Four Precious Jewels

On day 4 the group split in half with 5 of us going to work with Ms. Monique's jewelry ministry which I will call "jewels" since they make jewelry and the other 4 went with a member of the ministry to the brothels. I was in the group of 5 who went to meet with the ladies of jewels. We traveled to an area called "China town" where the jewelry studio is located within a large building which used to be a tannery. The building has many great ministries in it which includes a slum school during the day as well as the jewelry studio and a couple of other things. Below are some of the pictures of the drive through China town. When we got to the building which was HUGE and went inside, we traveled up some cement stairs and traveled down a hallway until we reached a beautiful glass door. We stepped inside onto wood floors into a very bright, beautiful, brand new modern studio space. We walked in to see Kaitlin, Ms. Monique's intern sitting on the ground with 4 Indian women. They all immediately stood up and created us with smiles and warm embraces. We all introduced ourselves and joined them on the floor where having praise and worship time. We sat in this beautiful room and listened to these women sing worship songs in the native tongue. It was an extremely moving moment because although we could not understand the words they were singing it was almost as though my souls new what they were saying. You could feel the Holy Spirit in that room and it was so strong it brought most of us to tears. I remember thinking to myself in that moment how honored I felt to be there, that God had chosen me to travel half way across the world and how similar we were to these women. We all love the same God, He created each of us in His image and I couldn't help but think how pleasing that worship session had to be to Him.

After our time of worship and devotions we were able to work with them and help teach them English. We went back and forth asking each other questions. The four women were so sweet and loving to us and were so happy we were there. We were the first American women to come work with them so they had lots of questions for us. It was a great time of fellowship just sharing our lives and stories. After that we ate lunch and then they started working on their jewelry. They were extremely focused and a lot different then the chatty ladies we had just spent time with. They were all silent and very involved in their work, it was so nice to see how serious and determined they were. It was an amazing day just getting to know these awesome women.