Three days on the mountain side

Where to begin? This is the trip that the youth (including my Dad) took up the mountain to a village called Gatlang. The village is made up of roughly three hundred and fifty homes, which is large for a mountain village, so we were told. We have to think that the houses are, after all, scattered across the side of a mountain. It was an amazing experience, to say the least. But it really began on the bus ride, because that ride up the mountain was an adventure in itself. We have no seat belts to begin with, but on the ride up we were crazy enough to join some of the Nepalis on the roof of the bus. We clung to those roof racks for dear life, as the bus swerved around the corners and drove dangerously close to the edge of the road, where there would be a sharp drop into the valley far below. However close we were to having a heart attack, we could still admire the beauty of the mountains towering above us, and the sight of the river flowing down the ravine at the bottom of the valley. It was sights like these that greeted us every morning at Gatlang.
The first day there, we watched a group of the villagers travelling up the mountainside, up a steep path. The path is extremely dangerous, even for them (they lost someone last year, who fell off the path) and it's a one hour climb, only to gather grass for their livestock. We found as we went through our time there that all of their life is full of adventures like this. It's daily work for them, but awe-inspiring for us. We had to hike down into the valley to get to the river below for baptisms on the last day (after we had gone on hikes both days previously!). It was killer on the legs, but worth the pain. After the baptisms, we and all the youth went swimming in the river, which was completely pure but ice-cold. I've had experiences similar to this - rock-hopping and swimming in small rapids back in Canada - but there was just something different about doing it with Nepalis, and having a mountain face on either side. It's probably imprinted in all of our memories.
As for the ministry with the people, that was the more difficult part - for me, anyways. It was more difficult because the language they speak there is Tamung, with the adults being able to speak Nepali as a second language. Whatever I wanted to say had to be translated into their second language, and so it made communciation a lot more difficult. Karina and I were working with the children on the second day. The children, of course, were not so fluent in Nepali and were only beginning to learn it. So as I did children's ministry I began to realize that Rabin, who was helping me, couldn't communicate with the kids either. He tried to translate what I was explaining (games and what not), but we couldn't even get them to understand that we wanted them to sit in a circle! All in all, though, I had a lot of fun and learned a lot about the people and how they live their lives. It's very similar to pioneer days, except put a little spin on it by placing the village on the side of a mountain. I may never see anything like it again, but what I saw I was glad to have experienced. If I could, I would relive those three days, beginning to end! (posted by Sheri)