INDIA 2009
I'm in the midst of all those little kids with a green toque on :) I just came back from India and it was definitely an incredible time. It is hard to sum up my experience in just writing it down. There are so many things that happened that I experienced that are so hard to put in words. mmmmm so WOW...so I don't even know where to start. India was incredible. SO many things that I saw shook my world. I am forever changed. My experience in India was an unforgettable one. I got to explore around in Delhi and we made our way northern as well. We took a long train ride. I will never forget that day. I stared out the train window for hours looking at the people and their living conditions and seeing so many people wandering around in India. I have never been exposed to such poverty ever in my life. My eyes were opened so big to how fortunate and lucky I am with the smallest things that I have. As I sat on that long train ride that day I had a lot of questions come to my mind and thoughts were running through my head. Thoughts of how ungrateful as a society and people we can be for what we have. Even myself I was guilty of knowing that is how i am sometimes. It is so easy to live and go by your day to day tasks not stopping and thinking of how lucky we are. To walk the streets in India can be a scary thing. There are so many cars and people all around, every where you look there is someone either on the ground or walking around aimlessly. I really learned that there is such a bigger world out there than I really think. There is so much going on and so much poverty that yes we see on t.v. but actually seeing it with your eyes is just unbelievable. My eyes were opened so much on this trip to see things that I had never saw before. It made me have lots of questions and thoughts in my mind. How can I help the poor is one of them? Us as Christians are called to help the poor :
Deuteronomy 15:11 says,
There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.
Deuteronomy 15:11 says,
There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.
What does this mean to you? How can you help the poor? We live such comfortable lives with the basic necessities we have. When i say comfortable I mean we have clean water, hot water, beds to sleep in. There are so many poor people around the world. What can we do?
So many people in India as i walked the streets would smile when you smiled at them. The woman most times gave smiles back and I was so cheery to give kids smiles. But if you think about it, I come back to Canada and I walk the streets and I am not as cheery like that to people as I was in India. I am a cheery person but I don't walk the streets smiling at everyone. India gave me so many questions and challenged me in many ways. My heart was also wanting to give so much love to these children we met when we were hiking. They crave so much love and attention. In India we hiked for about 6 days and the view was just breathtaking! The mountains were gorgeous and there were fields of flowers in some areas as seen in this picture below:
We slept in the villages in these huts and it was really cool experience. It is crazy to think even though I left these villages that there is still people that live there. They are very isolated in a lot of these villages. We brought some gifts for the kids and handed them out in each of the places we visited. The kids were so happy and grateful for what we brought. We also played games with them and it brought them such joy! Everyone one of the children we played with were so precious.
It brought such joy when we got to play games with the children and hang out with them.
I hope that this blog post gave you a little insight on how India was for me. My heart was transformed and my eyes were opened so wide. If you have any questions feel free to ask me! I'd be happy to talk with you! Thank you for reading everyone!
Here are some photo's i included from the trip :)
Photo by:Eric JohnsonThis is the cutest baby goat I have ever seen! It was only a few days old and a few of us got to hold it when we had a lunch break on our hike we met some people! If you are looking at my arm I did not get a tattoo lol. Well I did but its washable :P
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Each time we ate on the hiking trip we had to wash our dishes. There would be helpers each meal and we would wash our dishes in buckets!
SO I guess it was blue day? I didn't get the memo haha...actually alot of people randomly wore blue and it ended up being on the same day lol
The Mountains...
We were hiking through so much snow one day! This is on of the quick shots I took on our way hiking down out of the snow. It was so beautiful the snow and such a sunny day out :) We hiked about 11 km this day, it went by fairly fast and I was kind of feeling grumpy about all the snow we were going to hike in but it ended up being so much fun and a good time and soo soo soo BEAUTIFUL! Hopefully through some of these photos you can see the beauty!
Hiking through in the early morning!
The view was breathtaking, God's creation was incredible to be surrounded by!
photo:meLove Alivia :)
