Halloween

We had our Halloween party at school on Friday. The kids all got to dress up and have a ton of Halloween fun all day. There were six stations around the school that they went to. There was a haunted house, pin the tail on the donkey/pumpkin, mummy making race, pumpkin bowling, and the "monster dance." I spent the whole day in the monster dance room. It was basically a cake walk where we made the kids dance the whole time. It meant that I danced for two hours strait for the kindergarden program, and another two hours for the elementary program. The funny thing was that I didn't get tired at all, but I did loose my voice.

After lunch the kids got to go trick or tricking around the block. The parents were spread out around the whole way. I have never heard so many kids complain about having to carry too much candy.

On Saturday I did a party for the whole elementary sunday school program at the home of one of the parents of some of the kids. There were 20 kids there, and they had a ton of fun. They spent four hours getting to know eachother more, playing games, and eating pizza and other junk food. By the end of the weekend I was beat and ready for a break. Unfortunately, that break will have to wait until next Sunday.....

Happy Halloween everyone!!!!

Happy Birthday Isaac!

Nepal Part 3

The day after our long van trip, we hiked for eleven hours. We stopped for lunch in a village that had a small church with about eight members. The paster and his congregation were all persecuted and looked down upon. In addition, they are cut out of all the village share cropping, which is how most people survive. We were able to share the gospel with two groups of about 20 people. Both groups had people who were very accepting of us, and asked a lot of questions. We gave out medicine to everyone there, and left all the extra with the pastor of the church, so that people would come to him when they needed help. The people asked us to stay longer and tell more stories, but we had to get to the next village. Our destination for the night was a village that they had tried to reach before but hadn't made it because some of the people in the group couldn't make the climb. There was one believer in that village, and they had promised to visit and han't been able to follow through. We were determined to make it.

The hike after lunch that day was crazy. We basically had to go strait down, cross a river, and then go strait back up another mountain. When we started it was a little foggy, so we couldn't see the mountains around us. Unfortunately, our guide knows the way by looking at the mountains. We ended up heading in the wrong direction on a non-existing trail. We made our way down the side of the mountain for about an hour, pushing our way through bushes and underbrush, before we got to a point where it dropped strait down about 200 yards to the river. As it turned out, we had to go back up where we came from and take another trail down going the other direction. When we got to the trail that we were supposed to be on, it was rock stairs going strait down for about 3 hours. It make it worse, it was raining, so the rocks were slippery. My pastor has a bad knee and he hadn't put on his brace, so he was really having a hard time. Finally we made it to the river, and a really sketchy looking bridge that we had to cross. After crossing the river, it was strait up to the village, which was on the top.

The beginning of the trail going up was going through rice paddies. It was clear very soon that our pastor wasn't going to do very well going up. He thought that his knee would be okay going up, but it he was in a lot of pain. In order for us to make it to the village before dark, he sent us up with one of the guides, while the other guide stayed with him. We made it to the village just as it was getting dark, but still had another half an hour climb up to the village center, and then back down to a house for us to stay in. It was at this point, when we were walking through a remote village in the pitch black, following our 20 year old guide and some local boy, that we realized we could disappear in the middle of the Himalayas and no one would have any idea where we had gone. Of course, everything ended up fine. Our pastor made it about an hour later, and retired to our humble quarters almost immediately.

The next morning we got time to get to know some of the villagers before we shared the gospel with them. We played with the kids a lot. One thing that we learned was that if we can capture the hearts of the children, we have a lot better chance of reaching the parents. I gave stickers out left and right, and we played frisbee with a some of them. When we finally started preaching, we ended up with a group of about 60 people, all listening intently. They were so happy to get even basic medications. When we headed out later that morning, they were handing us flowers in bunches. There was even an older man who started dancing for us. I was an amazing feeling to know that we had caused so much joy in these people's lives in just a few hours. Looking back, that village was the one that will stick in my mind the most. It was such a challenge to get there, but it would have been worth hiking five days for the experience.

We went on a Field trip to some place out in the country yesterday. (Yes, on a Saturday, to make up for the day of school that we missed because of the typhoon.) The kids had a ton of fun. The first thing that they got to do was search for and collect chesnuts from a small field. They picked the field clean, and all took home small bags full of them. The best part was getting pictures of them. The school has a website that parents can go on to see pictures of the classes, so it is important that I get pictures of all of the kids while we are doing anything. The students had given me some chesnuts to hold on to before they had bags to put them in. In order to get pictures of a few of my students, I had to call them over, and throw the nuts out for them to scramble for. It was almost like feeding the squirrels or something. I'm not exactly sure how you deshell and cook the chesnuts when you get them home, but the kids didn't really care.

After the chesnut hunt, they brought the kids out to a field with a small stage and sang songs and did dances and fun stuff like that. The poor kids were wearing their school sweat suits and the sun was beating down on them as they jumped and danced. Some of them were as red as tomatoes, and sweating buckets. The teachers were all going around with waterbottles dumping water in kids mouths.

After we had lunch, they brought us over to a tiny little "mudpond," which was a small cement pool built into the ground, with about 5 inches of water in it. There were mudfish, which kind of look like little eels, swimming everywhere. The kids got to take off their socks and shoes, and wade around trying to catch the fish. I had one student who was absolutely terrified of getting in the water with those fish. I asked if she would get in if I went in, totally thinking she would say no way, but sure enough she said okay, and I had to take off my socks and shoes, roll up my pants and get in that water. I carried her in, but she freaked out whenever I started to put her down. Eventually she let me put her down, but the moment a fish swam over her foot she jump on me again. Other kids had a ton of fun. The boy in the picture that is holding the fish ended up basically sitting down in the water and playing. We found out later that his mom, knowing her son, had sent an extra set of clothes with him, something that we were really greatful for.

the boy with the Yankees cap on is a three year old who was on the bus with my class going to the field trip. At one point I took his hat, put it on my head, and made him say "Go Yankees!" to get it back. He ended up giving me his hat again and again just so that he would have to say "Go Yankees!" again and again. I also ended up with three other kids giving me thier hat so that they could have a chance to say it. This was one of my favorite parts of the whole field trip!






Nepal Trip, Part 2

On our first day of "treking," we were going to take a couple hour jeep ride to a village, and leave from there. Jeeps there are kind of like taxis. They are available for hire, and usually leave the larger city once or twice a day to head out to the villages. The first jeep that we hired made it about 50 feet before breaking down. They then spent about an hour under the hood, and got a mechanic out. We drew a crowd while they were trying to get it working, including this little boy in the red shirt. It finally got started and we headed up the mountain. We made about another 200 yards before it broke down again. We finally called another and had another jeep come down from the village up the mountian. They said that they would be about an hour. That hour ended up being more like three or four hours. We finally got going up the mountain 5 hours after we had started. The road going up the mountain was like nothing that I have ever been on before. There is really no way to describe to you how bumpy and uncomfortable it was. We were sitting in the back of this jeep on two metal benches, haning on to a bar mounted on the roof with all our might. The road had ruts that were 2 feet deep, and the mud was crazy. If you know what the driveway that goes up to my dads house is like, think about a road that is ten times worse, and goes on for 6 hours. We got stuck in the mud multiple times. Everyone just got out and pushed. If we passed someone who was walking up the road, they would just jump in the back , or climb on the top, which creeped us out at first. I have no idea how someone stayed on the top with out falling off, but multiple guys did it. One time we ran out of gas. A jeep who was headed down stopped to give us some. We used empty water bottles and a big kitchen bowl, and leaves that were used as a funnel to transfer it from their jeep to ours. I can't say that I have ever done anything like the jeep rides that we had there. They were long and bumpy, often times we were 2 inches from the side of the road that dropped hundreds of yards down the mountain, and people were jumping in and out as we went.
We finally got to the village that we were going to stay at that night right as it was getting dark. This is the home that we stayed in. It was a very nice home in the village. We found out that it had been built 150 years ago. The building had been built with rocks that they had stacked and cemented together, and the roof was very typical sheets of metal. It was the families home, but they cleared out two of their rooms for us to use. The room that I was in was about six feet by eight feet. We fit four of us in it! We were extremely sore that night, but it was from bumping up and down on metal benches for hours, instead of treking like we had expected!

Nepal

I got back from Nepal at the beginning of the week. The whole experience was completely amazing and really changed my whole perspective of the world.

We spent the first night in Kathmandu. The children who live in Mountain Child's Children's Home came to welcome us that evening. We had an amaznig praise and worship time with them, and then had time to play with them and get to know them a little. Some of the children have such amazing stories. All of the kids at the home (called the RANCH, Remote Area of Nepal Children's Home) were taken from villages where they were in situations of immediate danger. One child contracted an eye infection while living in the village. Having no doctors, her parents brought her to the local witch doctor. The witch doctor, deciding that she had a demon in her, poured boiling water over her face to exercise it. Another boy has a father who remarried after his mother passed away. In their culture, when a man remarries, his children become slaves to his new wife. He was living in a cage when a group from Mountain Child came to his village and brought him back to the RANCH. Many other children would have otherwise been sold into the sex trade industry if we hadn't brought them to the home. All of the kids had such amazing stories and amazing passions for their faith. They all called me Stacie Auntie, and I had a few letters from them waiting for me from them before we left to go treking the next morning.

The next morning we started treking into the Himalayas. We hiked into areas of the mountains that have no electricity and no water. They cook over fires in the middle of thier homes. In the villages, we stayed in peoples homes. They literally cleared out their rooms so that we would have a place to stay. We were able to share the Gospel with people who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ before. It was completely overwhelming, and it was hard to figure out where to even start. We had an amazing local guide named Ram who translated for us. Everyone spoke Nepali in addition to their own regional dialect. Ram was great at filling in all the things that we were missing when we shared. We also passed out really basic medications and did first aide for the people who needed it. When we left the villages, many times they gave us all flowers, and danced as we left. A few times they asked us to stay longer and and tell more stories.

Everywhere we went, I gave the kids little glittery heart stickers. They absolutely loved them. Often times after I gave a child a sticker, they would dissappear for a couple of minutes, only to return with a crowd of children looking for the person giving out the stiky shiny things. The kids were so adorable. It was heartbreaking seeing the sores and illnesses that they had, and not being able to do more. Half of the children in the Himalayas will die by the time they are 8 because of contaminated water. There is so much more work to do in this area of the world.

The treking was amazing. We spent hours hiking though jungle terrain. Everyone got some leaches. I was lucky and only ended up with four. The other hiking team averaged about 100 leaches each. The views that we had were breathtaking. I have so many pictures that it is almost rediculous. Most of the time the higher peaks were covered by clouds, but there was a short window a couple of mornings where we could see the snow-capped mountains peaking above the clouds.

I could go on telling stories for pages and pages, but think I will stop here. Maybe I will continue telling more specific stories and sharing pictures. Those of you with facebook can check out the pictures that I have posted there. The program that I went with is called Mountain Child. It was started by my pastor 13 years ago. You can check out their website at http://www.mountainchild.org/. The website doesn't mention anything about it's ministry because it is illegal to evangelize in Nepal, so he has to keep it on the Downlow.

Happy Birthday Leeann!