Well here I am in Kathmandu hanging out at a very nice little coffee shop contemplating one heck of a summer. Tomorrow begins the voyage home. On one hand I am very much looking forward to getting back home, on the other I am not so ready for it. Sorry for the lack of general updates internet in Mozambique was a little hard to come by...I have been in Nepal now for just under a month and I am loving every minute of it!!
Our team arrived here at the beginning of August after finishing up in Pemba. I must admit it was a little hard to say goodbye to people after literally living on top of them for two months and walking with them through the great and the tough. I love traveling and realizing that the people that now you cant imagine never having known, were those whose existance you knew nothing about a month ago. Incredible. Without writing a novel it is impossible to say what spending that time in Mozambique was like. Incredible, stretching, inspiring, ridiculous, so tough, so rewarding, amazing, and life changing. There's really no way to say in words what God did in and through me. The summer was nothing of what I expected but everything amazing. I feel honestly like the most blessed individual on the planet.
But I digress, Nepal. Nepal has been incredible. We are working with the Iris base here in Kathmandu and the team is absolutely stellar. We arrived here and immediately game planned our time here with both them and God. We ended up heading to a place called janakpur, thats probably the wrong spelling, which is a town almost on the border of India about a 12 hour bus ride from here (insert sarcastic excitement here). But it was glorious! Three of the people on the team felt God calling us there and when we arrived we found out why. People were so hungry for the gospel, ready for healing and ready for blessing. We spent three days there praying for sick people and watching them get healed, watching whole families come to Jesus, and loving the least of these. It was incredible. I have plenty of stories if you want to hear them when I get back. Ask me, it was insane. We also went out into some villages in the surrounding area in the evenings and spent time there. We showed the Jesus film and watched a ton of people get healed. After a few days there we headed about two hours away to another village where we stayed for another three days basically doing the same thing. We lived in what looked like a treehouse and hung out with the villagers in what looked like some scene on a postcard. So so beautiful! Very very hot and lots of bugs, but amazing. After those two excursions we headed back to Kathmandu for the last few days that the team was here. We did some stuff on the streets, threw a huge party in the slums, visited and prayed for a bunch if lepers in a leper colony near here (a bunch of them were healed), and helped out at the banquet house which us a sort of homeless ministry they run here that is amazing. The team left last week and I stayed on with a friend I meet in Harvest School.
Through a series of very fortunate events, some very helpful long term missionaries here, and a little help from the big man upstairs we made out to Bhutan for a few days!!
That trip was absolutely amazing, what an incredibly beautiful country, incredibly beautiful people and incredibly delicious good!! Bhutan isn't one of those countries you can just walk around in, but we had an amazing tour guide that took us all over the place showing us the incredible temples that are crazy old, the beautiful markets and the ridiculous scenery. My favorite thing we did there was hike up to Tigers Nest which is this temple built into the side if a mountain. If you google Bhutan, it's the picture that usually shows up. It is spectacular. But not easy to get to! It was a very very challenging five hour hike to the top complete with 865 stairs at the end. Buuuut the view was totally worth it! My sea level acclimated lungs had a little trouble with the 10000ft elevation, but does make for a ridiculous view though!! It was a great trip, once in a lifetime, so glad we had the chance to do it! And to top it all off on the flight back we had an absolutely incredible, clear view of Mt Everest. It was as impressive as I had imagined it to be, maybe even more. Icing on the cake.
So now as the summer draws to a close and I think about going back to work and heading back into all of the things that we usually call "normal life" (whatever that means), I can't help but feel super blessed. All of the things I have done and seen this summer are things many people only dream about. That's not counting the incredible people I have had the privilege of crossing paths with, some if whom I think will be good friends long into the future. Like I said before, the summer hasn't totally been what I thought it would be. Its been better. Its been more full and more life altering. And as much as I can't wait to get back to normal, I hope I'm never normal again. I hope this experience had changed me forever in a most excellent way. I think it has. So I guess I'll see you all on the flip side, in the motherland...until next time!!.
