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!