Thursday, February 2, 2012

A Day in the Life of Jolene – Mungpoo, India


5:15 – My alarm startles me awake.  I set it to snooze, but finally get up at 5:25.  It’s cold this morning (like most mornings… what’s new?).

6:00 – My time with God.  I’m reading through the parables of Jesus alongside Christ’s Object Lessons. 

6:30 – I head up to Krystle’s morning worship at the church.  She’s covering the Lord’s Prayer.  Very intriguing.  We ended the worship with everyone repeating the Lord’s Prayer… most of them in Nepali, with a few of us saying it in English!  Pretty neat!

7:30 – Breakfast!  Mmm… I had fried rice, sweet rice, millet waffle and chicu (a most delicious local fruit.). 

8:30 – Brushed my teeth, combed my hair and headed out the door to help Krystle with the last few girls who have the massage practical to complete.  I’m the “dummy,” which means they do the practical on me.  It was pretty cold as it was, but what made it worse was the girls had freezing cold hands!  Talk about non-relaxing!  No sleeping through this massage!

10:30 – Phew.  Done with the practical!  I’m ready to start cleaning teeth.  Who should I pick first?  I chose Jamuna.

11:00 – Cleaning Jamuna’s teeth

12:00 – Still cleaning Jamuna’s teeth.

1:15 – Finally done!  Man, did she have dental problems!  It took me over an hour just to work on her bottom teeth!  And, to top it off, she kept salivating, causing to her to have to spit every 5 minutes.  She’s one of the ones that really needed a cleaning.  Glad to have helped her (although, she complained her jaw hurt after… I’m not surprised!).

1:30 – Lunch!  Rice, stir-fry, cucumber salad and dahl.  We have dahl and rice everyday.  I don’t think I’ll miss rice too much when I leave Asia.  Or dahl, for that matter (especially when you almost always break a tooth on small rocks that aren’t cleaned out of the lentils).

2:30 – I start working on Hannah’s teeth.  She had her teeth cleaned the month before by a novice so she wanted another novice to check her teeth.  It was boring…nothing to clean, really.  I’m guessing most teeth in America will look about as good as hers did.  How unexciting.

3:00 – Preparing for my Women’s Ministries class.  I have the topic “leading small groups.”  I felt I could easily find stuff to talk about on that one since I kind of led a very small group of young people in Idaho.  I think I might talk a little too long though… we’ll see.

5:00 – Started Women’s Ministries class… late.  The girls were given a test that proved to be much more complicated then they’d expected.  They all moaned at how long it was too (1 page, front and back).  I couldn’t help but chuckle when I thought of my exams in college – 5 or 6 pages with 2 hours to complete.  And I usually spent a good hour and a half doing them.

5:30 – Finished my talk.  I had to speak quickly so as to keep within the time limit.  The topic was good, but the girls seemed a little tired by the time we finished.  I think that exam wiped them out.  Now for staff worship.

6:45 – Staff worship ends and we all have some warm homemade soymilk with rice puffs.  I started feeling really sick during the worship.  I could tell that I had a low-grade fever.

7:30 – Auntie Lori checks my temp and, sure enough, I have a low-grade fever (99.4°F).  I really didn’t feel well.  We sat up and talked for a while and then Senteal came over to sing some songs with us.  He’s learning to sing in English pretty well.  He knows like over 6 languages!  These crazy people who learn languages so fast.  I hardly can get past mastering one language.

8:30 – I’m miserable.  My fever has gone up and I feel chilled.  I drag myself around trying to get ready for bed.

9:00 – I have my nighttime prayer and thank God for Auntie Lori.  She’s taken the job of watching over me seriously.  She gives me my dose of icky oregano oil to make me well, tucks me in bed, and hands me my hot water bottle.  What a Godsend! 

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