Hey everyone! I’m sorry that it has been a while. Everything has just been so hectic recently. I’m back from India. India. Where to begin? I don’t really know where to start and there is so many things that happened that I don’t want to bore you with small things so I hope that you get an idea of what my outreach was like with this. There is so much that happened on outreach that I know for me to tell it all is going to take a number of blog posts so please, be patient and stick with me on this and you will see the amazing things that God has done in my life.
I left New Zealand on the 26th of November on route to India. My flight had a three hour layover in Thailand and after that we finally made it to India. Our flight arrived in Calcutta at three in the morning so everything was dark and scary. Being in a foreign country at night for the first time was pretty creepy. We were taken from the airport to where we were staying which was a guest floor at a girls school called Lee Memorial Girls School. We arrived there in the middle of the night and there were crows cawing and goats wandering the streets and lots of homeless people who looked very creepy walking about. The first thought that I had about India was ‘what did I just get myself into?’
The first five days that we were there we basically got used to India and how different it is from any country that I have been to before. We went shopping in the area known as ‘New Market’ and we spent a lot of time praying about our time in India, that it would be fantastic and that we would be effective in whatever we do and that we would be able to help as many people as we could. After we had kinda gotten used to India and Calcutta and the people here we left on a train with Darjeeling as our destination. The train only took between ten and twelve hours to arrive. The trains in India are not like the trains back home. They are overcrowded, they smell terrible, they are way too hot, and they aren’t safe because there is no privacy. The train left at ten at night so it was an all night train ride, which is usually a good thing but I’m not sure if it is a good thing in India because anyone can walk onto the train and into your car and take your stuff when you aren’t looking. Luckily nothing got stolen throughout our entire train experience, experience is the best way to say it because that is just what it is, an experience. Myles and I decided to try to stay up all night to make sure everyone and everything was safe after we had a lovely encounter with some transvestites. It was not as exciting as it sounds. We didn’t make it the whole night but once we saw a man walking around with a shotgun we felt safe enough to go to sleep.
That next morning we arrived in New Jalpaiguri which is the closest train station to Darjeeling, from there we had to take a three hour car ride up the mountain to Darjeeling. The road to Darjeeling was crazy. We hired two Sumo’s which are basically jeeps that can hold twelve people, not comfortably I might add but it can hold twelve people. The entire car ride was extremely bumpy and cramped. After three hours of sitting in the crowded car we finally made it to Darjeeling. When we heard that we were going to Darjeeling we were told that it was going to be cold but we all of us thought that it couldn’t be that bad, it was India, but when we actually got there we basically froze. Darjeeling, for those of you who don’t know, is situated in the Himalayas near Mount Everest and right next to Kangchenjunga which is the third tallest mountain in the world for those of you who didn’t know. Even thought Darjeeling is so close to Everest I actually never got to see it because the weather was so bad that the clouds blocked everything. We arrived in Darjeeling on a Thursday and took all of Friday to do a scavenger hunt so that we could get to know the city. Later that night we went to a village outside of Darjeeling. To get to the village we had to walk for a long time, and when I say that we walked for a long time I mean it. It must’ve been for at least three hours that we walked just to get to the village and, if you figure that you walk between three and four miles an hour, we walked at least ten miles.
We went to the village to help out and encourage a woman who was trying to start a school there for all of the children. While there we were not only able to spend time with the kids and see how amazing they are, but we were also able to go out into surrounding villages which had never heard the gospel message before and share it with them. We stayed in the village for two nights and on the last day before we left all of the guys were asked to stay behind to help with some work that was needed to be done while all of the girls were able to go to church with the children. While the girls were at church we guys helped dig and fill a place for a chicken coop which took most of the morning. After we had finished with that we were asked to go to someone’s house to have a small church meeting with them. We were able to share a testimony and a story from the Bible and explain it. We also sang a song for them which was interesting because the guitar that they had was so out of tune that it couldn’t be fixed without taking some time to do so, so we four guys sang a cappella to them. After we had finished sharing with them they asked us to come into their back room and pray for a woman who was bedridden because of a problem with her spine. We were able to pray for here and after we had done so she had told us that some of the pain had gone down. When we had finished with the people in the house we were asked again to come to another spot to pray for some land and, as we followed the man who had asked us to come. an uneasy feeling came over all of us. The land that we were asked to pray over had been the home of an alcoholic and drug addict and everyone who had stepped onto the land could feel the presence of something evil. We had been asked to pray over the land because some of the men in the village were wanting to build a church on that property. We prayed over the land and when we had finished doing that we left the village and made our way back into Darjeeling.
Over the next week we partnered with YWAM Darjeeling to help them with the Christmas festival that was going on during the week. In the mornings we would have devotions and then we would practice for our program in the Christmas festival. One of the main things that we practiced was the Lifehouse Everything skit. It was the main focus of our program on the festival and I got to act out Jesus in the skit. It was a lot of fun. There was a lot of spiritual warfare going on the whole time we were in Darjeeling. Over the week we helped the YWAM Darj team with setup and preparations for the festival and with advertising for it. By advertising I mean that we handed out free chai tea and biscuits and invited people to come to the Christmas festival. On Monday, for the beginning of the festival, the two other guys on my team and I dressed up as the three wise men for a living nativity scene. On Thursday we performed our program for the festival and it went really well. Thankfully the lights and sound didn’t go out on us because it had been happening the whole week and it was making everything really frustrating. Our program turned out really well, we performed the Lifehouse Everything skit and afterwards we were told that some people we brought to tears. We also had a few of my teammates give their testimony and the Gospel message and there were at least five hundred people that got to hear it. The day after that, Friday, we headed back down the mountain to catch the train back to Calcutta and that was the end of our adventures in Darj.
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