Village Life Round 2!

My "Birthday baby"

It was a long, bumpy 5 hour van ride. There were squatty stops, snack breaks, and a stop for those who got motion sick. Sunday night I slept in a strangers house, a believer who had only two rooms in their mud house. I slept with another gal from our DTS on a board under a mosquito net, a first for me.

December 1, my 19th Birthday, I woke up feeling well rested. I was greeted with a "Birthday cake". It was an Oreo cake mix brought from America put inside a semi-empty old peanut butter jar. 2 years ago I would have laughed at it, 1 year ago I would have called it a poor college kid cake, 5 months ago I would have called it a ghetto cake, now I call it a love missionary cake. The more God moves me around locationally, the more I fall in love with where I am. Being away from my family for the first time on my Birthday did not bring me to tears, being surrounded by all these people who love me did.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we hiked over 25 miles, over 358 stories, for hours and hours. We

Acquiring drinking water out of a bamboo spiket on the side
of a cliff. 

were soar, hungry and thirsty. We drank from streams, crossed rivers, washed our faces in waterfalls, trekked through marijuana fields, avoided goat stampede, and treed lightly on the edge of cliffs. We ate dole beans with pebbles in it, ate honey with bees and bee larva still in it, had to wait for dinner because our rice was being carried up a mountain, and drank water that had to be hauled from a 3 hour hike away. The tropical jungles and the fields of poppy, mustard, and rice were screaming with the beauty of creation.

We were able to to stop in 7 different churches to share a message to encourage the congregation. The churches were either mud huts with thatch roof or a tin roof, or they were bamboo walls with boards for floors with stables underneath. The floors were either mud or dirt and the walls crawling with spiders. The people were dirty, had head lice, and the babies did not wear diapers. We even road on top of a bus through water, as in the bus drove through rivers and sandbars.

We had an incident where our base director was drumming and yelling at us to hurry up and pack one morning. One of our translators rushed into the mud church and said he must stop, he sounded like a witch doctor.

On top of the bus that crossed the river.

I would often stop to catch my breath and I had to shake my head when I realized what I was doing. I am living what I always dreamed of. It is not easy. There were many moments when I wanted to sit on the trail and cry. I was in physical pain. I did not see the point of what we were doing at times. We stopped at churches, we did not need to go because they were already reached. It was worth it. It was worth the hike just to be in fellowship for 20 minutes with one church. It was worth the pain to meat my brothers and sisters for just one time and never see them again until I join them in eternity.

I have never pushed myself so hard. In Philippians it says, "I can do all things through Him who gives me strength," Paul means anything. When we are in the will of the Lord, we will be given extraordinary strength. There were people in our group who kept falling, rolling their ankles and they would stand up fine. We were beyond dehydrated, but not one of us got sick from dehydration. The energy and physical strength needed for us to complete the trek was not our own. The strength and protection of the Lord is often unseen. It is up to us to stop and realize we are living, breathing miracles. Everyday is not our own. We do not live according to our own will and ability. We live in accordance to Him who gives and takes away. There is no other place I would rather live than in that presence.