later, we met up with a woman who served as our translator as we got settled in, Mizen. She talked over the schedule for the month with us, telling us what most days would look like…
5:30 am Attend prayer and worship meeting (in Vietnamese)
8-10 am Teach English class to adults, students, and to the pastor we were working with. (The church serves as a sort of boarding school for children who would otherwise have to work in the unforgiving fishing industry to survive… at least that’s our understanding. Like I said, the theme for the month was not really knowing what was happening too clearly.)
11:30am Eat Lunch, prepared for us at the church. (For those of you interested in what I eat on the race, this was usually rice, cabbage, fried egg, ocra, and some kind of meat. Super yummy, even though it was repetitive.)
2- 4pm Teach some more English.
The schedule remained this way for most of the month, except the first week, when we would go to Mizen’s English center and teach more English until 9pm. (That week was very exhausting.) Because we had lots of free time between classes and in the evenings, I really dug into creating weekly rhythms for myself, so I could turn sometimes monotonous days into meaningful ones. This looked like skyping someone from home once a week, reading scripture every day, practicing guitar regularly, and working out. We had Sundays off as rest days, and Mondays as our “adventure day.”
Our two adventure weekends (clearly this blog is not in chronological order) were really restful. The first was spent at a hotel near the beach. We got to go swimming in both the ocean and a pool, sit in air conditioning, and buy some snacks at the nearby lotte-mart. The second, we went to visit Mizen’s boyfriend’s church in Ho Chi Minh city, then stayed the night at the same hostel we’d been in for LDW. It was nice to spend a weekend in a place where we could walk around freely without causing suspicion.
For ministry, I started off the month teaching English to our host, the pastor of the church. I was very excited while doing this, because he was consistently making progress, and I knew it would help both his ministry and future World Race teams if his English improved. Unfortunately, just a week in the Pastor became too busy with the responsibilities of the Christmas service to work with us. After that, I joined a rotation to teach the kids at the church. I’d already done a little music with them (I consistently say my hair and my guitar are the most valuable ministry tools I brought on the race). Teaching isn’t my favorite thing to do, and feels pretty draining for me, but I really enjoyed the relationships I got to form with the kids, one in particular. Our leadership had encouraged us to take prayer walks that month, to meet people outside our assigned ministry, and to intentionally disciple them. For us, this wasn’t really possible. Our host asked that we not leave the ground of the church or our house unless it was to go with him to the grocery store. He could get in lots of legal trouble, even be put in prison if local authorities found out we were working there. On a few occasions, he called to tell us not to come to class because he was meeting with someone who may become suspicious if they saw us there teaching English. (All of this was in very broken English, so we weren’t sure what the extent of the risk was, but we stayed inside all the same.) I was discouraged by not being able to talk with new people. Those of you who know me know that talking with strangers is one of my favorite things to do. Instead, I decided I would disciple one of the children who I had immediately connected with, Vy. Vy is SPUNKY. She’s 12, knows more English than most of the kids, but still communicates largely by hitting or tickling. She started getting on the nerves of many of my teammates, but I loved it. I loved the constant conversations about her school, asking questions about her family, her help in learning Vietnamese, and the thousands of selfies she took on my phone. Our relationship was largely through google translate, but it’s one of the sweetest I’ve had on the race so far. She got really upset when she realized I would be leaving, and pleaded with me not to go to Cambodia. She said “if you go to Cambodia, who will teach me to sing?” It broke my heart. After things had calmed down, I wrote her a letter expressing how proud I was of her, how she deserved the best the world can offer, and that I can’t wait to see the ways God uses her as she grows up. We talked about how she wants to be a missionary when she grows up, because missionaries told her about Jesus and brought her to school. We talked about how excited we are to meet again in heaven one day and share stories of our journeys as missionaries. She was 12, but she is forever a dear friend.
Spending Christmas in Vung Tau was a sweet new experience. I thought we’d be cut off from typical Christmas celebrations, but man was I wrong. I taught the kids “Joy to the World” in English, and learned it in Vietnamese. We performed it at a Christmas Eve service FULL of people, complete with Silent Night and many other favorites, sang by locals we’d grown to love. We had this service three times, and after the third (Christmas night) I stayed overnight at the church to use the wifi and talk to my family while they opened the Christmas presents I’d sent from LDW! It was such a sweet couple of hours for me, physically sitting in a dark church in Vietnam, but mentally transported to my living room at home for my favorite holiday with my sweet family. The only very different thing was that we were asked not to go home for a while on Christmas Eve, because a policeman had become suspicious about us at the service, and was roaming the neighborhood looking for us. The translation of what was going on didn’t come through very well, and it was a little nerve-wracking… luckily God speaks all languages and was looking out for us! My favorite part of our ministry in Vietnam was DANCING. At home, I get restless if I haven’t been to a dance party in a long time. In Vietnam with our kids, this wasn’t a problem. One night the kids dragged me by the arm upstairs to the roof, yelling “DANCE!” They pulled out a speaker, connected my phone, and requested such songs as YMCA and the Macarena, EDM music and country line dancing. World Race teams had obviously been there before. It became a tradition, and we had plenty more dance parties on that roof. Our lasting impression was not only teaching English and the gospel, but the Foot Loose dance, too!
My last bit of Vietnam was spent on a rather unusual (even for the World Race) adventure, a trip to Ha Noi to meet my teammate’s family! It was incredible. We spent a few nights with her great Aunt and Uncle, neither of which spoke great English, so we weren’t sure what was going on. (See, it’s a theme.) We went to visit the iconic Ha Long Bay, which had me so so in awe of God’s creation. The next day, expecting family lunches and lots of cultural barriers, we were taken to a bamboo boat ride through some really amazing caves, and to see a MASSIVE collection of temples that rivaled anything I’d seen. To say that God romanced me with a surprise trip to the exact type of things I would have wanted to see, is an understatement. We got to spend some really cool time with her extended family as well, seeing a museum full of Vietnamese history, and ringing in New Year’s Eve day “cheers-ing” with all of her Uncles. We flew back into Ho Chi Minh City after a whirlwind couple of days, walked back to our hostel through the chaos of the big-city New Year, and went straight to bed. Our travel day was the easiest yet! I didn’t do much planning for it this month, since I had handled so much of the logistics for the month before. We left Ho Chi Minh city, and after a series of about 15 hours on busses and lots of catching up with my squadmates, we arrived at our new ministry site. I’m writing this from Battambang, Cambodia. I’m happy to be in this new place. The normalcy of the race is really surreal. I look back on the ways I wrote about India, and my very language has changed. You can be praying that my team and I don’t lose our sense of wonder for each new country, and that our ministry is deep, fulfilling, and full of inspiration.
