Outreach

Nepal and China

When a school leaves for outreach, we split up into teams, and usually head to different locations. This time was a little different- for the first 5 weeks of, all three teams and 26 students of the Sports DTS, as well as Claire's team from the All Nations DTS, were together in Nepal. So that was a very different experience- forty people instead of the usual ten! But it was fun all being together, and each team had it's own leader so I wasn't directly responsible for everyone.

We spent two weeks in Kathmandu initially, a little way outside the city. For such a well known city, I was surprised at how underdeveloped it is. It's a bit of a dump! During our time there, I had a lot of conversations with God about his heart for the poor, and His desire to generate wealth in societies to raise people out of poverty. It's hard to accomplish much of such a long-term enterprise when you're only there for a few weeks, but we did have a really encouraging interaction with a family near where we lived. I asked a crippled woman on the road if I could pray for her, and she instantly broke out smiling and invited us into her house for tea. Nepalis love tea. Turns out she was a Christian!

Over the time that we knew her, we were able to build steps up the hill from her house to the road so she could get out more easily; and also give her husband input on how to insulate their chicken shed to stop the chickens dying in the night from the cold. She said when we left that she had been living there for more than ten years, and no one had tried to help her like we had. It was so awesome to be able to address people's practical needs in some small scale in Jesus' name. They shared their house with two other families, both of which were Hindu, and through this woman we were able to get close to her young neighbour and share and show the gospel to her, too.



After Kathmandu we went east to Birtamod, a small town very close to the Indian border. We stayed with the YWAMers there, helping out with practical jobs as well as traveling to different parts of the town each day to do open air evangelism. A lot of people heard the gospel there! And it's a very Hindu part of the country. One of my favourite moments was being able to go into a school and preach the gospel to probably 400 students, and give tracts and bibles to most of them as well.

After one final week in Kathmandu, we took off and flew to Shenzhen, China, where we finished out our outreach. China is my favourite. We had six weeks there, and I loved it. We did a lot of sports evangelism there- my basketball improved immensely :). Just going to universities and parks, meeting people, getting to know them and sharing the gospel. Shenzhen is incredibly open to Christian activity compared to the rest of China, so we were able to plug in with various Bible study groups and bring our new friends to them as well.

My favourite story from our time there was at one of these studies. One of my students had met a girl earlier and invited her to come, but was worried she was more interested in him than Jesus! She ended up coming to our last Bible study before we left for Perth. During the message she was mostly on her phone, and in the discussion afterwards she quite forcefully asked, "how do you know God is real?". As people in her group shared their testimonies of knowing God, she softened. When the guy who invited her shared that when he had asked God in his desperation to show Himself, God had responded to him and he had felt God's presence. She said, "Ok, pray for that to happen to me, too." So they did, and she said she felt God! She gave her life to him right then. it was such a good way to finish our time there.

So that's a fairly succinct summary of the last 3 months. Thanks for all your support and prayers!