What nonsense did Team Adelphi and Team Lucent encounter this month? You’re about to find out!
We discovered on the final day of debrief that we were getting to our first ministry site, Urlabari, in two small vans/jeeps/whatever they were. Somehow we had to fit 12 girls and all of our stuff in there – multiple people made the 14-hour journey sitting backwards amongst the bags.
Our host coached a semi-pro soccer team, and we attended the final three games of a tournament they ended up winning. One of the goalkeepers was Carter, a guy from Colorado who was volunteering with Reuben’s ministry. During the second game a teenage boy came up to me and said “Excuse me, Miss. Do you belong to the keeper?” Now this may have just been a language mistake, but I’m pretty sure this kid was asking if we were married.
When we were out in Urlabari, gigantic bugs liked to invade our house. One night, a praying mantis appeared in our room, and since I was the only one still up, the task of getting rid of it fell to me. I didn’t want to kill it, so my plan was to grab it and throw it out the window. When I grabbed it around the middle, it turned its head around and bit me. It didn’t leave a mark or break the skin, but I didn’t even know that praying mantises could bite.
If there’s one thing you can count on when it comes to international travel, it’s this: public transport is insane. If we took a bus, we were packed in like sardines with barely enough room to breathe. You always needed to have an eye out for flying bags or stray elbows coming at your head. L
In order to get from Urlabari to Kathmandu, we opted for the bus route instead of the Jeeps. However, as always, there were a few things we weren’t expecting. It was an overnight ride with a 4-hour dinner stop (turning our approximately 14-hour drive into almost 20) and if that wasn’t enough, the whole bus had a whole lot of gas. Not that kind of gas, you people giggling while you read this… The aisles of the bus were filled with gas cans, crowding the space so much that we had to climb over them to get out. Our clothes reeked of petrol by the end of the ride.
When we got to Kathmandu, we stayed in a guest house a stone’s throw from our host’s home. We had the keys, and the last person to leave had to lock the padlock. Unfortunately, if anyone was left in the house, they were stuck. This happened to me and a few other girl one night when Racquel accidentally locked us in and had to come rescue us.
