Confession time, we’re actually already on our way to Cambodia, and I haven’t written anything about Vietnam yet! (update – I wrote these next few blogs on the way to Cambodia, but we’ve been in Cambodia for a little under a week now and I’m taking the once in a lifetime opportunity of not even really having the option of wifi (we traveled a pretty long way to get to this coffee shop)) Oops. But there are some things that I’m excited to talk about in Vietnam, and so here we go.
Law of the Land
First of all, it took about 25 hours of plane flights and a 20 hour bus ride to get to our ministry spot. Longest travel time of my life – it took like three days to get there, but it was a good time. Anyway, heading into Vietnam, there was one thing that really set a fire under us as far as ministry goes, and that is the government’s hostility towards the Gospel. Here’s a little breakdown of some of the things we were told…
- It’s illegal to be a foreign “missionary” in Vietnam, so all the ones there are there on work visas, and we got in with tourist ones
- Bring up the word missionary or mission with a stranger will, at best, turn them off to anything else you have to say, and at worst, get you into some trouble
- If a random person comes up and asks you about church or about what you believe, avoid the question cause only the police would ask you that
- There was a girls team working with Cru in the same city as us, and we weren’t really allowed to talk them much if we saw them on the street, cause Cru is heavily monitored by the government, and implying our ministry host by association could get his visa rejected next year
- Regular gatherings of more than 15 people have to be approved by the government, and so technically the English club that we were apart of for our time there could have been broken up
These things sound pretty scary or restrictive… but realistically, with the way we approached our ministry, they didn’t affect us that much.
The rules meant though, that there are not really any ministry organizations there (save one or two like Cru), and so basically we were just living normal life with a higher purpose. For a little background, we were in a city called Đà Nẵng with five other teams, but we were all split up around the city with different hosts. It’s a relatively touristy place since it’s on the beach, and so a lot of people spoke at least a little bit of English. Our hosts name was Sherman, he is from Texas, and he runs an English club. Also, something super interesting about the Vietnamese, is that they love the beach, but they also want to keep their skin as light as possible so it doesn’t look like they work in a rice field. How do they satisfy both desires? Great question. They wake up really early.
Morning Ministry #1
Part of our ministry for the first couple weeks included us waking up at 5:30 to be at the beach with the Vietnamese to try to make friends playing volleyball or doing yoga. About halfway through our time we dropped it though, cause we realized that they’re out there to play volleyball and do yoga, not to talk to some random tourists on the beach. (We also got kicked out of quite a few of our own volleyball games when they saw we weren’t very good 😂) And so as fun as it was, that wasn’t the most fruitful time for us.
Morning Ministry #2
The next morning activity Sherman had planned for us was for us to find a local coffee shop and becoming a regular there. The goal was to try to build relationships with the owners and other regulars there, to the point of being able to share the Jesus as a part of ourselves as they got to know us. For most of my team, this didn’t come to much either for various reasons, but there was this one place that I started going to regularly that had the potential for being a great ministry opportunity.
My first day there I got into a conversation with this younger middle aged lady named Phước (or something like that) who spoke really good English. I talked to her for probably an hour and a half or so, and come to find out that it was actually her aunt and cousin who own the coffee shop, her other cousin who owns the minimart next door, and her own house next door to that. So her whole family owned this corner of this block and ran a few different businesses out of it. I also find out that her and her family aren’t Buddhist, like most of the people there, but from what I understood they did do some sort of ancestral worship. I was super encouraged by our conversation and committed to telling her about Jesus next time I saw her. I went there almost every morning for the next two weeks, also stopping in at the mart when I could to get her family to like me. (They didn’t really speak English though, and so I wasn’t able to get more than their names in conversation with them). The whole time I was just hoping and praying I’d see her back, but unfortunately I never did. Maybe someone else down the road will get the opportunity to share with her.
Coffee shop ministry started to fade as well as we got into our last week and a half unfortunately… until Nick and I approached it from a different perspective. But I’ll talk about that in another blog.
I know I didn’t get very far in this one, cause I have a lot more to share, but stay tuned, cause there’s good stuff coming up.
As it turns out, we also didn’t get very many pictures of coffee shop stuff, but the really be more of those later as well.
In Christ,
Jackson
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