tea of soul

we are surrounded by mountains wrapped in misty fog, a fine white covering that lends ethereal sense of beauty to this peculiar mountain town we are embracing...every day we relish indian and nepali simple foods, and earnestly practice simple nepali phrases. cold hands and toes, warmed occasionally by mugs of warm, rich coffee or happy hot water bottles at night...the other day we worshiped standing together on our simple balcony in the view of majestic himalayas, and hills of this mountain people's dwellings - our hearts rejoicing in the grandeur and faithfulness of our God in this place. though we struggle, it is little compared to the stories already we hear of God working in this place, the certainty of our meaning to be here...though we are cold, we are warmed by brisk walks, words of God and encouraging interactions with friends and nepali people....yes, we are in darjeeling!!!

after long and arduous train and jeep trip up harrowing mountain roads, we have been ensconced in our frosty darjeeling chateau for a week today! have embraced a week of intense-but-good language training with our nepali teacher deepok, and have met backpackers, nepali friends and various people from two ch**ches here! (we have to be careful of writing, so read between lines and stars)

the colourful windows above: first, a view from the balcony of our chateau! this is katengunga (sp!), the third highest mtn in world! everest is just out of view and soon we will mount to tiger hill for spectacular view! other pictures: a typical calcutta street (typical shacks along roads, old buildings and yellow taxis that traversed us around the city), and some friends we met at city central of calcutta (more developed and touristy area - these teens loved hearing the worship songs hanna played and we sang, we will hopefully meet up with them again when we return in march!)

our whole team is doing well, we are thankful for your p***er and support. this monday we start intense two weeks with youth from two ch**ches around here, with a couple days of teaching and three days at villages! (we are split up, and each have at least an hour hike to get to villages, my group probably a few hours hike! yay!!) many of the villages are apparently tea estates, relying on growing tea to support village (and now tea industry not doing well. but we hear God is doing cool things in many villages!).

we have learned about bhuddism, hinduism, visited a bhuddist monastery and hindu temple...here are bhuddist prayer flags at hindu temple, and our p***erful leader gen!

we really enjoyed working at mother teresa home in calcutta, especially after seeing the pain and struggle of calcutta streets, to see God doing something about it. truly, 'blessed is he who is generous to the poor' (prov 14.21). we struggle to understand and deal with all the beggars and poor, but it is good that we struggle. probably for a lot of us, our favorite day in calcutta was last thurs, we had a "fa1th" day of asking God what to do. gen and dina took coffee to a shop owner, who asked them why they would give to him, with tears in his eyes, and they had long and good interaction with that family. janneka and hanna and i (callie) fed milk formula to a baby on the street and talked with the sister and mother, and then when we entered calcutta hospital/university complex downtown, felt extreme need to p*** just pouring from our lips, could not stop p***ing!! (for the first time in my life, it was like we couldn't NOT p***)...a few minutes later a well-dressed guy came up to us (standing there) and said, "you foreigners? come with me!" he turned out to be the (hindu) head of entire hospital and we had long good conversation with him and got to pray for him!!

okay quirky internet cafe is closing. lastly - a picture of our beautiful tanja with a little orphan girl at mother teresa home!