June 20: My mama dropped me off at LAX for my first flight to Hong Kong. I ran into most of my teammates (Rob, Katie, Peter, and Haley) pretty immediately. Poor Katie had to miss our flight because her plane from home was still taxiing around. It was like a fifteen hour flight to Hong Kong, most of which I slept, largely due to the amazingness of NyQuil (praise JESUS for Nyquil. It's seriously like the best thing ever!). I was only awake for like three hours total. It was awesome. I hate flying, so sleeping was perfect.
June 22: So, because of the time difference we skipped Thursday (the 21st). Let me tell you--weird. Very weird. We arrived in Hong Kong and quickly met up with Katie! We then flew to Singapore--amazing city. Absolutely gorgeous! We really had about fifteen minutes in Singapore before we were whisked off to ******, a second world island. We got off the ferry and all of us took a huge breath of the hot and humid air in. I can proudly announce that my first breath of Indonesian air included a big bug. Yep. Right down my throat. Lovely. We got our visas and left for the house that we would live in for the next few days during our language training. We met up with the other teams, had icky tuna fish pizza for dinner, and crashed. I felt miserably jet lagged. So tired!
June 23: Today was the first day for language training. I, who am not super good at remembering foreign languages as it is, had a super hard time the entire time we were learning. Although I knew that we would use almost 100% of what our guides were teaching us, I honestly remembered very little. And by very little, I mean I could say "Halo/hai, nama saya Margie" or, in English, "Hello/hi, my name is Margie." Pathetic. For lunch, they served us some rainbow noodles and a huge tortilla-sized ship with a ball of chicken in the middle--delicious. It was so sweltering outside that day, and especially after the ramen!, that we visited a local pool to go swimming. One of the girls on our team we suspected of having pink eye, despite her denying it. I and the girls on my team felt badly, but we had to avoid letting our eyes get in the water. After about three hours of swimming, we went back to our house to change for dinner with one of the families who started the mission program. We had hot dogs (American food!!) for dinner and played a super fun game called "Family". Seriously. You should look it up.
(Rainbow noodles!)
June 24: Another day of language training! Again, this meant that I was sitting there, furiously writing notes, and remembering nothing of what was being taught. It stinks. They served us our first Indonesian meal today--chicken, potatoes, tempeh, some strange African green veggie, and tofu.
We took a nap after lunch and went on a "scavenger hunt". By "scavenger hunt", they really meant "let's go shopping for souvenirs". It thought it was great! I got a sarong for the beaches and showers (more on the showers later). We went out to dinner at a little Indonesian restaurant and ate noodles and chicken chips.
June 25: Last day of language training! Finally...after a quick cornbread breakfast, we left the house for the boat terminal. When we got there, much to my dismay, we had to throw our luggage over the side of the dock, down about four feet, and into the arms of the guy driving the boat. It would have been more than easy to drop the bags into the water...so scary. We, fortunately, got to climb on to the boat. It was only like an our hour and a half before we reached our home base. ****** is seriously one of the most gorgeous places I've ever been--white sands, big forest, super warm sea. Stunning. When we arrived, some ladies were waiting for us with this odd little orange sparkly juice thingy and warm rags to wipe off our salty faces. We all sat down to lunch (poppy seed chicken, some gross fish--news flash, I hate fish--, rice, and the weird African green veggie again. From there we had our code language briefing. We learned what words not to use ever and what words to replace those with. (Again, for security reasons, I'm not going to go in to specifics about what our code was. I would be delighted to sit down and share with whomever though!) After the briefing, Katie and I took a swim in the South China Sea. Guys, this water is WARM. Like 75/80 degrees. And it's super salty. No need to tread water very much at all. It's wonderful. We had a quick dinner (fried shrimp, curry beef, wheat flat bread, and vegetables stir fried in coconut milk) before we had out last meeting for the day. In this meeting we compared Islam and Christianity and two different approaches to evangelism. The two approaches say (#1) "Christianity is right; Islam is wrong. You should be a Christian or you're going to Hell"--basically--and (#2) "Both our religions have crap about them. Let's look at them together." Obviously the second one is a way better basic approach to have (mind, those aren't opening lines; more just mindsets).
(There go the bags!)
(Orange fizzy drink thing!)
June 26: Because of being jet lagged a little bit still, I woke up early to see a gorgeous sunrise. One of the guides and workers at ******, came to share about Islam with us. He was a Muslim man until he found God. He stressed the point that what Islam is in the Al Qur'an and what the Muslim teachers preach are two very different religions. He told us that in their culture, whatever the teachers say must be taken as true no matter what and, because the Qur'an is in Arabic, not in Bahasa Indonesia--their language, nobody can, or is even allowed to challenge them. The Qur'an does actually claim that Jesus is the Christ and that he is messenger and Messiah. It also correctly says that Jesus rose from the dead (Qur'an, Surah 19:30-35). ****** firmly believes that a Muslim can to go Heaven as long as he believes in Isa al Masih (Jesus Christ) and, after this amazing orientation, so do I. This was by far my favorite meeting. I learned so much! For the rest of the day, we did very little other than relaxing and packing to leave for our first island on the 27th!
(Gorgeous said sunrise.)
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