In case you didn’t know, I had the opportunity to travel to China from September 9 – 21. It was my first experience out of our country and an experience that I will never forget. I want to start off this note by stating some of the obvious things and then get to what I thought my Father was teaching me.
First, there are people EVERYWHERE! China has an estimated 1 billion people living in the country. That’s almost 3 times the amount of people we have in the States. I can understand where the value of human life has decreased over there. I don’t agree with it, but can understand it. In the city that we were in, there were about 10 million people. At least 5 million people ride a scooter. Todd would fit right in with all the Chinese. One thing I would never do over there is drive. People in China do not know how to drive. Signals and lines on the road mean absolutely nothing. I asked our connection over there about getting a license and he said that it is hard to get a license and if you can’t pass the test, you can just pay for it! Our bus driver used his horn more in the 2 weeks than I have in my entire life.
Second, the food is terrible. Granted, this is coming from someone who is already a picky eater, but I tried some things are they were for the most part, terrible. In my photo albums on Facebook, you can see what I am talking about. From the fish head and tail still attached to actual chicken feet being in the soup, I hit my gag reflex several times on this trip. My friend Wayne and I lived on crackers and water for a long period of time. There were several things that I did enjoy, like dragon fruit, fried rice (not American style) and duck. We did find a McDonalds, KFC, and Pizza Hut over there and we lived off those things for the last couple of days. Whatever weight I lost in the first week, I gained back by the time we left.
Third, the beds were hard a rock. They do not know what a comforter is. We stayed in the 3 different hotels while we were over there and all of them had beds that were hard. The bathrooms were not something to be desired as well. While the hotels had western style bathrooms (even though you couldn’t put used toilet paper in the toilet), most bathrooms out it public were what we called ‘Squatty Potty’s.’ Basically, just a hole in the ground without plumbing. They were some the nastiest things I have ever smelled.
On to the things I was taught. The verse that was stuck in my head while we traveled was, “You are his workmanship, created in Him, to DO good works which He has prepared in advance for you to do.” I was ready to get to work while I was over there. We were visiting some cities that were devastated by the earthquake on May 12, 2008. That date is being memorialized like our 9-11. Our plans were changed often on this trip. It came to be very annoying while we were there. The villages and cities that we did visit were absolutely devastated. There were several schools that collapsed and many of the victims of this disaster where children. While we were not able to do all the things we wanted, we were able to give hope and encouragement to many people that we came into contact with. Whether they were organizations that were helping with disaster, to college students, to the village people who were seeing ‘white faces’ for the first time in their lives. These organizations were starting to get discouraged because of the lack of volunteer help and so we could encourage them. We meet people who lived in portable housing that was basically a bunch of one-room homes for 40,000 people.
The main thing that I walked away with was an awareness of things much bigger than me. It was like the time I went to the Grand Canyon as a child. Our Father has great plans for China, bigger than I have ever imagined and we need to keep them in our thoughts.
