So today is my day to stay home and watch the house while everyone else goes to the house of the elderly. I wanted to take some time and write about what is going on.

We are beginning to build relationships in the neighborhood. Raj is one of the guys I lived with at Ivenwold. Raj has a girlfriend named Deepa.  Her mother owns a little shop about 50 feet from our front door so we go visit her often, sit on her steps, and drink Fanta.  She has “adopted” us for our time here (making her our Nepali mother) and asking us to call her Ama.  We’ve also met a local boy with some mental difficulties who we see pretty often named Suman.  It’s been kind of fun to feel part of a neighborhood that is so foreign. There are 4 guys that are here in the house all the time, and many others come from everywhere just to be with us, serve with us, and eat with us. All the Nepali guys here are very close; they have known each other for at least 10 years if not their entire lives.

We are still having a hard time serving… how do you serve servants???  It is funny to watch the different ways we try so hard.  Tim has gone nuts diving into his interior decorator mode by rearranging and building things to fix up the kitchen and make everything look nicer.  He is the same old Tim plugging away with his little projects and focusing on every detail. My friend Jordan wrote this about me  “Wes, as usual, goes straight after the hardest work.  We swept the whole house two days ago with a bunch of weeds tied together.  I think that just about drove him nuts.  But when we got into shoveling and moving cement, he was the first one to pick up the heavy loads and haul them up and down the six flights of stairs in the house.”  As for Jordan he is the one that is really working on the relationships with the guys. Even though we are trying to serve and love these guys, we are still much more served than we serve. One of the Neapli guys, Digi, insists on making us a gourmet breakfast every morning the first week we were there, when none of the Nepali’s even eat breakfast at all.  We told him the other night that we came to be his brother, not his guest, but he still insists on treating us a little like a guest.  The other guys are beginning to change, but Digi is a little more hard headed. I think we also bring an element of unity to the house.  The guys seem to come together better with us around.  We’ve also stirred up a lot of action in the house. We are getting things done with the house and we are working on the relationships here.

It’s a little hard writing this over several days as so much is going on. We went caving, to which I, by far, prefer Colorado caves (namely Fulford).  But nonetheless it was fun to go out and get dirty with the guys and go on somewhat of a bonding adventure.  Afterwards was our first house meeting.  Ohh man, the house meeting was probably our biggest shock out of all of the Nepali culture shocks.  It was always something of a foundation for Ivanwold that we are open and vulnerable with where we are at and what is going on inside of ourselves. Its hard because the guys here put on huge mask and pretend everything if great. There is no concept of reconciliation, vulnerability, or openness.  This was a shock to us at the first house meeting and made us realize how much we came to bring here and not simply be apart of an already operating house.  This was the first real answer to our, “how do you serve a servant?” question.  I really can’t go too much further into it than that without breaking confidence, but it is an area where we are facing many walls that won’t come down all at once.  It is an, or perhaps the, area where we most need prayer.  Ivanwold, we will count on you specifically for that.

Anyway, these are some of our daily challenges: only eating one real meal a day maybe two, short beds, hard mattresses, sharing beds, the combination of the previous three, no electricity, getting water out of the well, not having flushing toilets, walking everywhere, rats in the house, dust and pollution (still my biggest one), hand-washing dishes, clothes and people out of bowls of water drawn up from the well, as well as unreliable electricity. (Haha! the power just went out and Tim’s “NOOOOOOOO” just echoed through the house… this makes construction stuff and work hours on the house very difficult to coordinate).  The challenges make us more intentional about everything we do during the day and we are all learning not to take different things for granted.

This is what a basic week looks like here.

Monday:  Work in house, clean, work on bathroom, plant garden etc.

Tuesday:  Hindu temple and serving at the old age home.

Wednesday:  Early Bible study then work in the neighborhood cleaning up trash

Thursday:  Work at a street-kids home

Friday:  Back to old age home, back to street kids home in the afternoon

Saturday:  Church, house meeting, and rest

Sunday:  Guys go out and have fun together

That (above) is what went on our first two weeks here, So on to what’s going on now? We have just finished the cement floor in the guest room, next we need to paint it and then we are getting furniture… So that room is almost done. Some of the other things we are working on is getting a water tank (that goes on top of the house) so we can have running water (kind of) in the house. Also, we are trying to get a solar water heater so we can have warm water. We are trying to get a water pump so we can pump the water out of the well to the tank. We can only use the well water for cleaning and flushing the toilets.  We also have a reserve tank that we call a truck to come and fill up with clean water. That’s the water that goes threw the solar heater. After that, we want to put doors and windows in on the second floor, as well as electricity. The second floor is all ready done so if we can get the electricity, doors, and windows, then we will have four more rooms that people can live in.

We had our second house meeting last Saturday, it went better then the first, the guys opened up a tiny tiny bit more which was really cool so see and lead the guys here to do that.

Remember the truth and forget the lies.

Speakintruth