Goodbye Penang

I am sitting at the Penang international airport as I write this. I have been stressing a little bit because the flight to Taipei was pushed back an hour and 15 minutes. I didn't know how long my layover was in Taiwan so I was worried because I am ready to get back to Nashville. Luckily, after finding a free wi-fi network at the airport I checked my itinerary and my layover in Taiwan was 4 hours. China Airlines seems to have done me a bit of a favor since now 2 of those lonely hours I can now spend with Adrian at the Penang airport since he is waiting on his flight to KL which departs 10 minutes before mine does. Maybe I should say God did me the favor and not China Airlines.

It has been a really somber day for all parties involved. I didn't get to sleep until around 5:00 AM and then woke up at 8. I guess I am just anxious to get home. That is only one of the emotions destroying my peace right now, really. I am so excited that I get to play with my sister and see my friends and family face to face again in less than 36 hours, but I am heartbroken to leave a country that I have grown to love. I am also heartbroken to leave a group of people that I have grown to love as well. It was so difficult to actually walk out of the door to the car. We put on "The Scientist" by Coldplay on the loudspeakers as we left and this could have ruined this beautiful song for me personally. I will never be able to hear this song again without the memory of walking out the door and leaving behind the people who have become a 2nd family to me. I don't mean to sound like I have left them for good or turned my back on them, just referring to the fact that I literally walked out the door and left them behind because I had to.

I came here 6 months ago not knowing what to expect, and the funny thing is, I'm leaving 6 months later still not knowing. I guess life is just like that. Here I am sitting at the airport after the most solid 6 months of my life, and now I am more confused than ever. It is funny how many doors open to you when you are in line with God's plan as opposed to when you aren't. I came with a goal to attain direction and I got more paths. I got direction, absolutely, but now there are more alternatives and that is the hardest part. I want to be back in Asia so soon, but I know I need that piece of paper that says I'm qualified. It will open more doors, and after a lot of prayer I know it is the right decision, but the toughest part is knowing that it is going to take time to get it. I will be in America for a couple of years finishing school. I love everything about America, but my heart beats for this place. I know that it will be hard to leave family and friends again in the future, but the end result is so much greater than what I would get sitting around chasing what I want, and not chasing what I need. I'm going to finish school and I'm going to love spending the time in America, but it will be great when you have to come to another country to see me.

Even though this journey has come to a close, minus the 30 hours of flight I am looking at ahead of me, I will continue blogging. I will continue to keep everyone updated on the things going on in my life and how I am continuing to work at changing the world for the kingdom, but I am just going to continue taking it one day at a time. I have Camp Whatever a week after I get back and Brazil just 2 more weeks after that. I am also working full-time again this summer to make some cash. I have a lot on my plate, but it is par for the course. I look forward to more adventures in the future, and I also look forward to letting you in on the stories. For now, the adventure is rediscovering home. See you soon, I have to catch a plane to America.

48 hours and counting...

I have only 2 days left in Malaysia. It is unreal to me how quick these months have gone by. I described it to my parents as bittersweet. It is going to be so good to finally see friends and family face to face again, but I love this region of the world and can say with a good amount of confidence that, at some point in time, if you want to visit me it will require a trip to southeast Asia. I feel like I have a place here and that this region is where I am supposed to be.

On a light note, we saw the new movie from M. Night Shyamalan called The Happening, with Mark Wahlberg a.k.a. Marky Mark, as the lead role. Possibly the strangest movie I have ever seen, but I really enjoyed it. I am personally a fan of Shyamalan's very artistically strange representation of psychological thrillers. I am no movie making expert but I know enough to say the Shyamalan knows what he is doing with camera angles and shock factors. I wouldn't recommend this movie unless you know what you are getting yourself into. I loved it, but you may not.

It has been a rough week due to the Euro Cup soccer games. They are broadcast live here which means they don't come on until midnight and 2:45AM. Two games are played every night. We haven't been getting much sleep since our past few nights have been spent at various food stall locations until the wee hours of the morning. It helps to kill the time, though, since we are completely done and today and tomorrow are absolutely free. We are trying to get everything done that is exclusive to this area for one last time: Batu Ferringhi for tourist shopping, Balik Pulau for Siam Laksa(the angels themselves are employed by this food stall), Georgetown for Wan Than Mee and fresh fruit, the incredible taste of durian and mangosteens, etc. We have such a huge list of things to do in the next 36 hours.

Sunday at 2:15PM, my plane departs from Penang, Malaysia and it will take me about 30 hours of travel time to get back to Nashville. After I hug my family, we're going to Cracker Barrel. I have been thinking about that breakfast for six months, since I have known my arrival time in Nashville was 7:45AM for my whole stay. I am torn between Uncle Herschel's favorite and the Sunrise Sampler, decisions decisions. Then we are grilling out that night. I have considered making a list of different foods that I have missed out on for the past 6 months, but I am not going that extreme. All I can say is that corn beef and cabbage is going to be had within the first week. Anyways, I seem to be rambling on my blog so I'm going to sign off for now. I need to take a nap so I can be ready for the soccer games tonight. If I don't blog again before I come home, see you soon!

Nepal Final Phase pt. 2

Here are some pictures just for a little taste of Nepal: Walking to the base in Kathmandu, Patan Square, The typical hammer and sickle symbol for the beloved Maoists, Sitting on a hill overlooking Pokhara valley, and the building of the god monument for an annual Hindu festival. More pictures later, on to the 2nd half of yestrday's story...

After our hot spring bath, we walked back down to the bottom of the valley to our guest house in Thambuchet. We worked with the children at Pastor Balkrishna's school again and did some open air evangelism very similar to what we had done in Butwal. We didn't have much time left here so we figured it would be best to utilize every second for last minute relationships. It ended up being a pretty good program we did on someone's front porch for about 95% of the villagers.

The next morning we woke up at 5:30 to take a bus over the ridge to our starting point for our hike. We totalled about 30 hours of hiking for the whole two weeks and most of these hours were spent in the last 5 days on the way to and from Gosai Kunda lake. It took us three days of hiking up, up, up, to our final location at the lodge on top. Our first stop on the way was a village called Thulo Syaphru, where we stayed with a Sherpa pastor and attended a church service with him before we hiked to the next village the second day. The songs the Sherpa people were singing were the most beautiful harmonies I have ever heard. It took us two days of hiking many hours to get to the top but it was worth it after we fought ourselves so much about whether or not we could get to the top. One the way up there was such an intense cloud cover that our visibility was only about 10-15 feet in front or behind us, if even that much. This was the most beneficial thing that could have happened since if we had seen how far up we actually had to go, it would have been a whole lot more discouraging than it was. When we were almost there it was sleeting on the path. The frozen rain felt like it cut through our faces. We sat at the top in the lodge eating garlic soup, to help fight the altitude sickness that we all had a bit of a taste of. Our South African leader and one of the teammates of our group actually had to walk back down because of the level of their altitude sickness. We began to pray for them as they started walking and the frozen rain was turning into heavy snowfall. About 10 minutes later, the snow stopped and everyone of us felt like a million bucks. Our teammates were on the way down and we were getting warmed up and drying off and hadn't really enjoyed the lake any. We sat there in the lodge for an hour or two and I decided to go walk around before the sun set and take some pictures. In that two hours of time after we prayed, the snow stopped and the clouds had left the sky above us. We stood at the top and realized that we were above most of the clouds as we were at 14,400 ft. This was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

We spent the night in the lodge that had no heat more than a wood burning stove in the middle of the dining area where they mostly burned coconuts and yak patties (yes I do mean poop). I had to sleep in a full thermal suit with socks, gloves and a hat with a stitched on scarf that you may see more of this coming winter. I almost froze to death and only slept about 2 hours the whole night. The next morning I was very ill with nausea and a headache and didn't feel decent until I yakked up (no pun intended as there were no yaks in the mountains this time of year) all of my rice and potatoes from the ngiht before. I walked down to the lake and we prayed a little, but I walked back up because I felt sick again. The lodge owners were cooking our breakfast and I couldn't even stand the smell because it was making me sick so I packed my things and started to head down the mountain by myself because I knew that the altitude was affecting me and I needed to go lower and lower until I felt better. I left before everyone else and they caught up with me and passed me because I had to stop many times due to the nausea. We got to the half way point down the mountain in a village called Chandanbari where there was a yak cheese factory that I didn't get to enjoy since my altitude sickness had spawned into a virus of sorts. I laid in bed all day with a fever, headache, and nauseous feeling but a bowl of tomato soup and a good nights sleep perked me right up for the other half of the mountain down the next day. Our porters were drinking Nepali homemade millet liquor called rhaksi the whole 5 days, but this day one of them got particularly beligerent and we are not really sure how he didn't fall off the mountain. I didn't agree with paying him for the days work because the other porters had to carry his load to make up for his drunken stupor, but we paid him when we got to the bottom at my disapproval.

We hiked off the mountain to a town called Dhunche. We were all so ready to get back to Kathmandu so we ate a nice expensive meal, which in Nepal is about $4 worth of food, and went to sleep with 7 AM bus tickets in hand. We were almost sweating blood praying for safety for the bus ride home and I actually think at one point I prayed "God if it is possible let this cup pass from me." I learned a bit about the power of prayer as we woke up and carried all of the luggage to the bus and the bus driver said "No buses running today." It was the first day of Nepal's new title as republic instead of monarchy. It became the first annual celebration of this brand new, two-day holiday. Nepalis everywhere were celebrating and we were stuck in Dhunche for another day. I spent 5 hours in my room that day playing games on my iPod, considering the worth of pulling my teeth out for entertainment. We tried to move our flight back so we wouldn't be pressed for time but Thai Airways didn't have another flight running all the way to Penang for another week. We "had" to rent a jeep to go back to Kathmandu (Praise the Lord!). We piled up in a jeep the next day and made it to Kathmandu in a safe vehicle. Our prayers were answered. We made it to Thamel, the tourist district, for one last night of souvenier shopping and good food before our flight the next day and now here we are in Malaysia killing time until our trip to KL before our flights home.

Nepal Final Phase pt. 1

Alright, we are finally settled back into Malaysia and eating good fattening food again. I lost quite a bit of weight in Nepal, especially over the past couple of weeks, but now that I am in the capitol of eating I might not be quite as different as you might think I would be. It is said of the Malaysians that they only eat once a day and that time spans the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. Just warning you. On to the more important issues...

The last two weeks we spent in Nepal were incredible. It kicked off with the worst bus ride any human could endure on this planet. Some of the duration of the bus ride was spent with me sitting on top which was a result of getting kicked out of my seat by a lady leading a Hindu pilgrimage to Gosai Kunda lake, where our team would later be hiking to and having prayer there. I was a little frustrated with this lady at first but I was on top of the bus, so I couldn't complain. As I sat there on the top, I heard a familiar voice and turned to look and there was the very same lady sitting next to me. Despite kicking me out of my seat, she was an awesome lady. We developed a friendship and as we moved around the bus we always ended up close by each other somehow. She announced how happy she was to be sitting by me again in Nepali on the bus inside when we moved down. I thought she was joking, but my middle aged friend was quite serious that she enjoyed my company. The next thing I know, a man of around 70 sat on my lap and put his arm around me. This wasn't so bad, save for the fact that I was already sitting on rice bags in the middle of the isle. This bus ride, as I said, was the worst any human could ever have to endure. We sat on this 40-50 passenger bus that had a head count of 110 people sitting somewhere on this bus, be it top or inside, for 12.5 hours on a bumpy gravel road placed nicely on a ridge that the bus easily could have fallen off of at any shift of the weight. My prayer life has never been healthier, and there were times I was planning an escape to myself if I felt the bus begin to roll. We made it to our location nonetheless.

We began the last two weeks in a village called Thambuchet, located in the Langtang area of northern Nepal. This was our "base of operations" for the first 8 days. We worked with a local pastor in a neighboring village called Goljung. It was about a 15 minute walk between the two villages and there was one church in the two villages. The pastor, Balkrishna, was an incredible man with an incredible vision to see all of the people of his area break out of the stronghold of Buddhism and embrace Christ. He personally had come from a religious background mixed between Hinduism and Animism. He has a heart for his people group, called the Tamang people, because they remain an unreached people group in this location of Nepal so close to Tibet. In Thambuchet, we mostly worked a lot with children at a Christian school the Balkrishna runs.

That sunday, we hiked up to the next village, called Tethangchet. It was about a 3 hour hike up a mountain in the rain. Luckily, we bought ponchos before we left for this area, but unluckily, wearing these ponchos was like wearing a portable sauna, so I think I actually ended up covered with more sweat than rain water. In Tethangchet, we had a church service with another pastor who works closely with Balkrishna. This village is where we got a taste of how hard it really is for the people that live up in these mountains. With only a trail to get to your house, and ropes to carry your supplies, you really only have the essentials where you live in your 1 bedroom stone or wood house. After the church service, in which a very old woman renounced Buddhism at, we hiked back down the mountain only to hike up even higher on the neighbor mountain to a village called Tatopani. Tatopani, literally translated "hot water," is a bit wealthier than most villages in the area because of the amount of tourism that comes through this location. It is called Tatopani because there is a natural hot spring there that is perfectly safe for bathing. After eating Daal Bhaat, our every night meal of rice, lentil, and curry potatoes with pickled chilis, and almost freeazing to death, we stayed the night in a guest house here and the next morning all of us had a bath in the hot spring. There were two pools, one with warm water, the other with blazing hot water. The guys had to bathe second but we got there and took our time and it was the best I felt over the whole time we spent in Nepal...

The rest of the trip I will blog about tomorrow before we leave for Kuala Lumpur, where we will be until Saturday. Not positive if I will be taking my computer or not so enjoy the blog posts just in case. Thanks for reading!