Leaving Nepal

Wow. It's over. I'm in the airport waiting to head out to Thailand! I can't believe it's already here, these past weeks feel like they flew now that I think about it. Even though the time felt slow during our time in Nepal, looking back it seems like just yesterday that we were in Perth talking about everything that we were going to do. And now it's almost over! Just 29 days till I'm back in Perth and then only 12 till I'm back home! I feel like I should be more excited to be home than I actually am.. I'm so excited to see my family and sleep in my own bed and cook and go back to work, but I'm not looking forward to leaving all of my amazing friends that I have made on this journey and to leave all the adventures that I have experienced.

Anyways these past two weeks were so much fun! We went to a district called Surkhet and it was my favorite place that I've been to so far in Nepal. We stayed at the YWAM base there and they took such great care of us! We each had our own, fairly comfy, bed and a big bathroom where we could take really nice bucket showers. Everyday they cooked us amazing food; at each meal we were excited to see what it would be because every time it was so good! Especially breakfast, we had delicious oatmeal one day which I had been missing a lot because I haven't had it since Perth, they also made us French toast which was incredible, especially when you dip it into your milk tea, one interesting breakfast food that we had was cornflakes with hot milk. It sounds pretty gross, but it actually was really tasty, it was actually better then cornflakes with cold milk. So yes, we were really well taken care of in Surkhet, the only thing we didn't have was wifi, which was actually a blessing. It's nice to not have the distraction of the internet all the time.

Ministry was awesome in Surkhet! We did a lot of open airs, which is where we draw a big crowd by singing a song or doing a dance or a drama and then we hit the people with the gospel. It's possibly one of my favorite things to do. In total, we preached the gospel to 440 people. It was so much fun, usually we would act out the story of Jonah, which it would narrate, and then afterwards someone would stand up and preach the gospel. I have really grown to love telling people about God's love for them, it seems like whenever I share it, I grow to love it more. We definitely planted a lot of seeds in Surkhet and I'm excited for the teams that come in the future to reap the harvest.

We were also able to use sports as ministry! That was so much fun because that has been our goal since the beginning, we are the sports dts after all. We played soccer almost everyday that we had ministry. There was a soccer "field" about a 7 minute walk from the base, it was just a huge dirt filed that had soccer goals on either side. The first and second time that we played we just played local people from the village and each time we beat them pretty badly. I don't think they liked that very much so on the third day we came to the field and there were lots of really talented looking soccer players all with cleats and socks and all their gear. I was pretty intimidated because I knew that it was going to be a really hard toe hour game ahead of us. I was right. It turned out that we were playing the best players from the Surkhet soccer clubs and it was our turn to lose badly. We still had lots of fun though and every time we played we attracted a huge crowd of spectators. So the last day we took advantage of the huge crowd and told them why we are here and we preached the gospel to them, it was a really good opportunity.

That was basically our trip in away, the bus ride to and from turned out to only be 14 hours instead of 25 which was a blessing I guess. It was definitely not like a Coach bus in the states, but I wasn't really expecting that. The bus probably would have been so much better if they didn't blast nepali music the whole time or play bizarre Hindi movies, but at least we had our own seats and wifi, so I'm not going to complain too much. H

Here are a few pictures from surkhet, there are many more but I don't have them yet.

This was the soccer field and my team before one of our games :)

This was on one of our ministry days, we went to pray for this family at their house and they served us tea, which is typical nepali culture.

This was at a restaurant after a night of youth fellowship, we ate lots and lots of momos and I got chicken butter masala with some naan bread, so delicious!

Well that's all for now. I'm about to board my flight! Be praying for our team, especially against sickness, I'm getting over some type of stomach thing right now and it's really hard to do any ministry when you're sick. Hopefully I'll be able to blog soon and tell you about Thailand!

Bon voyage!

Xo, Helen