I know many of you are dying to hear the stories of what we have been doing all month. If I was to tell each story in detail, I would have to spend the next month of the Race only writing blogs. But for all of you who are interested, here is most of what we have been up to since my last blog…
We moved! We left the city of Bandung and traveled 3-4 hours to the province of Bogor, specifically this little town called Cisarua (CHee-Sa-Roo-Ah).
We began our stay at the House of Hope. HOH is a project that is being headed up by some really cool folks from the local 7th day Adventist church, and it is also where we have been staying for the last month (for free!). The house is right in the midst of the refugee community, and the vision is to start a school soon and to have a place for refugees to stay until they can get adjusted and on their feet so to speak. Also, the extra lodging budget has given us the ability to bless people here in some cool ways.
We have met a ton of new friends. Afghan and Iraqi Muslims, 7th Day Adventist Christians, local Indonesians, Afghan believers, Iraqi Sabians (look em’ up, they follow the teachings of John the baptist and are one of the most persecuted peoples in Iraq http://minorityrights.org/minorities/sabian-mandaeans/ ) and just a bunch of awesome people in general. People that are hungry for a hope and a future.
We have started a relationship with a refugee school called RLN. So part of the refugee situation in Indo is their children are not allowed to attend local public schools. The refugee community has banded together and started this school, Refugee Learning Nest, so their children can have an education. They are all volunteers, all unpaid, most are not even teachers by trade, but what they are doing here is a beautiful thing. If you would like to know more about RLN or some of the other refugee schools we have had contact with, you know how to get ahold of me. Side note: I find it greatly ironic that as much disdain as I have for formal education, the first place that God puts me on the Race is in a school… Funny God. Ha Ha.
We discovered Emerald! This place is our sanctuary, there is free WiFi, some delicious fresh brewed Indonesian coffee (most of the stuff we have had here is instant, I’m pretty sure they export all of the good stuff), incredibly comfy couches and picture frame views of the nearby volcanic mountains. The food is decent, and not expensive, the staff is wonderful, and the place is so clean you could eat off the floor. It is a great mercy of God.
We have eaten some great food. There is this one story, we decided we were going to go to the market and get some fresh chicken for dinner. So we get there pretty late in the day, maybe around 4 or 5. Most of the Indonesian folks do their grocery shopping in the morning, and the market slows way down in the afternoon. Normally they have a bunch of chickens prepared, laid out and you get to take your pick of which carcass you would like to devour. Not this day. We got to the shop and they didn’t have any chickens. Well, they didn’t have any dead chickens at least. We tell this guy we want two chickens, so grabs a couple off the truck, still squawking, and does the thing. Not 5 minutes later we are telling him how we want them chopped up, and paying and walking out. We stopped at some other shops to get veggies for the meal and the thought occurred to me: “I’m Anthony Freaking Bourdain. How cool is that”. By the way, the chicken was some of the freshest and most delicious ever. Other food highlights include: Martabak (hard to explain this one, it’s like a giant, medium rare pancake with chocolate and cheese and peanuts on the inside, it’s great), Soto Ayam (Indonesian version of chicken soup, so fresh and flavourful), Pizza Hut cheesy bites stuffed crust (you didn’t think we would eat totally local did you?), Roti Bakar (it’s like a sweet and savory grilled cheese, one of my favorite street foods), and Biryani chicken (this one is another story on its own, but we basically had a pair of Afghani friends offer to cook us one of their favorite Afghan meals in house if we would just buy the ingredients. No brainer there). As I said before, Mom, I’m not starving here.
We went to church with some 7th Day Adventists. This was an all-day experience y’all. We left early, like early, because on Saturdays the highways here shut down one direction for hours at a time, effectively making it a one way road. So we ended up getting there two hours early just so we wouldn’t be 6 hours late, and the church service itself lasted almost four hours, and after that we all ate lunch together, and then rode an hour back home. It was a long day, but a good one. I almost forgot… Two of our Muslim friends joined us for the entire outing! I can’t explain to you how many times this month I have said, “God, are you kidding me?” because he has continually blown my mind with the doors opened and the opportunities to discuss and share our faith. WITH MUSLIMS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST GUYS. I cannot get over it. It is so unbelievable, it has to be from the Lord. A guy told me this quote from Graham Cook just a couple of days ago “The Gospel is such astonishing good news that it borders on fantasy. We have that pessimistic saying in the world that if something is too good to be true, someone is being conned. Well, in the Kingdom, if something is NOT too good to be true, it’s not God!” Let your mind wrap around that one for a minute.
We helped host a charity clinic for the refugees. It was an amazing picture of people working together to acheive a common goal. We had Muslims from Afghanistan and Iraq working with Indonesian Christian doctors and nurses, translating from English into Farsi and Arabic. Our team helped fill in the gaps, doing prayer counseling, picking up the trash, and getting lunch for the workers. We had 70 something people working, doctors and translators and us. We saw over 150 people and I think it was a great success.
We have started the process of video interviewing some of the refugees. Right now the vision is to get a lot of raw footage, hear and capture the people’s stories, and then take all of that and drop it off with some Kingdom Journeys Storytellers when we run into them next month, and let them do their thing and make something way better than anything I could put together. This interview process has been incredible. We have heard some crazy stories, and in that have been able to sit with people in their hardships and encourage and hopefully, give them some hope for the future. It has also been very hard, hearing what these people have gone through, at no fault of their own, and knowing how little we do to help. Many of these people have been persecuted, driven from their homes, seen family members abducted or murdered, and have fled for their lives. Now, in this country, they are not allowed to work, their children are not allowed to go to school, and most can’t even go pray at the local mosques. If you would like more info about the refugee situation in Indonesia and what we are doing to help, check out my blog: Indonesia and Morning Prayers, Part 2.
I have taken a liking to the game of badminton, and had a chance to plan with some locals. They are really good. You know those old guys at the tennis courts that don’t move around a ton, but are so accurate with their shot placement and speed that they make you do all of the running? Yeah, these guys are those guys. This one man, has to be 65 years old and will smash the shuttlecock in my face if I’m not careful. Sports are always a lot of fun, and a great way to connect with people that don’t speak a lick of English.
We have played the game of Dutch Blitz many, many times. If you don’t know it, check it out.
I learned an Arabic version of the game of rumy, and played with some old Iraqi men one day as we were just walking around the neighborhod and talking to people. Their hospitality and friendliness is amazing to me. They have very little, I mean, they can’t work or make money in Indonesia, but you better believe if you go for afternoon tea they will bust out some fruit and cookies.
We got held hostage. Mom, before you go into cardiac arrest, lemme splain it to ya. Indonesia has this pretty cool system of public transportation, called Angkot. We learned how to use it soon after arriving here and it is great. These tiny little microbuses have bench seating along both sides, and they all drive a fixed route all day, and people pile in and you get where you need to go and hop out and you pay a few thousand rupiah (look up the conversion rate, its dirt cheap) and you’re good to go. So having done this a few times under the supervision of our host, we were turned loose to go try it for ourselves. The first few times went great. And then it happened. Me and Jordan had just got done shopping, and had tried the first few bites of roti bakar (see above). We flag this guy down and hop in. Jordan first, then me. As I am still climbing in the van (I have to fold up like a card table every time, such is life for a big man in Asia) the driver takes off. I stumble towards the back of the bus, and my shoulder hits the back glass. The whole window popped out! We holler at the guy to stop, because he didn’t even realize what had happened. At this point, I’m thinking, ok no big deal, we will hop out and pop the window back in and continue on our merry way. This guy had other plans. He starts yelling in Sundanese. Now we have been in Indonesia for less than three weeks, and while I have picked up some of the language, Sunda is a totally different story. Anyways, there was one other passenger at the time, and she does her best to inform us that the guy wants money. I try to pay the normal fare and get out and he says “No, No”. (FYI, the normal ride cost is 2,000 and he was looking for 200,000- which is about 15 bucks.) So Jordan tries to get out so that we can put the window back in and stop fooling with this guy, and he grabs Jordans arm, and gives him this look like, “you’re not going anywhere”. Around this time, our one other passenger decides she has seen enough and gets out. So this driver whips the van around in the road and heads the opposite direction and starts yelling, “Polisi, Polisi!” and Jordan gets all indignant like, “yeah sure take us to the police, dude”. I was a little bit more worried about simply getting out of the van with this lunatic driver, and am doing the best I can to explain that we don’t even have 200,000 on us, only like 50,000, but I would gladly give him that if he would just pull over and let us go. So we call our squad leader Jeremy, who translated for a little bit and is like “it’s 10 bucks man, just pay the guy”. MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY, JEREMY! But Jordan is still all like “we don’t negotiate with terrorists, we didn’t do anything wrong” -totally concerned with the injustice of it all and not the fact that we could be spending the night in an Indonesian jail cell. So I get this guy down to 100,000, we pull over at an ATM and I got some money out. Which was great, because I had been looking to get money from an ATM for a couple of days but just hadn’t made the time, THANKS CRAZY DRIVER. So I get back and I’m trying to pay the guy and Jordan says, “hey, let’s give him some more money and get him to take us back to the place we just came from”. Jordan… come on bro! (He later explained his reasoning in the moment, but at the time it sounded like a terrible plan) The guy was apologetic, I guess because he got our money, but he said sorry for freaking out and he was just really poor and stressed about feeding his kids. I’m not totally sure the whole thing wasn’t an elaborate scam, I mean that window popped out so easy, but it was still like only 8 dollars. We made it home safe and sound, and now have a cool story about how a crazy Sunda taxi driver kidnapped us and held us hostage.
We met a new team. These guys came in almost a week ago. They are the expedition squad that launched in April, and Indo is their last country before heading home. It has been such a cool thing to meet them and hear their stories, and to swap perspectives a little. Some awesome folks.
We went to an Indonesian wedding. Technically, the girls have been to two. Me and Jordan did not attend the first one. So, the House of Hope has two floors, and apparently as of last Monday the bottom was available to rent as a wedding hall. Indonesia has this great wedding culture, in that if you have heard about the wedding, then you have been invited. So of course, as the upstairs neighbors and white people, we were the honored guests. We ate, we took the obligatory 1,931 pictures with the bride and groom, me and Charles (from April squad) got on stage and danced, we saw this bizarre exchange of money from the girl singing and this loaded Indonesian dude. I still understand very little of what happened that night, but we had fun.
We met with Afghan believers at a house church. This was so special to me because it was nearly identical to my lifegroup at home, even on the same day of the week. It is so good to know that the seeds we planted will be watered and hopefully harvested by the local church that will be here long after we’ve left.
We went to a mosque. It was pretty cool, before we went our friend took us to meet the village elder, who gave us his blessing over coffee and cookies and then took us personally to it. As for the building itself, no crazy revelations here, it was not a service time when we went. Kinda like a church with no people in it. Gasp! Did he just compare a mosque to a church?!
I have learned a lot about hearing the voice of the Lord and different ways of building relationship with him. He is doing some crazy stuff in my life y’all, a lot of it revolves about making the connection from my head to my heart. Taking all of the things about God that I know to be true and making them the truth in my life. Anyways, God is really cool, he continues to reveal himself to me and I love it.
We had an adventure day. This one is a story in and of itself, but basically that whole one-way-road-on-Saturday situation I explained earlier, yeah, we forgot all about that. We tried to go to this waterfall that’s only a couple miles away, but in the wrong direction. We spent the entire day trying to take backroads because the main road was a parking lot. After about 2.5 hours of this, we decided to cut our loses and headed back to the casa. To do that though, we had to communicate to our driver, who spoke less than no English. We used a combo of Google translate and this random old man who spoke English. Eventually, we made it back. It was still a fun day, and while the day wasn’t a total bust, it was definitely not what we expected.
I quoted Parks and Rec for hours one night with Chelsea from April squad. It was awesome sauce.
SO BASICALLY, TO SUM IT ALL UP:
Indonesia is still awesome. I’m still loving it. You are all loved, and I will be doing my best in the future to update these bad boys on a more regular basis. Your prayers, as always, are welcomed and appreciated. Pray for the transition as we go to KL for debrief, then split up to India and Thailand for Manistry month. Pray for the people that we are leaving in Indonesia, that we can continue growing relationships even after we are physically gone. Pray that we will finish this season well, and mourn our losses well, and start well in month 2. Pray for the April team as they head home, to a new season of life, and to take the things that they have learned on the race and make them a part of their everyday life. Pray pray pray and know that Papa hears our prayers.
