Day Trip to the Toto Tribe

This felt like tea garden central, and I absolutely love it.

Yep, how many people will fit in a car? India usually knows the answer to that.

These people were on the way up to the area we were leaving. It is a long bumpy, scary, dirt road ride, haha!

This is what most of the houses looked like in this area. This area/village is not accessible for months out of the year due to monsoon season; bad mud slides, etc. So, there is a limited window to physically go to this village.

This lady was awesome. She just laughed the whole time, or maybe just everytime she looked at me. She fit perfectly into my arm pit; I hate that for them!

Some kids we met on the road. As you can see in facial features the different people group they come from, of the Mongolian background. Very beautiful people.

The gang's all here. And once again we look like Ogers compared to our fellow workers. One of the men called Nick a giant today.

They told us that right past the mountains you see behind us is the country called Bhutan. We had no idea that we had gone that far. It was absolutely beautiful.

Kind of got hungry on the trip up so while we were stopping for a bit a man selling this fruit came up to our window and saw that I was interested. These are called "lychee"..not for sure of spelling, but they look like big, hard strawberries, (kind of) and you peel the skin off and eat this. SO GOOD!!!

Today was filled with driving, learning, and beautiful, beautiful creation viewing. We went with a ministry partner today to the jungle. We drove about 3 hours to meet up with some other locals and then drove another hour up into the hills to reach a certain tribe. This tribe is of the Mongolian descent and was only discovered by the Forestry Dept. in 1964. Crazy! Their entire tribe population numbers at approx. 1800 we were told. Now, India has allowed Nepalese to move to this tribal area and to intermarry with the Toto tribe to try to build up its population again. Such a unique situation. This tribe has recently heard the Good News and some people did decide to follow Christ, but there was not much follow-up with those new believers. So, now the people who are trying to reach this tribe is starting back at square one, from what we understand as to how to enter this village successfully. That is one reason why we went there today, to meet and encourage these believers who are targeting this tribe. We truly felt like we were living straight out of the Jungle Book and that Mogli was going to come and greet us at any point. Especially when we saw the trees that were in the jungle, etc. We heard a wild elephant in the bushes and the people were telling us stories about the wild tigers that roam around. We saw the big stands/towers that people sat perched up in at night so that they could be on the look out for the wild elephants and tigers, etc. We were just like, "NO WAY!!" We definitely felt like little kids again at the zoo....but even better this time around!