The weeks leading to training camp were both exciting and not. Some days I would be so stoked that I would want to go ASAP but other days I would rather just crawl into bed and pretend it was already August. I was nervous meeting everyone in person and seeing how they would react to the trip too. The Saturday before my dad, brother and I started the drive and during that time I wasn’t really excited or nervous, just numb. I didn’t know if this was really the plan for me to go across the world or if it was me ignoring God’s plan. When arriving to training camp I was so nervous I didn’t want to get out the car, everyone seemed so much more prepared and at peace just by looking at them. I really just wanted my dad to drive us back to Texas. I got the courage to get out of the car and go to where the rest of the group was.
Flash forward a few weeks and we are in Nepal, serving at a women’s center. The women’s center is a place for Christian women to come live and to learn how to sew, use computers and be able to do hair and nails, so that they can go out and get jobs that are better than the ones they had before. What we did there didn’t seem like much but to the ministry host and the people living there, it was changing how they got around and reacted in the home. We painted some walls white to give it the look of being new. We built a path way so that they could have easy access to their storage. We made the beauty parlor look like a place beauticians would feel comfortable in working in.
When the group talked about it later, we felt like we had done really nothing, that we were thirsting for more. The whole trip so far we have felt that. Just this week our leader was telling us that both our ministry host and the people who go to the women’s center are so grateful for the work that we did.
A week later from working at the women’s center, we set out to the mountains to do ministry there too. We spent a few days up there and each day was full of either climbing a mountain or sitting in the church that we were sleeping at. We really felt that during the trip that we did nothing. That is being there wasn’t where we were supposed to be, but our leader told us the same thing. That us just being there, gave the people so much hope and joy.
I really did into this trip full of fear of not knowing what to expect but just seeing how we have effected people’s lives is enough to know that I was meant to be here.
