Humbled by love

I cannot describe the humbling that has been happening this past weekend here in Nepal and on my team. I have been praying for unity in our team and this weekend was our first meeting including our host family and the walls that have been torn down in a matter of hours is amazing! We debriefed again (the 7 team members) and thoughts were revealed and more barriers broken. Thank you for your prayers and and great thanks to the one God who is teaching us and myself his grace.

In other news, my team went to church on Saturday and it was in English so it was a lot easier to follow (my Nepalese is pretty good just not good enough). After church we went to a Hindu temple which is known as the monkey temple which was very interesting to experience an intimate place of another religion. Sunday was great to go shopping in Timel (the tourist place of Nepal). Most of the team members and I finished shopping for friends and relatives. I loved experiencing the weather, we go into one store while it was sunny and come out five minutes later into pouring rain, go in the next door and come out sunny again. Bishwa and Romila (our host family) say it is monsoon season in Nepal so that explains it I suppose.

School with the 8th graders is going wonderfully! I have the oldest group so they know a lot of English but have trouble putting sentences together. My approach is to try to teach the story telling so they understand how dialogue works so when they are speaking they think back to the dialogues they have put together. Today, however, I forgot my lesson plan notebook at the house so I had up with something quick! While I was with the 7th graders and Madi was teaching I decided to go over sounds of the alphabet and the unique ones, especially the sounds I hear the Nepali people struggle with like 'th' and 'z'. The lesson went wonderfully! I noticed the most struggle with 's' vs. 'sh' but other than that I felt the individuals who were pronouncing it incorrectly found the error and did their best to correct it. I will review and finish the rest of the sounds tomorrow then return to story telling plan, if I remember my notebook. There is a Hindu festival this week so no school Thursday and Friday thus I will need to work with the shortened week. This festival has to do with people remembering their lost family members of the past year and taking "holy" cows while wearing masks down the street similar to a parade, we'll see.

Your prayers are still much appreciated. Thank you.