hey! I’ve been in Myanmar for about 2 weeks now. I have a week and a half (I think) left here. I don’t have a poetic blog for you, so here’s kinda what I’ve been up to:
Getting here took 18 hours on a bus. 6 hours from Chiang Mai to the border. We arrived there at 6am and walked across the border into Myanmar with all of our stuff. I have never been so sweaty in my entire life. The border crossing man took a picture of me filling out my visa….I don’t know why. I hope I looked good lol. After that we somehow managed to get to our bus station that was pretty much just a patch of sidewalk and got on another bus for 12 hours to Yangon. A 12 hour bus ride is easy money at this point. Eventually we made it to Yangon and made it to our motel.
For the first few days we couldn’t leave our motel because we couldn’t go anywhere without our ministry host. We just sat in the motel and rested. A few days later however our ministry host randomly picked us up and brought us to the orphanage we would be working in to make floral arrangements for a funeral the next day. One of the boys from the orphanage had died in a sudden accident. They invited us to the funeral, which was our first time meeting everyone living at the orphanage. We made our debut singing cornerstone at the funeral. The funeral shook me up. This boy would have been one of our students. Life can end in the matter of seconds.
I was also shook up because the cemetery was a very accurate picture of how Christians are treated here in Myanmar. The cemetery was split in two. One side for Buddhists, one side for Christians. The Buddhist side was peaceful and scattered with flowers. The Christian side was a literal dump, mountains of trash and random dogs running around everywhere.
After the funeral I was struck by the need of these people and my inability to help. However, The day before our first day of ministry at the orphanage I was reading Daniel. I was reading in the first chapter about the qualifications and standards of the men who were chosen to teach the language and literature of the Babylonians to the King. I was struck by the honor bestowed to these men. I know they probably did more than teach the Babylonian language to the King, but The Lord highlighted the importance that, in my case, teaching English is. My team is alone at this ministry, every team is spread out across Yangon, but every team is teaching English. English opens so many doors to these kids. Knowing English opens up doors to jobs, access to information from the outside world for them. Teaching English opens up a door to share the gospel for us.
Ultimately, teaching English is an honor and a privilege that the Lord thinks I am worthy of. I am not qualified, I got a 2 on my AP Lit test I think, but the Lord knows what I am capable of. Turns out I am capable of being a pretty good English teacher! And he delights in me for that!
So, for the past two weeks I have been teaching English to the older kids at the orphanage. We spend our days playing hangman, writing plays, talking about bananas and learning how to form a sentence. The language barrier gets smaller daily. I love them and I am so proud of them. They are really smart and very fast learners, the only thing they aren’t very good at is remembering my name. They think my name is Mary….yah I don’t know. Some things I’m not good at teaching.
Ultimately, Myanmar has been a time. I have no words to describe what it’s like. I described it to ones of my friends as “what you would expect India to be like but with less people. Where we are is not westernized at all. We cause a scene because I don’t think they have seen white people before. It also smells like smoked meat and people associate American culture with minions.” It’s weird. it’s fun. I experienced a lot of culture shock. I don’t want to leave.
