travel

It's the oldest cliche in the books, and I cringe when I hear it, even more so when I actually use it myself. I just don't know where the time went! This year is flying by.

Cringe or not, it's exactly what I thought when I finally managed to open my eyes this morning, far later than the to-do list on my dresser would have liked. It's been more than two months since the HoJ and I landed ourselves back on North American soil, which means that it's high time we left it again.

We leave for Peru tomorrow.

As a farewell to my hometown which has treated us so well since we've been back, we wandered down to the local Chinese restaurant for the lunch special yesterday. I've been eating there since I was young, and I've recently introduced the HoJ to their pork fried rice. He is now, understandably, a die-hard fan.

Once our bellies were filled and we had our little cups of tea in front of us, we cracked open our fortune cookies and burst out laughing when we read our miniature prophesies. Their accuracy and relevance were uncanny.



Tomorrow is the start of our next adventure, and I'm excited to be able to share it with you. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a little apprehensive. As we laid in bed last night, I couldn't shake the feeling. I think it's a mixture of things. The ship is getting closer and closer to Sierra Leone as I type this, and my heart is yearning to be there right now. (Yes, I said yearning. It's the closest I can come to describe the way it's trying to punch a hole through my chest wall and go soaring off through the air towards West Africa. Strange feeling, this.) And I'm headed in the opposite direction.

It's such a strange thing, knowing that I'm in God's will but wanting so badly to do something else at the same time; it's a pill I haven't had to swallow before. Up until now, I've been living out my dream life, getting to practice nursing among the most incredible people in the most incredible setting. And now I'm being told that the next five months of my life will take place more than six thousand kilometers away from them.

I think it's called obedience, and I'm not sure I like the taste of it. But I'm pretty sure, as with everything God plans for my life, that this is going to be so much better than I could have hoped.

So with that, I'm signing off until some unspecified time in the future when I find an internet cafe somewhere in the Amazon jungle. I'm going to go beat the mess in our room into tightly-packed submission, and tomorrow I'm getting on a plane heading south instead of east.

I think it's going to be awesome.

-----

Want to know more about where we'll be and what we'll be doing? Here are a few links:

YWAM - the organization we'll be working with
YWAM Peru - the website of the base where we're staying
DTS (Discipleship Training School) - a description of the course

Apologies to my brother, who just wrote me an e-mail pleading with me to stop posting photos of the HoJ and I in beautiful places, but I've just got one more photo to share. This one is yanked off Google Maps, and maybe Brother will be persuaded to forgive me when he realizes that the HoJ and I aren't actually in it?

Yet.

We're hoping the weather cooperates (although it's shown no sign of doing that so far, pouring down rain on us every day that we've been here) because we're going to that little island for a couple of days next week. The HoJ and I joke that we're on this strange sort of perpetual honeymoon because we've never managed to settle down into anything resembling the widely-held notion of Real Life.

Honeymoon Stage Forty-Seven here we come!

You have to forgive me for my silence. New Zealand is an outdoor playground the likes of which I've never experienced before, and we've been living life to it's absolute full these past two weeks. I've been reunited with my cousin, Fiona, who's turned into something closely resembling a Kiwi, and we've been going on adventures that have my heart in my throat because it's all just that epic.

Yesterday's found us climbing a fence to get onto a tiny dirt track that led us down through the bush to the base of a waterfall where we balanced on a skinny log bridge before diving off into the rushing green water. It was something like paradise, and I'm kind of dreading the thought of getting on a plane and leaving all this tomorrow. Of all the places we've been so far, this country is the one we'd most like to come back to, but Fiji and family await.

Someday...

It turns out there's not much time to blog when you're road tripping around New Zealand. Personally, I'm not complaining, but my Granny left me a comment on a Facebook photo (yes, I said Granny; she's pretty hip, that one) implying that she'd like some words from me. So here in the quiet of an early morning, before we need to get up and begin the process of packing up and checking out of our hostel, I've found the time and the free internet to write.

But how do you use words for New Zealand?

I remember how my parents came here when I was little. They left us in the care of our grandparents (the same granny that prompted this entry, if you were wondering) and went to the other side of the world. They came back with photos that even then inspired me. The sweeping mountains and bubbling mud pools and fluffy sheep stayed tucked in the back of my mind all this time, reminding me what I'd promised myself back then. One day I'll go to New Zealand, too.

I e-mailed my dad last night to send him a photo of the HoJ and I walking on a glacier, and mentioned my childhood dreams, remarking that it's rare for things to ever be as good as you imagine them, especially when the imagining has been going on for so long. It turns out that this country is putting my imagination, formidable as it may be, to shame.

I think we're doing it right; we've got a Kiwi friend, Maria, one of my cabinmates before the HoJ and I started bunking together, and she's got a car. We've got maps but no set plan, blue skies out the sunroof and Brooke Frasier on the iPod, and we're trying to discover as much of the south island as a week will allow before heading north to meet up with my cousin.

The weather has been spectacular, bent, it seems, on showing off the snow-capped mountains and the wooly sheep and the startling aqua lakes in the best light possible. Travelling with these two is a photographer's dream, because they're up for pulling off at any and every scenic lookout and even a few lay-bys that promise adventure. When we see a sign that looks intriguing, we turn off and go for an excursion. We've been rewarded with deep, cyan pools of water, waterfalls where we climbed up into the bush before stopping to drink from the crystal stream and a winding, downward path through thick jungle that spit us out onto a beach where we felt like the only people in the world, ever.

Two days ago we went paragliding over snowy mountains and yet another bluest-of-blue lake in Queenstown. That night, when we'd settled in for the night, we took torches and, bundled up against the cold, set off into a mossy forest in search of glow worms. We found them, shining like a hundred tiny lights in a little cave carved out under the trees. Yesterday we donned heavy boots and metal spikes to go traipsing around on a glacier, white with a cyan heart under yet another sapphrie sky, the rocky mountain walls rising up on either side to touch the scattered clouds. When the day drew to a close, we raced up the coast in search of a sunset at Pancake Rocks with a hot packet of fish and chips wrapped up in newspaper and waiting to be eaten when the view looked right. Every night we pull into town and show up at a hostel that promises one thing or another that catches our eye; free internet, great views, and even, as was the case in the place we're staying right now, bubble baths.

We are on an adventure, seeking out the road less travelled, and so far, here in New Zealand, I think we're doing a pretty good job finding it.

I have to go, though. Maria's been to the supermarket for some bacon and eggs, (we're splurging this morning) and when they've been cooked and eaten we're off again in search of our next random, roadside excursion. Just buckle your seatbelts, because I'm driving.


(Sorry for the lack of photos; the problem with dirt on my lens is getting worse, and I can't bear to show you these views all marred by black spots. You'll just have to wait, but it won't be so long now; we're home in just over five weeks.)

I'm finding it strangely hard to blog from the first world. We've been in Australia for a week now, and I've been avoiding this corner of the internet, totally unsure of what to write.

I want to say what a great time we're having. How we've been welcomed so warmly by friends from the ship, shown everything from Sydney Harbour in a raging thunderstorm to the Australian Outback Spectacular in Brisbane to the top of a mountian in Port Macquarie. How we've slipped so easily back into these old relationships, born of a common love for Africa and a big white ship.

But when I sit down at the keyboard, my fingers are slow to type these words, pushing as they must through an unexpected and overwhelming feeling of guilt.

I expected to feel the not-belonging, coming here. I prepared myself for the shock of first world prices, a place where a bottle of water costs three dollars instead of three cents and actually comes in a bottle instead of a plastic bag. I schooled myself to be ready for the orderly streets, the fenced-in lawns and the stop lights where everyone, inexplicably, stops when they turn red. All this I was ready for.

It was the guilt that blindsided me.

All around me is the shiny, new first world but all through my heart is the third, and it's my heart that's telling me that there is something so wrong about all this. I'm here having the time of my life and I can't stop feeling like I shouldn't be.

At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I think I know too much now. I think I've seen and lived among, in my admittedly limited experience, far too much of the opposite side of the coin to be able to bask in the shine on this one without consequence. I run my fingers over dresses made from rich cloth in air-conditioned stores, and I find myself wanting to buy things even as I cringe from the thought of spending so much money and through it all is this voice screaming in my head. You are greedy again. You are enjoying yourself, eating ice cream and going to the zoo and spending long days pleasing only yourself. You want this world and everything it has to offer. You are greedy again.

I'm telling myself it's not true, that I would give anything to be back on the dirt roads and in the bamboo shacks of Asia and Africa, but then I catch the scent of my freshly-washed hair and realize that I'm loving the feeling of being clean and safe in a quiet home where all I can hear is the crickets in the fields outside.

I don't know which way is up anymore. I don't think it's wrong to enjoy myself in this place, to revel in the feel of clean sand between my toes without worrying whether someone's dropped a dirty needle or used the area for a toilet. I don't think it's a sin to wish I could buy a pretty dress. But I don't know how to think that with the same mind that has seen families living in raggedy shacks no bigger than a chicken coop. I don't know how to type about how I got to feed kangaroos with the same hands that were clutched by beggar children with huge, pleading eyes.

I don't know how these two halves of me will ever fit together again. to form anything like the whole I'm used to. I'd say I'm not sure I want them to, but I really don't want to live with this guilt because it's strange and awkward and not terribly comfortable.

This is one time I really wish I had all the answers.

My mother always reminds me when it's been too long since I've blogged, and this time was no exception. Until the last two days, though, there hasn't been much to say. Silence truly was golden. Silence was the ten days spent in blissful rest at Deeper Still, rediscovering the reason God told us all to stop working on that seventh day.

Mama J has a point when she says that we've totally lost the concept of Sabbath rest. I think it's especially true for us as missionaries. We're meant to be these unbreakable powerhouses who just keep going day after day, month after month, with no regard to ourselves. Because, after all, there are needy people who, well, need us. Right?

But what we were forced to do during our time in Chiang Rai was to put all that aside. To be 'useless' for ten whole days, except for a couple of odd jobs around the place. To stop measuring ourselves by how much we could accomplish in a day or by how many days in a row we could keep on going. And it felt strange, a little wrong, even, to be in a place where nothing was expected of me. I couldn't shake the feeling that there was somewhere I should be, something I should be doing, and all of a sudden it became so clear to me that Mama J is right; I don't know how to rest.

I don't have any earth-shattering realizations to add to that. I didn't all-of-a-sudden learn to lay down my need to be useful. I think, if anything, I just learned that I need to. Deeper Still was a starting, a place to begin. Now I just need to find out how I can do that in real life, something that promises to be slightly tricky because of the next piece of news I have to share with you.

We're going to South America!

That, I know, seems incongruous for the author of a blog entitled Ali's African Adventures. And Africa is still the biggest piece of my heart; be sure of that. However, for six months next year, starting on the 28th of February, the HoJ and I are going to be living in South America instead; in Peru, to be exact. We're going to be taking part in something called a Discipleship Training School (DTS for short, which is how I'll refer to it from now on) with Youth With a Mission, (YWAM). We'll take part in four months of class and then go on outreach for two months, to places not yet determined. (Potentially, though, we could end up in Ecuador, where a good chunk of my heart was left in the sandy ground of a camp on the beach there.)

The course will be in Spanish and then translated into English, so I'll be learning another language on top of everything else going on. We will be living in the city but going on outreaches to Amazon river villages, and the packing list includes jungle hammocks, so I'm pretty sure it's going to be an incredible six months. We're going to use the time to seek God's heart for us for the coming years and to grow in our love for God, the world and each other. I get the feeling it's going to be intense.

So that's the news up to the minute. We've spent the last two days in Bangkok, wending our way through crowded markets, climbing temples and riding boats on dirty canals, but I can't upload pictures, so it seems hard to write about for some reason. We're about to say goodbye to Elliot and Julle, our companions for the last two months, and board a plane for the next leg of our trip, where we'll spend six weeks just hanging out with Mercy Ships friends and family in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji.

In some ways, I'm looking forward to the first world. It will be nice to pay a set price rather than having to barter for everything I want. For the first time in seven weeks I won't have to carry toilet paper with me everywhere I go, and I'm going to be able to go out alone with no fear for my own safety.

But standing on a crowded bus last night, sweat tricking down my back even as my hair was being pulled into the fan above my head (because I am taller than 99% of the Thai population), I had this sudden, blinding realization that, in some strange way, I belong in the third world. I might long for the first, for its clean bathrooms and safe streets, but there will always be something in me that pulls me back to the chaos and the open markets and the people staring at my white skin. I revel in the crush of people and the swirl of colours and I don't think I want to stay forever in a place where no one stares at me.

Ask me again after I've had a dose of clean streets and first-world supermarket selection; I might be singing a different tune, but something tells me I'll be missing all this.

And just when I thought all was well, that the tears were starting to dry up, I've had a day that broke my heart yet again.

We spent the morning in the company of Vern, who drove us into the hills and through several villages of the Akha hill tribe. As he navigated the muddy, rutted roads he told us stories of the families who lives there, of the girls who have been brought down to stay at Eden House because otherwise their lives would have consisted of abuse and slavery and worse.

I'm in a country where forty percent of the national income comes from the sex trade, and today I heard some of those stories. I heard what poverty has reduced these girls to, how they are denied even the right to citizenship because they are born into a hill tribe. How they are indoctrinated right from the start with the belief that they are worth nothing, that they will amount to nothing. Women from the hill tribes are not allowed to leave the province, are unable to work legally, cannot go to school past grade nine and are not allowed to own cars. They are often referred to as the slaves of the servants, so low is their position in society here.

But, as always, there is light even in the darkest of places. Sitting with Mama J over the past few days, I've found out more about what Deeper Still does. Once I'd had a chance to rest, she revealed to me that this place is so much more than just a place for that. She told me how, when she first came to Thailand, seven years ago, she prayed that God would give her four women to mentor. She had a vision of each of those women going on to mentor four women and on and on.

This Christmas, Noina, one of the original four, is leading a team of thirty-three univeristy students on an outreach to a Lahu village way up in the hills. The group is made up of both Thai and tribal students from the Akha, Karen, Lahu, Lisu and Hmoong tribes, and they are going out to minister to their own people.

Their goal is to provide every family with a mosquito net, along with distributing winter clothes like jackets, hats, and long pants. If there's money left over, they want to buy sports equipment and some toys for the children. They are hoping to raise 2,000 USD, and want to buy everything locally in order to invest back into the local economy and support business here which have been badly suffering because of all the political unrest in Thailand in recent years.

Again, I don't expect you to donate, but if you do feel led and would like to help out, you can send a check payable to Deeper Still Ministries, International to Deeper Still Ministries, International, 4110 Foothill Road, Kalispel, MT 59901. Don't write anything in the memo section; just put a note in with the check saying whether it's to be used for the hill tribe outreach or for the ministry centre itself.

Because there are also needs here at Deeper Still. With the school starting up, there are much more mundane things that need to happen; curtains for windows and a desk for the office and a bunch of little needs that go along with maintaining a property and running a school. Julie's vision is to change the way teachers in Thailand value not only themselves but also their students. In a country where people are so often told that they're worth nothing, because they were born on a hill or because they're a woman or because they just don't have enough money, she wants to start a revolution, a new metric for measuring worth.

Given the love she's lavished on us during this past week, I think she has a very good chance of doing just that.

Today I had one of those myriad small moments that make up the fabric of traveling the world. It was enough to make me carve out a corner of my heart that's forever going to be reserved for Thailand, because, in some strange way, it reminded me so much of Africa.

I walked outside to put on my flip flops because we were headed to the fabric market to search for material for a dress. They weren't in the place where I've been leaving them, and when I looked over to where the ladies who help out here were doing laundry, I saw that one of them had them on her soapy feet. We made friends yesterday, bonding over a lesson in Thai numbers, so I didn't hesitate to walk over and point to my shoes on her feet, a hopeful look on my face.

She answered with a broad smile and a knowing nod before walking over, retrieving her own shoes from under a table and handing them to me. Clearly, I was to wear them instead of my own.

Because my feet are the same size as a tiny little Thai lady's.

And that, my friends, is why I love Thailand. (Also because it is the land of inexpensive street food that bursts with flavours I've never tasted before but which I'd probably like keep eating forever.

Now if you'll excuse me, we're heading out to the market.)

(Qian Men Hostel, Beijing)

Sorry for the protracted silence; China has been too much fun to take time sitting in front of a computer.

Somehow we've already come to the end of our stay in China. We've spent the last four days in Beijing and the four before that in Yangshuo, and the time just seems so short. This is one place we wish we could have stayed longer. I was ready to leave India by the time we boarded our plane, but I would have relished a few extra days to explore this city.

We've done everything good tourists should do (and a few they don't), the majority of it in the company of what felt like around half of the population of China, since our visit to the big city coincided so neatly with the national holiday. We saw the Forbidden City (where we had to literally throw elbows to have any chance of actually seeing into any of the palaces) and the Olympic stadiums (which were not nearly so dangerous). We meandered through the shaded paths and along the cool lakes at the Summer Palace, watching an old man write long lines of calligraphy on the cement with a brush and a pot of water. We hung out with Abby and her incredible friends, eating home-cooked food in a homey apartment; hands down the best meal since India. We're professionals on the Beijing subway system, provided we can find a stop; it's not always easy depending on where we are, since taxi drivers don't want to run the meter, prefering to squeeze the foreigners for all they're worth and we are not the type of foreigners that trick works on.

We hiked the Great Wall under a cloudless, clear blue sky, marvelling at the way it just goes on and on into the distance, every ridge dotted with guard towers sticking up over the long grey spine of the wall. We wandered through the hutongs near our hostel, trying out the various meat-on-a-stick options, sometimes for free, if the vendors found our lack of Chinese endearing enough. We were even brave enough for the night market at Wangfujing, crunching down such delicacies as fried cricket, silkworm, snake and scorpion (all on a stick, naturally) while Chinese people looked on and laughed, holding their own sticks of far more identifiable lamb and chicken and squid.

I should be giving you links to all these places, and I definitely can't wait until I get to a computer that'll allow me to upload some photos, but we've got to head to the airport soon and I need to wander out into the street one last time and get a donut and a little porcelain jar of yogurt. I'll stick a straw through the paper cover on the jar, drink down my yogurt, return the cup to the shop and head back to the hostel munching on my sesame seed donut and I'll leave Beijing, albeit unwillingly.

Next up: Thailand and Chang Rai.

(Tripper's Carpe Diem Hostel, Yangshuo, China)

Happy Chinese National Day! We are in Yangshuo, somewhere deep in the Chinese countryside, surrounded by the incredible karst landscape. Before we made it here, though, we spent a day in Xi'an after taking another night train from Luoyang.

This time, three of us were treated to a soft sleeper bed. The fourth ticket, for some reason, relegated one of us back onto a hard sleeper, and Elliot took the fall for the rest of us. Our beds were in a little room with a door that closed into blessed silence and darkness, and if it weren't for the fourth person in our compartment, a woman who snored ferociuosly throughout the short night, it would have been perfect.

It was our third night without proper sleep, so when we arrived into Xi'an before seven in the morning, we were a little fuzzy-headed and disoriented. We managed to find a place to check our bags in (five yuan for the day, somewhere around eighty cents and well worth it) and stumbled around until we found a bus that had Terracotta Warlors (typo intentional, because that's what it said on the bus) printed on the front.

This was another sight that nothing could have prepared me for, these rows upon rows of silent men standing guard in an underground cavern. Each one was crafted individually, based on someone living at the time, and so they all look different. They're fat and skinny and short and tall, some with mustaches, some without. All of it, all the time and effort and years of work, was to provide an army to watch over a dead king as he made his way through the afterlife, and once again I find myself saddened by something that's just meant to dazzle.

A late-night flight took us to Guilin where we found our hostel (after a prolonged search) and crashed gratefully into bed for the night. The next day, possibly Thursday, although I've lost all sense of time, we gave ourselves one mission: get to Yangshuo. This we managed to accomplish in style, because when we showed up at the bus station, a man offered to take us on the scenic route; rafting down the river on a bamboo boat, past the mountains that are pictured on the 20 Yuan note.

After a couple of bus rides further and further out into the country, we were dropped off by the side of the Li river and shown the way onto a small boat. The man explained that the old man at the tiller was his uncle and, despite the fact that the bamboo turned out to be PVC pipe, we settled down to enjoy the ride.

It was wonderful, really, sitting there and puttering down the river. We never knew what we'd see around each corner, and were invariably happily surprised. The terrain here is like nothing I have any kind of framework for in my head; I've never seen anything like these mountains that just thrust up out of the land, row upon row of them fading out into the distance like jaggedy teeth.

Our hostel is wonderful (I'll probably write more about it at the end of the trip, when I plan to make a list of the best and worst of the world, this place sitting easily in the best column), and the receptionist who checked us in, Alice, turns out to be a tour guide as well. Yesterday, she took us out on bikes through the countryside. It was one of my favourite days so far, not least because we actually got to ride on a real bamboo raft, poled down the river by a chain-smoking guide who steered us over little rock slides where we had to lift our feet or risk being soaked when the entire front of the raft dipped under water. (We're not sure whether he liked us much, since he guided us over the very deepest part of one of these, laughing as the water came up to soak our bums through our chairs.)

We spent the rest of the day hiking up Moon Hill, marveling at the scenery, and pedalling slowly through rice paddies where old men and women worked under pointy straw hats. I'm very sad that my card reader doesn't seem to work in this computer, because I want so badly to share photos of all of this with you. Maybe when we're back in Beijing.

Tonight we'll head back into town where the place will be alive with people and street vendors and all sorts of crazy food-on-a-stick and the only English we really need is maybe later, the standard phrase for turning away persistent sellers. The HoJ is desperate to try snake, and I'm pretty sure I'll be brave enough to follow suit, especially after having eaten fried dog meat last night at dinner.

For now, we're just relaxing, enjoying the slower pace of the countryside and the luxury of having a bed we can sleep in whenever we want. Speaking of which, I think it's time for a nap.

(Xi'an International Airport, China)

Where to start with China?

This place is so incredibly foreign, yet there are little snatches of familiarity. I cannot read any of the road signs (can't even begin to guess, really), but we're driving on the right-hand side of the road for the first time in a month and a half. Virtually no one speaks English (not an exaggeration), but the temperature feels like home in late summer. Everyone here seems to dress up when they leave the house; I am woefully out of place in my 'sunday pants' and traveling sandals, but the stares I garner are merely curous, holding none of the malice I felt in India. I'm not sure what I expected from a communist country, but it certainly wasn't this friendliness and openness, pure delight when we parrot our two words of Chinese.

Here in China, unlike India, I feel the weight of the population. Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by a crush of people. Getting off trains feels like an exercise in bovine empathy as we are herded together down ramps and up flights of stairs to finally be ejected into grey, smoggy air, searching for white faces in the inevitable crowd.

The first of those white faces we saw belonged to Abby. She's an engineer doing energy research here in China, and she's been reading this here blog for a while now. When I posted that we'd be coming to China, she e-mailed me with an offer of assistance that I more than gratefully accepted. We probably exchanged close to fifty e-mails over the last couple of months, getting to know each other and sorting out an itinerary for the two weeks we'll be here.

I can't even explain how cool it was to see her smiling face when we came through those doors and know that it's because of this corner of the internet that she was there. She's the first of you I've ever met, and now I want to sit down with every single one of you because it's just that much fun. She took us to her apartment where we dumped our excess baggage and then guided us out to the student quarter of the city for Peking duck and lots of other Chinese treats. We walked through a street market, all neon and streetlights and grey buildings reaching up into the night over the press of people thronging the sidewalks. Markets are the common thread that seem to make me feel more at ease in a new country than almost anything else.

Abby guided us to our train, and we boarded a night train bound for Luoyang. We were in hard sleeper beds, the equivalent to the class we travelled in India, but the trains here are a world away. They're clean and carpeted and they give you a fluffy pillow and a duvet. Almost immediately, there was a small crowd near our compartment, curious friends who wanted to take a peek at the white people. The family occupying one of the two other bunks in our area lined up in a row and started to chat. We were given small sachets of 'very famous tea' and offers of assistance in Luoyang, although I can't imagine what help our new friends could really have been, since our Chinese is limited to thank you and hello, and they ran out of words shortly after determining that we were from 'Chanadah.'

The white faces meeting us in the crowd at the end of this trip were Mikey and Mariah. They work with an organization based out of Beijing called New Hope. In essence, New Hope provides a place for medically fragile orphaned babies and children up to about age five to be cared for. They arrange surgeries for those who need them (lots of cleft lips and palates, heart defects and other things that are so familiar to me as a paeds nurse), and they provide comfort care to the ones for whom there is nothing that can be done. The centre in Luoyang is the biggest and can hold around 130 little ones in large rooms full of windows and sunlight and brightly painted murals. Each room has twelve little cribs, each with a quilt handmade by the doctor in Beijing who started all of this. For every three babies there is an ayi, a wonderful, smiling, gentle Chinese woman who loves on these little ones like they were here own.

Our task for the day was simple; leave your shoes outside the door of any room you want to visit, remember to use hand sanitizer, and snuggle as many babies as your arms can hold.

It's hard to understand how those little ones could heal my heart just as they were breaking it. On the ship, we look for the outcasts. for the ones society has pushed aside, and these are the ones we want most to reach. At New Hope, every one of the kids is, literally an outcast. In a country where you're only allowed to have one child, when babies are born broken they're tossed aside to allow for a second chance at a 'worthwhile' one. They're had babies found on the steps of police stations, on sidewalks and in garbage cans because they weren't good enough to keep. Almost none of then were actually orphans.

And I got the spend the day there, babies snuggling close and smiling up at me with the broken smile of a cleft lip kid that gets me every single time. They're young enough, most of them, that they don't know that they're 'not good enough,' and so they accepted my love unconditionally, basking in it and falling asleep with complete trust that my arms are a safe haven. When it came time for one to be fed, the ayi would replace it with another, and so my arms were never empty, and more often than not there were several of the older ones draped across my lap, too.

I've canoed down the Zambezi and seen the Taj Mahal and the Terracotta Warriors and I've stood under the spray of Victoria Falls, but I think this might have been my favourite place in the world so far.


Up next: Xi'an, the Terracotta Warriors and the incredible beauty of Yangshuo.

One of my favourite things about this trip is that I'm constantly and utterly overwhelmed by what I'm seeing. Now that I'm feeling better (although last night was rough again, for no good reason), this assault on my senses is something I'm coming to welcome. Yesterday, it was the Taj Mahal's turn to enthrall me.

There's an odd system of ticket-buying in place here; you have to go back down the road past our hotel about a half kilometer, buy the ticket at an office there and then take the free shuttle back up to the North Gate. We did not know this until we got to said gate, although an insistent man had apparently been trying to tell us the whole time. Once he turned out to be right, we accepted his offer to act as our guide for the morning (it was hard to say no when we'd be paying him about a dollar each) and headed back to buy our tickets. This is where the fact that the HoJ is of Indian descent comes in handy.

It costs non-Indian tourists 750 Rupees to see the Taj Mahal. Considering that it's one of the wonders of the world, this price does not seem too steep, and I got in my line willingly. Phil, however, tucked in his shirt, combed over his hair (the preferred style) and claimed that he was from Kerala, smoothly talking the man in the Indian line into giving him a ticket for the local proce: twenty Rupees. Not even fifty cents.

I could repeat all the little tidbits our guide shared with us, but if you want to know facts about the Taj Mahal, you can just look them up on the internet; I'm fairly sure you're not here for a dissertation on the subject.

What I will tell you is that it took my breath away, and not just for its beauty; there's something so tragic about it. Built as a tomb for a much-loved third wife who managed to bear fourteen children, only six of whom lived, it's an immense, marble mausoleum. Fourteen chapters of the Qur'an are inlaid in black onyx into the white marble, one for each of the children, and lotus flowers made from glowing orange and green stones encircle the marble screen around the queen's tomb. It's indescribably beautiful and strangely sad, twenty-two years of crafstmanship to honor a dead woman who never got to see how much she was loved while she lived.

Early this morning, as I sat on the roof of the hotel again, waiting to see if the clouds would part enough that I could see the pink, early morning glow on the white stone, I heard the Muslim call to prayer echo somewhere over the city. Somewhere in the streets below drums beat and bells jingled as a procession carrying a statue of Ganesh walked slowly past, red dust filling the air, and I felt for a moment like I was suffocating, lost along with all of these.

I think God's heart must ache when He looks at India. I know mine does.

(Taj Plaza Hotel, Agra, India)

We drove to the train station in Mumbai yesterday morning at dawn. Around us, the city yawned and stretched, people spilling from darkened doorways into the slowly filling streets. As the day gathered strength, the coloured lights still blinking from the night's Ganeshi festivities shone less and less brightly. Our driver stopped and we got out, alone for the first time in an Indian train station and unsure of how to find our platform in the teeming throng. It seems, however, that there will always be someone to help; an older man in spotless white approached us and asked us which train we needed. Without asking for money (an anomaly here, we're coming to realize), he smiled and pointed us to Track Four, where we found an officious little man pasting passenger lists to the outside of dingy coaches. Our names were all there, and when the doors opened we climbed into our home for the next twenty-four hours: a 3AC coach on the Bareilly Express.

3AC denotes a sleeper car with air conditioning and beds stacked three tiers high. I had assumed it would be six of us, three on each side, but there were a bonus two bunks across the tiny aisle, running along the side wall of the train. The top bunks were fixed in place, and the middle ones flipped down to serve as the backrest while we all lined up on the bottom ones, waiting to see who our traveling companions would be. Through the window, we saw an old couple pushing an even older woman in a rickety wheelchair and were momentarily thankful that we'd not ticked the box when they asked if any of us were medical.

Three guesses on who ended up in our compartment.

Granny (as we immediately christened her) was even frailer in person, with hugely thick glasses that made her look like a wizened old bug with dentures that she constantly rotated around in her shrunken mouth. Her son and daughter-in-law (or vice versa; it was hard to be sure) toted in about seventeen bags, stuffing them under the seats and building a small fort around dear Granny. Most of them, it turned out, were filled with food in varying sizes of plastic containters, doled out at intervals by the woman to her husband or Granny, who took turns sitting across from her to be fed. A man in a yellow shirt and shiny grey pants made eight, and promptly creeped us out by very obviously taking photos of us as he reclined on his bunk. He contined to be mildly creepy for the duration of the ride, but we got used to it.

At seven minutes after eight, we jerked into motion and the adventure began. It was fairly anticlimactic for the first half hour or so as we rolled slowly through Mumbai, but once we were clear of the garbage and the slums and the people pressed together on platforms, we started to pick up speed. Soon we were rolling through lush, green countryside.

For most of the trip, we were passing fields and farms, corn and rice and tea and sugar cane alternating like patchwork, cut through with temple spires and rivers where women washed their clothes on the banks. It's hard to figure out where 1.2 billion people live in India; so much of it is this wide-open green, and I realize that I have seen nothing when it comes to crowded cities.

We settled into an easy rhythm, one born of monotony, really, since there's not much to do on a train. We moved around like the pieces of a sliding puzzle, sitting and sleeping and playing cards, changing places as we flipped bunks up and down, always making sure Granny was well tucked in and her chewing tobacco was close at hand. (No joke, that.) When the train stopped at a station, we knew that soon after we'd hear the droning tones of chiki wallas and cold drink wallas and, of course, chai wallas, offering ginger-spiced tea in tiny plastic cups for just five Rupees. We availed ourselves regularly of the latter.

Night fell, and we set up all the bunks. The creeper in the shiny pants took one last photo and then gave the command. Fan on. Light off. No argument possible. Our little compartment was plunged into darkness and we settled in for the night, rocked to sleep by the movement of the cars.

It was perfect, really; just as we were starting to get tired of the whole thing, we went to sleep, and when we woke up again, we were very nearly there. On the way back, we'll be awake during the time we had been sleeping, so the scenery will be new, and I have to admit I'm kind of looking forward to it

And so here I am, in one of the more surreal moments of the trip so far, sitting on the roof of my hotel, looking at the domes of the Taj Mahal, gleaming white in the morning light, not even a kilometer away. I can not wait to see it up close.

I'm in Mumbai right now, staying with another Mercy Ships friend, Vish. His parents have opened their home to us and fed us more than any self-respecting human should eat in just over twenty-four hours. I will never get enough of Indian food.

This city is so much more of what I expected India to be. It's the only one I knew anything about (thanks, in large part, to my brother Pete, who introduced me to incredible writers like Rohinton Mistry), and I've been surprised to find it, in some ways, exactly as I pictured it. This is not necessarily a good thing.

I thought the poverty in the areas around Lonavala was heart-wrenching, but it's nothing like here, and I haven't even set foot in an area that could be called a slum. Everywhere we go, there are beggars. They all look similar to me, unwashed and sharp-featured, dark eyes holding a life of hurt. We went to a market today and as we walked through an underpass, I was smacked in the face by the sour smell of urine and garbage. A whole little clan was living there on the concrete, and as we passed by, a little girl started to run towards us with hopeful eyes. She was called sharply back by her mother; perhaps there is some unwritten rule governing Sunday mornings and outstretched hands here.

I can't get used to it. Walking past the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel and then looking down to see the bare bum of a little, filty baby curled up next to his mama on the pavement. Meandering down streets lined with mansions sheltered under the overhanging branches of trees while two old women carry impossibly large loads on their backs, stopping every so often to rest. Breathing deep to smell the spice and incense and catching the stench of human feces mingled in. It's hard to find my balance.

I want to share photos with you, but I can't get them to upload from here. You'll just have to trust me when I say that this city is filled with colour, markets pulsing with life as vendors hold out fruit and shampoo and jars of tea and even little fluffy puppies, all for a very cheap price, I am assured. I'm glad I'm feeling better, more like myself, or this would be all too overwhelming. As it is, I'm drinking it in, eyes wide and heart a little more shattered than it was a few days ago. This, I am coming to realize, is a very good thing. When this stops happening, it may be time to stop traveling.

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On an only loosely-related note, do you remember how I was going to try and e-mail the director of the Joy Centre Preschool, but I wasn't sure how it was going to work out? Imagine my surprise (or lack thereof; I'm getting kind of used to God working like this) when there was a new face at chai time on our last day in Lonavala. We sat down and she introduced herself to us as Rose, the wife of Joy, the man who just so happens to run the school. I told her about all of you and how you want to help and she almost started crying. She called you a miracle and handed me her phone and I was able to talk directly to Joy. Here's the scoop.

The cost for one child to go to school for a year, including admission fees, uniform, books and a school bag and monthly tuition fees is 7,000 rupees. This works out to approximately 160USD per child per year. (It's more than what I originally told you because I hadn't factored in the admission fees, uniforms etc.) If anyone wants to sponsor a child and is able to send extra money on top of that, it will go into savings to be used for the same child in the next year, unless the child is no longer at the school, at which point it will be used for someone else.

There are several ways to give, and you can do so either in a lump sum as you're led, or monthly. I think the easiest way is to give through PayPal. The PayPal ID is joyisaac2001@yahoo.com, and when it asks if the money is for goods or services, you check goods. It's also possible to give by wiring money directly to a bank account in Hawaii or through Western Union, so if anyone wants to do that, please just e-mail me and I'll send along that information. For my Canadian friends, if PayPal isn't a good option for you, they have a relationship with a funding agency in Canada who you can go through. E-mail Rita at donorservices@shaw.ca for details.

Additional food for thought? Joy told me that it costs about 32,000 rupees yearly to run the schools (there's another one in another area of Lonavala) and that the income from kids paying for their own tuition is only about 6,000. That's a deficit of about 550USD yearly that they depend on donations to cover.

He said the following in his e-mail, and I couldn't help smiling, knowing that God was working to answer prayers long before they were even spoken, as Phil and I planned out our trip and picked Lonavala as one of our destinations.

We had got some money from a Church in Austalia for six months. That money is till November. After November, if money does not come, it will be hard to run the schools. That is why we have been praying earnestly for the donors for our schoools. As you guys are going to send money, we will be very transparent to you and accountable to you. We will update you from time to time. Please say to them how much we are thankful to God and them. We blieve that it is from God and that all your / their support and prayers for the little children of India will bring them to the love of God.

So there you have it. Any other questions, don't hesitate to ask and I'll find out answers from Joy. I asked if it was possible to get specific information for you guys on the kids you sponsor, and he said it would be no problem to send photos and a little about the family situation. Just e-mail him and let him know how many kids you want to sponsor, and I'm sure he'll be happy to give you the info! joyisaac2001@yahoo.com

I'm so encouraged to see how God is working in all this. To think that He had it all planned out beforehand for us to be at that little school to bring this need to you just a couple of months before their funding was going to end just blows my mind. It puts any struggle I might have had over the last few weeks into such a sweet perspective, and I'm so glad to have been in India for this time.

Tomorrow we board a train bound for Agra, a journey of twenty-four hours to see the Taj Mahal. This should be interesting...