We awoke the next morning to find that we were in the foothills of the Himalayas. Being a mountain lover, I thought that I had seen some amazing mountains in my lifetime. Granted, the Rockies are incredible and Yosemite is almost undescribable. The Himalayas, however, are real mountains! They’re old, they’re huge, they’re breathtaking–and those were only the foothills.

Jeff, Ben and I were still riding the excitement from the night before coupled with the first really good night’s sleep that any of us had had. We were ready to get to work! I must admit that I was a little unsettled at this point. My hope was to spend time with locals, getting to know them and learning how to help them. I would be lying if I were to say that I didn’t have a little of the “hero-mentality” floating around inside me at that point. The hard part for me is that when I woke up, I discovered that the eight additional Americans that were at the Bisham base all had really strong personalities with eight different ideas of how do pull off the job of bending 1000 pipes.

A quick word about the pipes. The shelters that we were building looked like mini-car ports made out of tin. The supplies needed were 8 rebar stakes, 4 bent pipe, 1 roll of foam insulation, 10 pieces of tin (secured together), and 8 metal straps. All of the pipe in Pakistan came straight–for obvious reasons–meaning that we needed to bend it; thus the pipe benders that we brought over with us. By the time we would run the pipe through the hand-cranked machine, it would come out in a perfect arc. The problem was, the pipe-bending machines weren’t cooperating well and kept on breaking down. The men there had been trying several different solutions the day before but hadn’t come up with a good one. 1000 pipes needed to be bent by 8 strong American personalities and a couple of men from Peshawar, Pakistan and all we had were four broken down pipe-bending machines.

Now does my angst make a little more sense?

I was there to serve though, and was prepared to do whatever it was that I needed to do.

Jeff, Ben and I spent some time that morning praying together and then had breakfast (naan and eggs–delicious!). While were were eating, the director approached us at the table and said, “We need at team of three to get to the top of the mountain sometime today to trade out with a team of three that have been up there for a day and a half.”

At this, everyone in the room began to bubble with excitement. At last, what we had all dreamt about was becoming reality. Everyone in the room (except for Jeff, Ben and I it seemed) began to plead there case of why their team was ready to head up the mountain. I watched the entire interaction confuse and stress out the director so I mentioned that maybe it would be easier if he talked with the three team leaders that were in the room and make the decision that way.

Ten minutes later, Jeff came up to me and asked if I had warm gloves. I was a little confused by the question, but answered that I did.
“Good,” he said. “Put ’em on because were heading up the mountain in a half hour!”
And again, we were the team that got the go-ahead to move on.

Here’s what happened in the leader conversation. All three of the leaders determined that it would be best to send my team because we were the only three that hadn’t been orientated into the pipe bending. Because so many pipes needed to be bent, it made sense to keep the men there that had already been working on them. Thus–our team got the green light.

Within one half hour, we had our bags packed and were sitting in the back of a Pakistani army jeep on our way to the helipad….