Jaymashi Sathiharu! (Hello friends!)
I’m slowly but surely assimilating to the different pair of shoes for each room, using a bidet (or small pitcher of water) and my left hand every time I use the restroom, which is often only a hole in the ground. I cried the third time I had to use the bidet. Lol. Hard to believe already a month has passed since then – I’m almost a natural now! hahaha.
I haven’t had time to write since I arrived at base. Our schedule is intense – fully packed each weekday with lectures, workouts for trek training, local outreach, and worship and prayer in the heart of the city. I knew it would be a hard adjustment from my independent lifestyle in America, but wowww I never could have anticipated culture shock like this in my life.
I’ll do my best to describe culture shock, though I’m still finding out what it is for myself:
Imagine waking up in a place full of all the familiar things (people, places, animals, etc). Quickly you realize everyone’s playing a game, and you have to play too. Everyone around you knows the rules, but you don’t, and no one will tell you. And you can’t take a break for even 30 minutes to go kick your shoes off and decompress on the couch of your living room, because it’s 30 hours in flights away. you can’t take a break for even a moment to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t seem weirdly affronted by the way you speak, the direction of your gaze, whether you were making eye contact or not and for how long, the way you even swing your arms as you walk – all these things become glaringly obvious markers of a foreigner.
One simply cannot know the drastic difference between Western and Eastern Culture unless one has truly stayed longer than a vacation, and lived it rather than passed it by, waving from the window of a rental.
And to think this is the easy part.
Being myself, I signed up for the most physically and mentally challenging OR (the last 3 months of D-School, when we will bring the gospel to villages reachable only via week-long treks in the Himalayas). My school will split into four teams, and mine will be climbing into uncharted territory, where we have no contacts, no certainty of food or lodgings, weeks and weeks with no contact with the world outside the mountains.
I’m utterly delighted, and equally intimidated. Weeks without a shower, in the highest elevations of the earth, in the coldest months of the year, eating whatever we chance upon in the wilderness of Asia. if I get any wifi, at any point between November – February, I’ll post specific updates to my Discord channel.
I’m using the Discord platform for specific updates because it’s the most accessible way for me to send a brief update in real time. A blog post necessitates a bit more work than a quick pit stop affords, and I can’t be too specific about locations / actual activities on social media, so Discord it is.
Gotta go — I’m headed to my first meeting with my OR team!
Devin Leigh Snyder 