Join Angie Austin as she welcomes Grace Fox to the show to share her captivating story of spending her first Christmas in Nepal. From the challenges of culture shock to finding joy in simple moments, Grace and her husband embarked on a life-transforming journey. Discover how this couple managed to navigate a foreign land, deal with the caste system, and celebrate Christmas far from home.
00:00:01 Introduction to The Good News with Angie Austin
Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, it is Christmas time. Welcome to the good news. We have Grace Fox and Angie Austin here. And as we’ve talked over the years with Grace, she has done a lot of traveling around the world. Once we went over all the countries she’s been to. And I mean, it was a list as long as my arm. And since I’ve only been to Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, I’m, of course, intrigued by these stories. And my neighbor is. is from Nepal and their food is, when she cooks for me, like when she makes extra and they’ll bring it over when it’s still warm, we’ll sit around the corner and counter and fight over like the bread and the rice and the butter chicken. And it’s just so delicious. So I’d like to hear your, was this your first Christmas married? I know you went to Nepal right after you got married, didn’t you?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, we were married five months when we got to Kathmandu.
SPEAKER 06 :
You were just, and that’s what he said, but let’s say, hey, let’s get married and I’ll take you to Nepal.
SPEAKER 05 :
Pretty much, it was a, I’m going to Nepal, and I’m going to be gone for three years. Wow. Would you like to go to Nepal with me? For three years? I had just sent God’s hand on my life permission to come. I was in sixth grade, and I was preparing for that. And so when he proposed, I said yes. And then he said, oh, okay, just so we’re clear, so we’re on the same page, that means we’re going to get married first, right? Yes. so we got married and five months later we landed in Kathmandu so we went through a lot of culture shock and our first Christmas there we had been in the country what five or six months already by then and married ten months and I was a couple months pregnant with our first child already and so very morning sick and we had been for the first couple months we stayed in a with a Nepalese family, but we could not stay healthy there. We got so dreadfully sick. And so it had a lot to do with the caste system, the way the food was served. The men and the boys over age 13 or 14 would eat first. So they got the food that was hot and relatively safe then. It was safe for them to eat because it was fresh out of the cooking pot. And then the women and the other younger children would eat after that. And by then, because we were living in a, it was in a mud house and they were cooking over an open fire. They didn’t have, you know, they barely had a, you know, a 40-watt bulb. They didn’t have microwaves to heat the food up. We’re not talking electric stoves to keep food hot or, you know, stick it in the oven and keep it warm. Nothing like that. And so the men and the other, sorry, the women and the other kids, younger ones could eat, but their food was already cooled down by then. And then we ate last because we weren’t a part of their caste system at all. We were their house guests and they cared for us. But this was just the way it was. And so we got the food and it was always cold. And you have to understand that they didn’t have flush toilets in their home, right? So we had an outhouse. Like our bathroom facility was literally a pit they cut in the ground outside the the room where we slept. So there was this little screened window and on the other side of that was a pit about five feet by five feet with two by fours stretched across it. And you’d have to go out there, kneel on, or not kneel, but squat over these two by fours, one foot on each board and hope you wouldn’t fall into this pit. And around that was like a corrugated tin walls that were like waist high and then a burlap roof stretched over the top of that. So when you talk about flies and bacteria and all the rest of that, those flies would buzz around, and then if they landed on food that was cold, not kept hot, you know what? We got really sick, really sick. And so we’d moved into a boarding house where we lived for a couple months, and that way then we walked down the street every day to a little touristy restaurant where the food was served hot, and we were able to gain some of our health back. But then I got pregnant, and I weighed all of, oh, I don’t know, I was a little bit, maybe like 100 pounds at that point soaking wet because I’d lost so much weight from being sick.
SPEAKER 06 :
From being sick, yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
And then, yeah. So then we were told we were going to be assigned to our project where Jean would work as a hydroelectric power engineer on New Year’s Eve. We would move on New Year’s Eve out to the village 12 hours a week. But in the meantime, we had to leave the boarding house. You know, they needed the rooms for other people. They knew we were leaving soon. So they said, you know, you just go now. Then we can bring this other long-term client in. And then we were left with no place for a couple weeks. And so a missionary couple in Kotmandu found out about our place, and they said, you come stay with us. And so we did that. And thankfully, you know, they said, we’re going out to the village for Christmas. You have the place to yourself. So we lived in his house and we had showers, we had flush toilets. Oh, wow. We even left the Nepalese woman that cooked for them and got their groceries and did their laundry. She came and worked for us and I was able to rest. But we found out that there were seasons there with that tradition and that culture, that faith, where they would bring a tree into their houses and decorate it and worship it like a god. And so, you know, we thought, Christmas isn’t even recognized in Kathmandu. Nobody recognized Christmas. It was an official Hindu nation at that point. And so we thought, there’s no way we can even get a tree if we, you know, and we can’t put one in house if we could find one. But another expatriate came over to us and brought us a little wooden thing he’d built. It probably stood two feet high, two and a half feet high, in the shape of an evergreen tree. So it was like one slat of wood, probably two inches wide, from top to bottom and then graduated slats of wood short to long from top to bottom going across.
SPEAKER 04 :
A little wooden Christmas tree.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. And so we just leaned it against the wall. He painted it green. We leaned it against the wall and that was our tree. And then we thought, well, what do we get for gifts for each other? What do we do here? We don’t know. Anyways, all I could think is I need potato chips. I had this craving for chips. And Jean went out to a little store and that sold everything from hand soap to rice to lentils to everything. And we found, they were like homemade chips, so thickly sliced, terribly deep fried, extremely greasy, but just a handful put into a plastic baggie, folded at the top and stapled shut. And that’s what he bought me for Christmas, to satisfy that craving. And I found him somewhere, and then we’ll wear a hat called a topi. It’s a special little hat that the men in Nepal wear. I found one like that, so I bought that for my husband, and that was our Christmas. And, you know, all the fancy glitter and stuff stripped away. It just was a simple Christmas. I felt like Mary and Joseph were far from family. We’re in this foreign place. We don’t know our way around. We’re expecting a baby, and we’re feeling very lonely, but we knew that God was with us. God, Emmanuel, he is with us. And so, yeah, all the glitter and glitter, all the rest of the trappings stripped away. And it just helps us to focus on what Christmas is really about.
SPEAKER 06 :
My goodness. So you were there for three years. You had your first child there. And then what happened after Christmas when you had to go 12 hours away to this? What was the next part of this experience in Nepal like?
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, yeah. So we got on a bus on New Year’s Eve. day it would have been and we we drilled this long trip out to the area where we were going to live and we’d been out there a couple months before so we’d found a little house that we were going to rent when it cost all of american dollars eight dollars a month and so we had one barrel of goods that we’d shipped from north america we hired somebody in a little tea shop to He carried this thing, a barrel, like a cargo barrel, on his back with a strap around his forehead. So the strap went around his forehead and then around the barrel. And that’s how these people who were quite small in stature but very strong used to carrying things like that. And so we didn’t know how much to pay the guy, but Gene went into the tea shop and tried to explain, using very limited Nepalese, what he was looking for, somebody to help do this, and pointed across the river at the village because you could see it where we needed to go. And then he said how much he would pay. And, again, culture shock. We didn’t know what a monthly salary was, but, you know, like Gene just said, I’ll pay, and it was the equivalent of $5.
SPEAKER 1 :
$5.
SPEAKER 05 :
And because he had all kinds of hands, it went up. And so we just picked one guy, and this guy carried it on his back, and Gene paid him the equivalent of $5. And later we found out, yeah, when we found out we were paying $8 a month for rent, you know, the guy made a pretty significant income just by carrying that for $5 a month. Back then it was the fourth worst country in the world. And so we just couldn’t imagine paying him anything less. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah. Less than, you know, you’re going to pay him 50 cents to take a barrel with a belt around his head to carry all your stuff. Oh, my goodness. So he carries all that over. And then did you work as a missionary as well while you were doing all this? Or was this specifically for his engineering work?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. We could only get into the country as expatriates. using visas that were for economic development or teaching or medical care anything else was denied long-term resident visas and so we were able to get in as engineers but back then it was really illegal to proselytize and so we had to lend our skills for the economic development of these people and we could we could um share the love of jesus in very casual informal ways so I remember one time sitting in the village in front of my house with a 16, 17-year-old girl who worked for us. All the expats had somebody working for them because it took all day just to do household things like haul water from a stream and wash clothes in a stream and all of those types of things. We couldn’t do it by ourselves. And so this girl was working for us, and we had a Nepalese hymnal. And I remember she was illiterate, so she wanted to learn your numbers. And to learn how to read a little bit. And so we would often sit down during the afternoon tea time and I would teach her a little bit of literacy, reading skills, the alphabets and numbers. And I used the Nepalese hymn book to teach her numbers, looking at the page numbers and the numbers of the songs. And one day, a Hindu holy man walked in. And these guys just looked scary as all get out. They’re dressed in saffron clothes. colored clothing, but carried a tripod and, I mean, you know, painted stuff all over their faces, their hair just massive, long, done up in dreadlocks. And he just wandered into our village. I’d never seen him before. I never saw him again. But our closest neighbor was a pundit, which means like the priest, for as many villages around as you could see. And he saw the man come. So the man walked straight to our yard and sat down beside Tara and myself and he wanted us to make him some tea, so we were going to do that. But then our neighbor came down and struck up a conversation with him, and they wanted to see what we were looking at. So we gave them the Nepalese hymn book, and the Hindu priest sat there and read those Christian hymns to this Hindu holy man. And I remember thinking, see, I could never have done that, because my language skills weren’t strong enough for that, but But God miraculously used one Hindu priest to basically share the good news through a Nepalese hymn book with this Hindu holy man. Wow. Is that a miracle or what?
SPEAKER 06 :
That is amazing. All right. Merry Christmas. We’re out of time. Again, it is Grace Fox. Fresh hope for today. Thank you, friend.
SPEAKER 05 :
Thank you. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.
SPEAKER 01 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
Crumbling your tune to KLTT The Mighty 670.
SPEAKER 06 :
Hello there. It’s Angie Austin and Jim Stovall. We’re talking about his winner’s wisdom column for the week. Hey, Jim. Hey, it is great to be with you. So I didn’t say what it is because I’ve never used the word illusory.
SPEAKER 03 :
Illusory superiority is what we’re talking about. Basically, the illusion of being superior. And I always tell the kids. at the Stovall Center for Entrepreneurship, university students, I tell them, the surest way to not learn anything is to assume you already know everything. And, you know, people have a tendency to think they know more than they know. For example, drivers here in America, 93% of drivers think they’re above average.
SPEAKER 07 :
Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
They’re not. Or… 90% of college students think they’re in the upper half of their class, and they’re not. And the first thing you’ve got to do before you begin anything is get an accurate picture of where you are. If you want to get out of debt and build wealth, you need to know exactly how far debt you’re in. Or if you want to lose weight or gain muscle, you’ve got to know the exact numbers And what fitness level you want to be at. And all the numbers. You’ve got to know your numbers. And that’s the only way we have to keep score. And, you know, the thing you measure is the thing that always moves. And so you’ve got to be honest with yourself. It goes back to what I always call Stovall’s 11th Commandment. Thou shalt not kid thyself. If you’re in the lower 10% of something, let’s just figure it out, and that’s where you start. But at least you begin with an accurate assessment of where you are, and you can begin from there. I am a huge fan of Jack Welch. He was the former CEO and just an amazing, amazing guy. And he started every meeting with the question, where are we? Not where do we wish we are, where do we hope we could be. No, no. What is the exact circumstances? What are we dealing with here? And, you know, most problems defined are the beginning of a problem solved. And if you can get a definition or a snapshot of where you are, then you can start everything. But without that, you know, you’re just kidding yourself.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, I think he made me a lot of money, Jack, because he I worked for NBC when GE owned NBC. I can’t remember if we got like some kind of a bonus if we bought GE stock or I know we had company matching, but and people were like, you know, don’t invest too heavily in one stock. But I was like, well, I work for them and I know how it’s run and I’m kind of investing in myself by investing in my company, which I know most people disagree with, but It did extremely well in the early 2000s and the late 90s, whenever I invested in it. So I feel like Jack Welch made me a lot of money when they owned NBC.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, and he had one of those contracts where, like the Lee Iacocca had, where you work for a dollar a year and a percentage of growth in profits. So that when Jack started making literally… tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars a year, nobody could say anything because, you know, hey, I worked for a dollar a year and a percentage of money you didn’t have. So, I mean, this is all just a part of what I added to the buy here. I love that. So, yeah, it really helps a lot. But, you know, it’s always great to know where you are and where you’re going. And, you know, you can’t set a goal. You can’t have an objective. You can’t do anything if you don’t know where you are.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, in your article, you talked about at Stanford, 90% of the students thought they were ranked in the upper half of the class. Someone close to me recently showed me 300 and something, they’re ranked out of 688. And then they said to me, I’m above average. I was like, well…
SPEAKER 07 :
I think it’s pretty much average, but sure, if you want to view it that way, like maybe by 10 people or something, you’re above average.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right, right, right. I mean, I remember during the Cold War, I was an Olympic athlete, and so we would get these… these communiques that came out of Russia, because we were always competing against the Soviet bloc. And they would do things like, you know, there was a trial, and America was first, and Russia was second. But their press release would say, in a global competition, the Soviet athletes placed second globally and are looking to move into first place, while the Americans were next to last. Well, in a two… Team qualifier, yeah, we were first, which is kind of next to last, and they came in second. So it’s just, you know, as Harry Truman said, there are lies and statistics. It just depends on how you want to spin that thing.
SPEAKER 06 :
you know and you talk about how it’s important to have a positive self image but you know not to be overly and that’s so funny that you talk about that because over the weekend my husband had notes for the kids and so it was kind of a lecture but I more about like you know with one of them well they both want to play in college one already has a scholarship and he’s like it’s a job now like you have a responsibility to your school that’s paying you all this money basically that this is your job through you know college and so um he talked about you know uh just you know proper diet in other words like You’re not going to eat three bowls of chips while we’re waiting for our tacos to arrive at the restaurant. Just being responsible with how you eat as an athlete, more protein and less junk food. Anyway, to make a long story short, he said, I don’t want you over-inflating yourselves. I don’t want to hear you saying like, oh, that person’s trash or I’m so much better than that person. He’s like, to one of our daughters, he said, you might be the best shooter on the team, but are you the best at defense? And are you a hustler? Are you crashing the boards trying to get a rebound? Are you trying to find a lane and drive into the basket? He’s like, you cannot rely on the one thing that you’re really good at and say, I’m the best player, because there’s lots of different facets to the game, and maybe you’re the best at one, but what about the other five? So, you know, stop telling me…
SPEAKER 03 :
point.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, and stop saying other kids are trash.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, tremendous lesson your husband’s teaching the kids because You know, we can all find a day, on our best day, one snapshot where, you know, you did well. I mean, there’s this thing. I have a friend who I met through his book, and then we’ve done a couple of interviews and projects together, named Chuck Wepner. He’s the guy that fought Muhammad Ali. Oh, yeah, you told me about him. But at one point in the fight, and nobody’s quite sure… Either he tripped Muhammad Ali, stepped on his foot, or he actually hit him. Nobody’s sure. But Muhammad Ali fell, and Chuck was standing there. Well, they took a photo of it, and that appears on all of Chuck’s logos and everything. Him standing there, Muhammad Ali’s laying on the ground. Now, what you don’t know is he got up and three minutes later knocked him unconscious and defied games over. Right. But, you know, if you want to judge your whole life by that, And by that snapshot, man, that, you know, and I told Chuck, I mean, you may as well go with it. Not too many people got him on the ground no matter what. So, yeah, it’s great. But let’s not kid ourselves here, you know. And so I, and, you know, your husband’s lessons are so powerful because, as Gandhi said, everyone’s my superior in that I can learn something from them.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And what you’re good at, there’s something you’re not good at. Yeah. You know, you always need to be improving. You always need to be growing. And, you know, we have a tendency to do that. And, you know, you worked in television, as do I, and You know, these ratings come out. And everybody’s always number one in something. Every network, every time. You know, you may be number one in left-handed women Eskimos watching overnight or something. I don’t know what it is. But they always have some demographic where, yeah, we’re number one in this. You know, it just doesn’t give you a good, accurate picture of where you are. And nothing gets started until you get a clear understanding of where you are.
SPEAKER 06 :
I love, too, that they would, like you said, they’d find a demographic where they did well and they’re number one. But I also loved growth. And Mark, my husband, used to always laugh because he was a director. And he’s like, yeah, if you only had four people watching now, you have eight. Yes, you had huge growth. astronomical numbers because you can say grew 50 percent in our audience you know overnight or whatever and it’s like okay if people saw the true numbers they wouldn’t be as impressed as hearing you know we’ve gone up by 50 percent you know but it sounds so impressive but um Yeah, I also was looking at what you said about people’s financial plans, you know, and where they think they are. The drivers is funny because there’s so many bad drivers. I was just thinking this weekend I was driving downtown and I drove once with one of my… co-anchors. I’m downtown, really bright woman, did really well in her career, blah, blah, blah. The worst driver I have ever driven with in my entire life. Like at every moment, I thought I was putting my life in my hands and I’m like, how have you survived in the world with these driving skills? I mean, literally like we’re, you know, we’re going to work at like 2.45, 3 in the morning and we were working downtown for a while. That’s why we commuted together. We were doing like, you know, live news on the streets or something like that where we’d set a setup and everything. It was really fun. Anyway, so She ran a couple of lights, and then she went the wrong way down a one-way street. And I’m just like, how are you alive? How do you function in the world with these horrible skills? You’re a bright woman. This is like driving with a third grader. It was unbelievable to me that she could function in society.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and I noticed that when we make movies… the production company will generally get a permanent driver for the a-list actors yeah and i said what did they ask for this he no no we do that and i said why why do we do that and he said these people don’t know how to drive a lot of them have their own drivers back in california and they’re here and they don’t know how to drive and they’re going to get they’re going to get somebody killed and um you know and then i remember writing with one of them and um You know, there was like, I mean, we go to get on an expressway and here comes a truck and she jumps out in front of it. We nearly got killed. I said, what are you doing? She said, well, this car won’t go. We had a rental car, and I said, what kind of car do you have in California? Well, a Maserati. Well, yeah, you could have done that in a Maserati. Don’t try that in a Chevrolet. We’re going to die here. We’re going to die.
SPEAKER 06 :
Oh, my gosh. That is so funny. Oh, with my husband saying, don’t over-inflate yourself. Stop. I want you to have self-confidence. We teach that so much with all of these participation awards. My husband was still in coaching for… soccer or something. And this one father got very upset that his kid didn’t get the award that week. And my husband said, well, I’m filling in. I gave it to the kid who hustled the most, you know, blah, blah, blah. And the guy said, was my kid’s turn because he hasn’t gotten it yet. And my husband’s like, well, I’m, hey, I’m just volunteering here. I’m just helping out as a dad. And the guy was very angry with my husband that his son didn’t get the award that week. And I feel like we’re teaching people to have an artificially inflated belief in themselves or, you know, ego, you know, the delusions of grandeur. And my husband over the weekend said, well, why does so-and-so think she’s so great? And she’s clearly not. I said, Mark, it’s delusions of grandeur. I go, it’s delusions. Do you get the word delusions? Like she doesn’t, she isn’t truly the best at whatever she is. She has delusions of grandeur. And it wasn’t about our kids, but just someone that we were like, wow, she thinks so highly of herself. Where does she get this? You know, and it’s really just we’re teaching. It’s a whole society of kids that are meant to believe that they truly are the winner that week because they just showed up.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. And we always need to be finding someone better. I just finished. writing a sequel to a John Steinbeck novel, which I had to go back and read everything he wrote and the letters he wrote throughout his life that are in the archives. And, you know, writing something, continuing something John Steinbeck wrote will give me things to aspire to for the rest of my life if I live to be 200 years old. Because, I mean, you know, that’s the standard as far as I’m concerned. you know, whether it’s him or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway or whoever. I mean, just to look at people that are that great and, you know, and aspire to do something that is worthy of that, I think. And so, yeah, you always want to be comparing yourself to the best people or your best self. But be honest about who you are and where you are. Not a thing in the world wrong with that.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, I sure appreciate you. And by the way, my husband paid my kids to listen to it. They got 20 bucks each. I’m like, that really got him to listen to the lecture. I’ll tell you that much with notes. Jim Stovall dot com. Thank you, friend. Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you for listening to the good news with Angie Austin on AM 670 KLTT.
