I want you to picture this. I wake up in the morning and get out of bed. I turn to the right and walk out to my window space all the way up on the 24th floor of my high rise building. As I look out the window I can see huge buildings left and right, and all the way to the south I have a clear picture perfect view of the majestic southern mountains. I can hear children laughing, the streets from the marketplace below me bustling with activity, and the chants from the military training camp from right outside my window. I’m in Asia. Wow. That hit song from Adele takes on a whole new meaning! I really am on the other side. The other side of the world. It really hasn’t hit me yet until recently that I am actually living here! It’s crazy! Since my last e-mail update I have moved into my new apartment with my two roommates. It’s a REALLY nice place. If I were living in this type of place in the States I’d be paying a fortune, but for the most part everything here is relatively inexpensive. As of right now our routine here hasn’t really been set in stone yet. We’re still in the process of settling in and taking care of all the necessary start-up things and expenses that need to be done. So far one of the truly awesome parts about being here (besides the incredible food) has been getting my electric bike! Yup you read that right! Picture me flooring it through the crazy streets and highways of Asia zipping in and out through traffic! (Sorry Grandma I don’t want to give you a heart attack; I’ll be safe I swear!) but that thing is truly awesome! Originally we were going to get regular bikes, but our commute to the campus is just a bit too far from where we live for that to make sense so we went with electric bikes.
We’ve already been on the main campus we’ll be working out of a few times, and it is literally MASSIVE. It takes about 30 minutes to travel from one end of the campus to the other, and it has over 20,000 students. One of the most amazing things that I’ve noticed while being here is just how far out of the way the people here will go out of their way to help us. We were lost on campus trying to find a place to charge our e-bikes and we met this one student who spoke a bit of English. He literally dropped everything he was doing and jumped on the back of my bike, and pointed us out to the right building to go to so we could charge our bikes. He then refused to leave us alone until he was absolutely certain that we didn’t have any more questions, or didn’t need any more help! Things like this really amaze me. As foreigners here we really have a special kind of favor with the people. Another person just today named Steven who spoke English helped to translate for us as we were photocopying important documents that we needed to have. So far every person we’ve come across here that speaks English has gone completely out of their way to help us. It’s incredible. Throughout the remainder of this week we will be back on campus full force meeting people, and sharing about God. We’ve already had lunch with one student we met and we have a plan to meet him and a bunch of his friends again and go out to eat some hot pot later on in the week! Please pray for us that our time with him and his friends will be fruitful, and we can just love on them and share with them all about God and how much He loves them. That’s pretty much all the update I have for now but I will be back shortly when I have more to share!