ONE Prayer Field Report: Opener

One Prayer Update Episode 1 from Gene Ort on Vimeo.

I had the privilege of travelling with Mr. Gene Ort for two weeks as we visited India and Cambodia to put together the field reports for the ONE Prayer network for both of those countries, and what is above is the "opener" for the series of video shorts that he has put together since returning. In addition to being a world class friend, you will notice quickly that Gene is also a world class videographer and photographer as everything that you see here is original footage from our trip. I'm telling you that because you'll probably wonder if we sniped the footage from National Geographic or something... but nope... all from Gene's hand and handiwork. He even sourced the score from music he tapped through his business (GMP Productions). I'll be posting additional video shorts as we get them, but wanted to put the first one here!

Not In Kansas Anymore, Toto!

Okay, we woke up this morning with steel grey skies and a light drizzle. No biggie... no danger, but apparently, there has been a cyclone brewing just off the coast of Chennai that was spewing tropical air toward us that might prevent our shooting outdoor video footage if it didn't let up. But we set out anyway toward a series of three villages near the city of Vellavedu in the hopes of doing some ground survey and recon for community development initiatives, and figured we would take our chances with the weather.

We got to the first village (which i will talk about more after this post) and did just fine for about the first 3 hours, but then the rain started coming.... and coming... and coming. We managed to finish up there, and moved to dryer spots for lunch, and then decided to wait till the rain let up before we tried village #2. It's now 7 pm, and still coming down forcefully at intermittent junctures, so we're going to change plans tomorrow and head to Kalavai a day earlier, with a goal of stopping back by Vellavedu on the way back to Chennai before we head to Cambodia. You can pray that we don't get rained out there too, particularly as filming in muddy slush is no more fun for Gene Ort than it is for me to talk in it. More later!

BACK... in India...

So... Gene Ort and i set out on a 3 year mission to explore strange new life and new civilizations... to boldly go where no one has gone before! Cue the silly 70's theme music.

Okay, so we're not going to be gone for 3 years (whoof, thank goodness! I'd die from Wife-withdrawal), and considering how often we come to India, it's not exactly a "new" civilization (especially when you consider that Indian culture itself has been around for about 6 millenia), but we're here to do some pretty fantastic stuff, and so i'll be blogging about it over the next couple of days as we go. Here's the quick itinerary:

India
* We're going to be doing field and survey work for the March, 2010, India teams, and also spending some time doing preliminary recon on another village where we might start community development initiatives in 2011 or 2012. We'll start just outside of Chennai, work our way down to Kalavai, then back up to Trichy, and finally back to Chennai, where we'll stage for our next leg of the trip.

Cambodia
* That's right! On the back end of India, Gene and i will be popping over to Cambodia to do our field visit for our friends at the ONE Prayer network. We'll join Bob Craft (coordinated through our associates at Bible League Canada), Vibol Uong and Setha Say (with the National Cambodian Church Planters Network) in the north end of the country (with a walk through the Angkor Wat temple complex), and then on to the South to visit the Killing Fields and see mature churches planted through the first cycle of the ONE Prayer planter training process.

AND... the most excellent Michelle Wegner will be uploading our Cambodia stuff (because it has to do with ONE Prayer) to oneprayer.com if you'd like to follow along there starting on Dec 10th.