Homeward Bound

The next part of my journey began with a twenty-two hour bus ride to the Eastern region of Nepal. The idea of a twelve-hour flight no longer phases me after completing this marathon of a bus ride. The parts of the bus ride that I was awake for offered some beautiful scenery accompanied with life threatening driving maneuvers. There were a few times I was looking down the three hundred foot drop only to see that the tires of the bus were inches from the edge of the road.

This is just one of the breathtaking
views from our 22 hour bus ride. 

We stayed in a village in Nepaltar, which happened to be on top of a mountain.  It was grand! During our time there we taught at the Christian school, visited churches in the surrounding mountain regions (one of which included a 16 mile trek) and filmed a short documentary on the education in Nepal. Life in the village was pretty basic and included squatty potties (fairly self explanatory I think). Our room was a cement walled room with no heating and thirty-five degree temperatures at night. I have a new appreciation for insulation.

The view from our room in Nepaltar.

My favorite part of my time at Nepaltar was spent with Rhudika, the mother of a student at the school we were teaching at. I met her and her family while on a tea tasting trip to their house. While there, we were asked to pray for her son Bhuwan. Since birth, Bhuwan has suffered from some physical ailment that has left him without the ability to walk. She explained to us that everyday in order to get her son to school she would strap him to her back and hike twenty minutes uphill to where a car would meet them and drive them the remaining way to school. I was shocked. I myself had made that same hike earlier that day and was winded even without carrying an eighty-pound boy on my back. Not only does she make the trek with her son daily, she also goes with him to the school and volunteers there all day in order to be near her son. After hearing her story I knew it needed to be shared, so we decided to include her in the documentary on education. I was able to interview her and be apart of the filming of her story and cannot wait to share that. Rhudika couldn’t speak any English, but the tears in her eyes and her hold on my hands after having finished her interview said what she could not.

This is Rhudika, or as I like to
call her, Wonder Woman. 

The time in Nepaltar came to a close, but not without a wonderful send off BBQ in a bamboo hut. We hopped back on those horrible buses and made our way down the mountain and back towards Kathmandu. Of course, we couldn’t pass up the stop in Chitwan for elephant rides. Coolest thing ever!

After arriving back in civilization, I mean Kathmandu where real toilets exist, we prepared for our last week of ministry. The week started out great with some news from our contact in Ilam. After we had left Ilam people were so impacted by our work there that nineteen people were saved. His words, not mine. It was good to hear of some definite results of our time here. This jumpstarted us into our time here in Kathmandu. On one of the days we decided go to a bazaar in the city to play some worship music in hopes of meeting people. We sat down and before we knew it there were probably sixty to seventy people gathered around us. One of the guys asked if I was a Christian, he said that guitars and white people were a giveaway. We started talking in the midst of the crowd and it turns out he is studying English Literature and is earning his masters degree. An hour later we had talked about philosophy, scientific theory, politics and religion. He knew a lot about the bible and wanted to know even more. I encouraged him to ask God to make himself real to him in one way or another. I guess he did because when we went back to that same bazaar a couple days later he was there again and came up to me and said, “I don’t come here often but I asked God if I might see you all again and here you are”. His name was Nebean, and I hope that by our happenstance encounters he might come to know Jesus.

Outreach is now coming to an end. Today I am hopping on a plane and heading back to Hawaii (not without a stop over in South Korea and Honolulu for day trips of course). I am still trying to process the past six months, but one thing I have come away with is the relationship that I have built with my teammates and people I have met along the way. I am not sure what the future holds for me, but I can say that this whole experience has had a profound impact on my life. I now have a new revelation of God and who he is to me. I was reading the book Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis and one of the concepts he wrote about really struck me and I feel that it captures what it is I have learned and am beginning to understand. Here it goes:

“When the redeemed soul beyond all hope and nearly beyond all belief, learns at last that she has pleased him who she was created to please there will be no room for vanity there. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment that heals her old inferiority complex will also drown her pride.”

I think what I have experienced over the past six months is simply the beginning. So, here’s to the unknown.

These guys have been family to me these past 3 months.