Before anything, I need to apologize, the blog that I meant to post the day before we left for India never posted, so no one was aware of the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to post for the past month. But now that the blog is posted, you can read about the last bit of Nicaragua if you want to. So, from December 18 to January 21, my squad and I were in India for the past month! During this time, our squad was split by teams all over the country, so my team was in Kolkata on the very far west side and the third largest city in India! And by that, I mean that there were 15 million people, just a mere 5x the amount in Iowa! So as you can imagine, it was the opposite of the quiet farm we had been on for the two months before. We stayed in an Airbnb on a bustling road with dogs constantly barking, people yelling and horns honking. We had a small kitchen with no oven or fridge, which made making our meals quite the experience. But luckily, there is an app called swiggy on which you can order groceries or food from restaurants and it will arrive within 10 minutes! Our team got very well acquainted with this app, and we are so thankful for it, I honestly don’t know what we would’ve done without it!
Because we were there during the Christmas season, we didn’t do much ministry for the first few weeks but got to experience much of the city dazzling in Christmas lights. Turns out that in India, Christmas is a pretty big thing, and many people celebrate and know about Jesus; just don’t think that He is God. One fun thing that we got to do was wear saris on Christmas! But then we had to perform in front of the whole church in them, which was quite the experience, but also really fun!
After Christmas, ministry started to become more regular and scheduled. During the week, we would do ministry from 2-10, which was also an adjustment compared to Nicaragua and hard for me as I’m usually in bed by 9! We would walk to the bus stop and wait for the colorful, packed bus to come by, then we would wiggle our way on and hope there was a bar for us to grab onto so that we wouldn’t fall over, which did indeed happen a few times. Then, we would wiggle our way off the bus and walk to our host’s church in the slums. At the church, which functioned as a community center during the week, we would teach classes, and build relationships with the students. We would work there until 5:30ish and then go upstairs for tea and play spoons, a game we taught all our friends there. Then we would walk, sometimes for an hour to a house visit. Sometimes we would take an auto/tuk-tuk, or ride the bus, but usually, we’d walk. At the houses, we would worship, share testimonies, and give a message. Then the family would serve us dinner. Usually, dinner at house visits consisted of rice, more rice, curry, more curry, Dahl (lentil soup), and more Dahl. And typically by the end, my nose was runny horribly because of how spicy it was. After dinner, we would walk back to the church, maybe try some street food on the way, and then head to the bus stop to go home at 10.
On Sundays, we would babysit for our American ministry hosts who hosted house fellowship with another missionary friend they had. We would babysit the whole day so the parents could go out and have a break from the kids. Babysitting was lots of fun and I grew close with the kids.
On Mondays we had sabbath and on Saturdays, we had Adventure Day. For that, we did many things. One week we took the train up the river and went to a small tourist town and did a tour of all the places where missionaries had lived and done work, I learned a lot that week and our tour guide was Dutch so I got to talk to them about Pella and how I am also dutch! Another week we went to Victoria Memorial, a huge monument that was built while the British still ruled over India, we also visited St. Paul’s beautiful cathedral. And one week we even went to a circus! Some other fun things we got to do were going to a temple, which was interesting, but also really hard to see, going to a flower market, visiting an international trade fair, shopping at huge malls, and going to a movie.
Overall, India was great and we grew much closer as a team, and also grew very close with our American hosts and their kids, making it really hard to leave.
More to come in my next blog with what the Lord was doing in me and prayer requests.
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