Joy

Today was the first day of our actual field mission.  We gathered around a breakfast much the same as the prior day but with the addition of a chickpea and tomato curry and boomba bread.  Before we actually dig into breakfast we have a short I Am Second devotional.  A great way to start the day.  Spirits were high as we were all filled with anticipation and a strong desire to actually get on with the work we came so far to do.

Our bus arrived and we loaded up.  It was about a 50-minute drive to the mission site and it took us out of the bustling cities and into farmland.  There are always people on the road and even out in the middle of nowhere there will be roadside stalls offering fresh produce, cellular phones, welding repair, or any other number of odd products and services.  I don’t believe you can drive more than two minutes without seeing some small shack of a commercial nature.

The courtyard at the school on our first field day.

On the outskirts of a small village we come to our destination, a public school complex of about four buildings, all of them open-air and only a couple with more than a dirt floor.  Our “nationals” were already waiting for us.  In missionary jargon “nationals” are those local believers that you partner with.  These include translators, lay people, and others that provide help and services for the mission.  In addition to the nationals, several of the school children were waiting for us as well.  Technically they had the day off from school so that we could use their classrooms, but they couldn’t resist coming to see the big production.

A small crowd was waiting to visit our clinic when we arrived.

People were already waiting for our clinic to open so we set about the business or organizing the medical stations and the sharing stations.  Exam areas were set-up as was a dispensary for the glasses and for the medications.  As we set up it became clear that this was education at it’s most fundamental level.  There were no desks, but rather a collection of crude wooden benches of various heights.  The floor is not paved at all and instead offers an uneven surface of very hard-packed earth.  No whiteboard, no projectors, no bulletin boards.  Not even a chalkboard was to be found.

This is a tribal area of India and Christianity has had some success here.  Tribal people are generally considered so low that they do not even have a caste.  In Indian society they are the lowest of the low.  They aren’t received by anyone in Indian society and so they are very receptive to the message that God loves them.  Taking all this into account, it was not too surprising that a lot of the people we ministered to today were already Christians, mainly Baptist with a few Catholic’s thrown in.  The remainder of the people we encountered were Hindu or professed no real religion.

While sharing with fellow Christians wasn’t exactly what I had expected, it was no less fulfilling.  To walk the streets of India is, to me, an image of hell.  The vast majority of the people you meet on the street do not smile at you as you pass.  I’m not sure they smile at all.  There is almost no spontaneous joy to be found.  Misery, toil, and filth are overwhelmingly present.  There is not even the sniff of hope in the air.  It is difficult to describe the despair and darkness that is so present here.  It is how Satan would have us live.  This overwhelming oppression of the spirit is why the time interacting with Indian Christians is so revealing.

Three beautiful Assamese believers.  Unfortunately I caught them between smiles.

As a whole, the Christians we met were simple people.  Most could not read or could read very little.  Their possessions are not much more than what they have on their backs and some cooking utensils at their home.  The very basic occupation of simply surviving is their career path.  But their warmth of spirit and contagious joy is in such contrast to everyone else that you see and interact with on the streets of India.  These people smile readily and their smiles are so genuine and warm. They share with you and are completely open with their faith.  We pray together and I’m moved several times to the point of holding back tears brought on by the beauty of their spirit and it’s incredible light in this place of so much darkness.  It is an amazing reminder of something we tend to forget in Americanized faith:  the simple joy of salvation and the knowledge that God loves us.  It is, as Philippians 4:7 states “…….the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding……….” 

I am like most people.  I fill my mind with things like wondering whether my first meal on American soil will be bacon and eggs or a steak.  I concern myself with whether the wi-fi will be up at the hotel.  I’m kind of digging this little laptop that was loaned to me for the trip and think I should consider buying one.  Or maybe an iPad.  I would like to spend the money to fix up my pick-up to something near the condition it was 170,000 miles ago.  I'd like to spend some more time riding my motorcycle.

But these types of thoughts that are common to most of us remind me of how selfish and ungrateful I am.  I have so many blessings, more than I can ever think to count.  And sitting before me, time after time, are these very poor, mistreated Christians with no opportunity before them on this earth and with great concern as to whether they will have a meal today.  And they pour out a joy in God that fills the room entire room and my heart.  It is enough for them.  It should be enough for me.

My Indian friends have so much to teach me.

Communion

 

It’s Sunday here in India and a mixed day for us here.  In the morning our team will split up to go to area church services.  This afternoon is a bit of personal time until around 4:00pm when we’ll all get together for some additional training before heading to the field tomorrow to set up our first medical clinic.

Rickshaw cabbies await the morning's business over sweet tea.

Larry and I were up early and after depleting the instant coffee available to us, decided to go out for a stroll.  Mark joined us and we had a nice visit about the state of our team and the struggles some members are having.  It was very early and the street was just coming alive.  Merchants at the various small huts along the roadside were sweeping their dirt sidewalks with bundles of grass.  Cabbies squatted near trash fires lit near the stalls for their rickshaws, warming their hands in the 50-degree chill.  The street never really gets quiet here.  There is always a horn honking somewhere and the voice of a bus worker notifying the neighborhood that the bus will be leaving soon.

At dawn and dusk street people burn trash to ward off the cold.

We returned back to the hotel and had a good breakfast.  Stir-fried vegetables, potato and pea curry, an odd but very good dough-like substance that reminds me a lot of Cream Of Wheat with all the moisture squeezed out and some sugar added.  The only thing they don’t seem to understand here is coffee in the American/European sense.  Everywhere seems to have one of those fake cappuccino machines that we see at convenience stores in the states.  It produces a substance that is exactly unlike coffee with hot milk.

Tezpur's Baptist Hospital complex.

Our group split up into two in order to attend local church services.  My group went to the local Baptist church.  This church is located about three blocks from our hotel in the middle of a Baptist hospital complex.  Once on the complex we took a wrong turn and ended up wandering the halls a bit.  Yes, it is a hospital, but no, it is nothing like the states.  This is field medicine.  A lot of beds in a shared ward, open air windows to let the flies in and out, and families visiting and bringing the food for their loved ones.  I'm sure that it is the best of care that can be had in this area of India, but it is still very primitive by our standards.

As is almost always the case when out of country visitors are present, one of the visitors is asked to give the message.  Being the Pastor in our group, Mark was tapped early.  With decades of experience, Mark always has a message or two he can prepare in a moments notice so he gladly accepted.  He was asked while we were having breakfast so he spent a little bit of time reviewing a scripture or two and putting the message together in his head.

When we arrived at the church we were warmly welcomed and ushered to our seats.  It’s a very familiar looking and plainly adorned chapel that would be at home in most small towns in the states.  Seating is segregated by sex: women on the left and men on the right.  We had two young ladies in our group and the hosts were very accommodating, allowing our ladies to stay with us.  We were taken to the front pew.

The Pastor of this church, a distinguished looking Indian man with graying hair and beard, came and introduced his self before the service.  At first he keyed in on me, commenting on and appreciating the fine layer of gray that adorns my goatee.   He assumed I was the Pastor but I immediately directed him to Mark.  Again, he had an appreciation for grey facial hair, this time the ones on Marks chin.  He asked Mark what he planned to speak on.  Mark replied that he was going to give a message on unity and told the Pastor what verses he was using. 

The Pastor nodded and smiled as Mark explained his plan.  Then he said, “You will preach on the last supper, yes?”  With only minutes to go until the service started, Mark could only agree.  No doubt Mark was remembering the many times he told us to be very flexible during the trip.  He now had about five minutes in between songs and offerings in order to plan a 40-minute sermon that would translate well into the Hindi culture.

There was plenty of music, most of it accapela and most of it old Baptist hymns.  The richness of the voices raised in simple song was incredible.  There was a special music group of young ladies that sang a more traditional Indian worship song.  I was sneaky enough to bring my pocket stereo recorder and I wish I knew how to post an MP3 here.  It is beautiful and so filled with spirit and such a contrast the complete cacophony of noise that is Indian traffic.

The simple chapel at Baptist Hospital in Tezpur.

Mark took the stage and even though a few of his Western humor jokes didn’t come evidently come across well, he pulled off a nice message for communion Sunday.  It was a very special experience to share communion with brothers and sisters from halfway around the world.  Our cultures are completely different, our language barrier is extreme to say the least, and I am sure we are just as much of an oddity to them as they are to us.  But we share one common bond through Christ.  To me it is simply incredible that complete strangers with such vast differences can both look at a cup of wine and a piece of bread and communicate the greatest truth in the world.  Not only is it communion with God, but a communion that is universal among believers, no matter the divide that is between us in an earthly sense.

Tonight is more training and a rundown on the schedule for our first day in the actual mission field.  It seems like it has been a long time coming and we are all anxious to let the work begin.

Echolocation

 We left Delhi the next day and flew to Guwahati.  The flight was unremarkable.  It was timely and the service from the government funded Indigo Air was exceptional for a small airline.

Mark keeping watch of our luggage.

Guwahati airport is more like a third-world airport should be.  There is cracked plaster, water damage, quite a surprising number of army guards carrying semi-automatic weapons, and a wide array of traditional and contemporary dress.  After some (you guessed it) food, we waited for our transport to arrive.  There isn’t a lot to do in this airport.  No wi-fi, no Starbucks, no…..well, not a lot of anything.  Traditional tea booths and a shop selling yards and yards of the traditional silk fabric used here for dresses.  Lovely stuff.

A clear view of the road is not really needed for driving in India.

Our transport arrived.  It is what we would call either a large van or a small bus.  It’s kind of the Indian equivalent of an airport shuttle.  As you can see, on this one the luggage is on the roof and held in place by rope and faith.  You may also be able to see that keeping a clean line of sight through the windshield is optional.  In fact, it’s absolutely fine to tape any flora or fauna that you happen to be worshipping today right in the line of sight.  That way you can concentrate on that instead of the task of driving.  But that’s OK.  Driving is not done by sight.  It is done by sonar.  I’ll get back to that later.

The road is crowded with everything from full size trucks to bicycles to three-wheeled taxi’s to common passenger cars and carts pulled by hand or water buffalo.  Add to this a few thousand pedestrians, many with large parcels of straw or bamboo tied to their back, along with a few mystics and gurus panhandling, and you get an idea of the crowding on India’s roads.  The lanes are reversed here so you drive on the left side of the road. 

Mostly.  Actually, what you do is drive on the left until you feel like you can go faster than whatever is in front of you.  Then you begin weaving back and forth while honking your horn constantly.  This is where sonar comes in.  Relying on that same technology that bats and submarines do, the driver listens for an echo to his horn and if he hears none, he swerves fully into the oncoming lane and guns the motor.  At the last possible minute, when he hears an echo from an oncoming vehicle, he swerves back into the left hand lane, narrowly avoiding the vehicle he just passed.  A narrow miss is still a miss, nonetheless.

The drivers view.  Note the writing on the back of the truck.

Well, maybe that isn’t exactly how it works, but it is certainly the impression one gets.  It is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.  After a while there becomes a sort of rhythm to it.  You begin to notice that it is like a large dance floor at a fine West Texas country-western bar frequented by gifted two-steppers.  They swirl around their girls and scoot their boots and it all becomes a glorious bit of coordinated chaos with not one unintended touch of someone else’s partner.  The Indian traffic madness is like that only with less beer and even more polyester.

Finally it turns dark enough that it seems the driver really is operating by sonar.  There is no way to see the bicycles and water buffalo who, it seems, are not equipped with reflectors for some reason.  Oh well.  The dark makes it easier not to panic.

We finally arrive in Tezpur.  The hotel is nice and dinner is in about 30 minutes.  The greatest relief is that we are now actually where we need to be to do the mission.  These recent posts may have been interesting and all, but they are too much of a travelogue and not what I was sent here to do.  I’m really looking forward to getting to interact with the people of this country and share with them.  I believe they have a lot to teach me.

Tomorrow is Sunday here and we’ll be attending church services with local believers an doing some additional training for the medical mission of the coming week.

Monotony

Travel, travel, travel.  Huge amounts of boredom interrupted by very, very small bits of interesting stuff and culminated by a good meal, odd rooms, and stuffy noses.

We were able to meet Joel at DIA.  His college buddies drove him all through the night to meet with use at 4:00am to do the security and check in dance for the first leg of our flight, Denver to Chicago.  Joel has a neat story and I’ll get to it on another day.

The flight to Chicago was smooth and faultless.  At Chicago we first spent a good portion of our nearly six hour layover getting to know one another, talking about the mission schedule, and doing an I Am Second study.  With less than about 40 minutes to spare, Tara’s plane landed from California and she joined the team.  Tara is a 20 year old who is doing more travel and mission work before her 21^st birthday than most of us will do in a lifetime.  More on her later.

Th in-flight update screen.  Depressing.

Monotony.  There is not other word to describe a nearly 15 hour flight across the frozen waste of the northern hemisphere.  There is an old saying that it’s the journey, not the destination, that makes the trip memorable.  In many cases that is true.  In the case of spending more than half a day cramped in a droning tube of smell and bad food several thousand feet above the earth……The destination will certainly win out.

After what seemed like an eternity, our plane landed in Delhi.  It’s a thoroughly modern airport, something that probably shouldn’t have disappointed me but oddly enough did.

The good part was that after we picked up bags from the carousel and checked ourselves through customs, Charles Golla was waiting for us with cabs.  Charles is our main person in India.  He is the sort of man that the second he smiles at you and offers you his hand, you know you are going to like him.  You can tell that he has a heart as big as the continent he calls home. 

After our first exposure to the madness that is called “traffic” in India, we arrive at our hotel for the night.  Charles checked us in, two to a room and we all went upstairs to drop off our bags and agreed to meet in the lobby in 15 minutes to exchange currency and go to dinner.  Larry and I got teamed up together, which is just fine by me.  We’ve traveled together before and get on well.  But……….we don’t get on so well that we feel comfortable sharing what seemed to be a wide twin size bed.  That bed, along with walls a lovely shade of lilac and one of the most unique bathrooms I have ever encountered, are what we found in our room.

The single bed in the room too small.

We figured we’d sort it out later.  Right now it’s time to get down to the lobby and switch currency.  We’re switching not only an average of $200.00 in personal funds for each team member, but also enough to cover the entire teams hotels, vehicles, meals, etc.  In all, several thousands of U.S. Dollars are exchanged for several tens of thousands of rupees.  The rate is 48 rupees to the dollar and I feel like a prince when I get a sizeable stack of 500 rupee bills in exchange for my short stack of four $50.00 bills.  The whole transaction takes place in the lobby of the hotel and for some reason I keep thinking that one of the Soprano’s is going to come around the corner at any moment.  It’s all up-front and above-board, of course, but there is something odd about counting out all that currency anywhere other than a bank.

A buffet dinner was set up in the hotel restaurant for us.  I’m in tall cotton.  Good curries, great breads.  Peasant food at it’s absolute best.  This may be the first time in my life that I’ve had a completely meatless meal and been very satisfied.  I think that it is possible that Matt and Carly will drop several pounds.  Spicy foods are not Matt’s favorite and the lack of his own product (beef) is a disappointment to him.  Perhaps we’ll get him trained before the trip is out.

We mentioned the shared beds and our gracious host, Charles, spoke to the hotel management.  They hadn’t really considered two 200 pound Americans in a room about the size of a large American bathroom.  But all was made well in the end and most of us were moved to rooms with two beds in them. 

There is one small spot in the lobby where the internet connection actually works with one tiny bar of signal strength.  Needless to say, that is not where I am updating the blog.  I was able to check my email and give my wife a little comfort by letting her know I had made is safely to Dehli.  I also let her know how to make popcorn and encouraged her to take Eric up on his offer to help around the house, particularly with shoveling the estimated ten inches of snow that was due to come at any time.  Eric, you can thank me later.

Tomorrow……more travel.  This time to our final destination, Tezpur.

 

Well, it’s getting pretty real now.  Friday I received my last shot.  This Sunday my church commissioned the four of us for the trip.  That’s quite a moving experience.  Mark is now in Ogallala and will remain here until Wednesday when we take off to spend the night in Denver before our early morning flight on Thursday.

I’ve got most of my things packed.  Everyone else is talking about having a checked bag along with a carry-on.  All those years of motorcycle travel are paying off, as I believe I’ll have everything packed in just one standard carry-on and my shoulder pack.  Then it will just be a matter of discovering what I’ve forgotten, an inevitable occurrence.

One of the more sobering chores was in answer to a request from my wife.  She wanted to talk about what to do if the worst thing occurred.  That required a lot of thought and a bit of writing about the somber subject of a funeral and what to do with my belongings.  It has been quite an exercise and actually something that I would recommend to anyone, whether you are traveling across the world or just headed to work a few blocks away. 

There is nothing like contemplating your own death to make you wonder about the world you will leave behind and whether you have done what you could to make it a better place.  Even more enlightening is to think about your loved ones and considering whether you have loved them as they deserve and as we are commanded.  It hasn’t been so much about beating myself up for my shortcomings, but more about thinking what I can do a better job of in the future.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s unclear as to whether we will have web access while we’re in India.  As such, this may be the last post until I get back to the States.  I want to thank you for all of your prayers and your financial support.  Your continued prayer for the team is vitally important.   Below is a prayer calendar for the team.  In addition to the things listed on the calendar, please pray for the general health and safety of the team.  Pray for our families and loved ones as they deal with our absence.  Above all, pray for the mission, that the team would be effective in sharing the saving grace of Jesus Christ and that the hearts and minds of the people we come in contact with would be open to the message.

Prayer Calendar:

Peculiar

I was chided today, and rightfully so, for not having updated my blog for a while.  Things have been busy with preparing for the trip and are moving along pretty well.  It’s also been a goal at my work to keep everything caught up so that when I’m gone I don’t leave my crew in a bind.

Even with all this going on, I’ve still been trying to prepare myself mentally and spiritually for the trip, reading, studying, and really thinking about scripture more  than I have for some time.  All in all, it’s simply something I should be doing all the time and hopefully a new habit that will stick with me after the trip.

I’m an habitual reader.  When I’m in my recliner, even with the TV on, there is always a book or magazine or my Kindle open and being read either at the same time I’m watching a program, or during the commercial breaks.  My lunches are generally solitary affairs and I’m beginning to think that I am unable to take a noon meal unless I have printed material in front of me.

Lunchtime isn’t really conducive to an in-depth study.  As such I’ve developed the habit of just opening up my bible to any random page and seeing what God has for me.  This has proved to be really serendipitous and often a great way to study parts of the bible that I haven’t explored before.

Today I flipped open my old King James, my favorite for at-the-table reading because it’s large, hangs open easily, and was given to me by a dear friend who has since gone to heaven.  It opened to 1 Peter 2:9.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light:

Of course the way my mind works, the first part that jumps out to me is the “peculiar” part.  I’ve got that nailed.  It bugged me a bit that with some cross checking I found out that the ESV and my favorite NASB left that word out.  Oh well.

The next thing that hit me was a flashback to when my wife and I were teaching the high school youth group at the Berean church we did a lesson on this section of 1 Peter.  That’s been over a decade ago and I don’t recall the main points of the lesson.  I do hope it was more memorable for our poor students.

I take a lot of comfort in the words “ye are a………royal priesthood” as I prepare for India.  I don’t have any formal training, a great wealth of biblical knowledge, or any other earthly skill that qualifies me to go to India and teach others about Christ.  But I can have faith that through my faith in Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, God has declared me a priest, someone who can share God with others.

Some Updates

Nothing too philosophical or wordy today but I thought I would give you some updates on the progress the team is making.

Last week a few of us got a start on the shots needed to help keep us safe.  Hepatitus vaccinations take place over the course of a year or so and those will be ongoing.  I’ll be able to have the first two injections out of the way before the plane hits the ground.  Hopefully next week will see me traveling to North Platte to get a typhoid shot.  Then there is the issue of which malaria drug to take.  Two of them have side effects that include stomach problems, not a good thing if, like me, you have Crohn’s disease.  The other can cause psychosis and despite what my lovely wife might say, I don’t normally have those symptoms.  Anyone with experience on malaria drugs feel free to lend advice.

My visa came today and I was quite surprised to find they had awarded me a ten-year multi-entry visa.  The folks that handle these things told me that those types of visas are typically not handed out unless accompanied by business ties or relatives in the country.  I decided to ask for a ten-year because the cost is the same as a five-year and a five-year isn’t a whole lot more than a 90-day visa.  So, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

The most exciting news this week is that Matt and his daughter Carlie are going to go on the trip with us.  Matt is a great guy, a board member of my church, and has a real open spirit that is great to be around.  I haven’t spent any real time with Carlie, but it’s exciting to see a young teen willing to make the trip.  That brings our total team number to ten members, about the perfect size I’m told.

I’ve also received a few donations this last week or so and that leaves the remaining amount I need to raise at about $1,000.00.  It has been a humbling experience to ask for help but even more humbling to see who is willing to give and what they are willing to give.  My thanks to all of you who have given prayer and funds.  God is good.

There are a lot of other little details to be ironed out.  I’m on the hunt for a small bible that is a bit more suitable to our travels.  I need to find a few more clothes that are compatible with the climate.  I’m told that my boots that I love so much aren’t suitable for the climate and conditions, so I need to track down some that are.  Seemingly small details, but its India: I can’t just go down to the mall and pick some things up while I’m there.  This is particularly true considering I’m 6’4” and 185lbs. in a country populated by a rather diminutive race.

All in all, things have come together much more smoothly than I anticipated.  It’s hard to believe that the trip is just 30 days away.