One of my favorite things, in the entire world, is discovering a new place. A new place with people who wake up every day, just like I do, and continue on with their normal lives, just like I do. Only their normal looks completely foreign to me.
This is how I felt upon entering the city of Aizawl, India. We’d been in India for almost a month and were beginning to get used to the sites and smells; to the loud streets and flat terrain. And then we bored a flight to a section of India that is tucked between Myanmar and Bangladesh, that I honestly had no idea existed.
We were greeted by two very excited and very warm Indian women…only, by appearance they looked completely Southeast Asian. As we climbed in the truck we (ignorantly) told them both how different they looked from the previous location we were visiting, and as we excitedly buckled up they told us just how different this peninsula was from the rest of their country.
We were off. Winding and rolling through incredibly steep mountain switchbacks, not a single guardrail to be found, only clever road signs every few miles encouraging drivers to slow down.
And then we saw her: Aizawl. A city on a mountaintop, sitting amongst the earth but flirting with the heavens. It was…breathtaking. The only thing more beautiful than the scenery were the women who greeted us at the airport. Women who had and still are giving their entire lives to care for abandoned children.
Before we landed in India, I heard a quote from one of the women who greeted us at the airport. She said something along the lines of, “When I die, I don’t want to go comfortably… I want to give my life to something greater than myself…I want to die fighting for something, someone. I don’t want comfort.”
And that’s when my husband and I looked at each other and knew, we had to meet this woman. She may live on the other side of the world, on the side of a mountain, caring for 24 HIV+ orphans, but her heartbeat is the same as ours. We want to live for something, someone, we want to fight comfort and spend our lives for others.
So here we were, navigating our way through this fantastical city, with Lucy as our captain, headed towards her children, for whom she has given her life.
To be continued…
(We were able to visit Gan Sabra all thanks to one of their U.S. partners, Orphan Outreach. If you would like to get involved. or learn more about how you can support Gan Sabra, which we will talk about more through out this week, please contact [email protected])
