What I Learned in a Day
by Jeanne Zahn, in India January 06

Our van wound further and further into the heart of the mountains of India.  We passed villages worthy of National Geographic, tucked in between rice, coconut and mango fields and thick jungles of underbrush. 

Just a few days ago we were regular moms and dads wiping our kids runny noses, doing laundry, and ordering Pizza Hut.  A pastor, a business owner, a psychologist, stay-at-home moms, a nurse, a journalist, a public speaker, college students and a psychologist, ranging from twenty to sixty years old.  Survivor couldn't have selected a better cast to spin the globe and land on the other side of the world, dropping the players in the middle of 2,000 orphans in a culture as different from theirs as the 48 hour Amazing Race it took to get there...just to see what they learned. 

This is my story and here's what I learned.

A week ago, we were just people living our life, and now we slipped on our choudedars pantalons, chamis, and sandals each morning and dove heart first with open eyes into the fascinating culture of India, of orphans, of widows, of remote villages and the people trying to reach them.

Growing up overseas, and then coming to live in the United States, I often felt like I knew something, a secret, that no one else knew.  But I couldn't describe it.  It just felt like living on the inside of a bubble and when I tried to touch it, to understand it, or explain it, it popped.  A friend recently put words to this ever present stirring I carry around in my soul.  It colors everything I do and who I am.   

I'll tell you what it is later.

The seriousness of our adventure became clear on the five-hour train ride from Chennai to Salem, when our fellow American Brendon called from the House of Peace.

"I need to talk to Diana (the nurse).  A little girl here is really sick."  She's sleeping, I told him, I'll ask her your question later and call you back. 

Long pause.  "Is this girl going to die?" 

I woke Diana up. 

Elavarsi (which means Princess) didn't die, but she almost died, of Typhi Salmonella...Typhoid Fever, spread from contaminated food and water.  In India, diarrhea kills the highest percentage of children, from disease mostly due to lack of clean water and then dehydration.

This explains our delight at meeting Dr. Abraham Selvikumar and his nurse wife Elizabeth, new to the Promised Land, arriving on site two days before our arrival.  This is why we almost giggled with happiness when we discovered the caretakers popping vitamins into 1,000 open mouths before bedtime, saw the new water purifiers, and watched the children wielding toothbrushes each day.

My first morning at the rural Promised Land I woke early, turned over in my cot, adjusted the woven blanket, and peeked out through the bars in the window.  Darkness still lingered in the still, cool air.  A single dog barked.  Palm trees outlined the waking sky and I could see fog clinging to the distant mountains. 

The journalist in me quivered with anticipation.  I helped manage the sponsorships for over 800 stateside sponsors for these children.  This trip, I could hardly wait to see how the children really lived, day to day, in the normal routine, apart from special celebrations, dances, and festivals in our honor.  I planned to blend in, observe, and ask a lot of questions.  (The blending in strategy worked for about a minute).

I tucked my yellow notebook under my arm and drifted across the empty courtyard to the girls hostel.  Later that day, I would carry my same notebook into the mountains in the van to a rural village.

I found about three hundred girls from five years old to teenagers standing on their knees, filling a long, covered, outdoor hallway, just finished singing.  Wrapped in faded blanket sheets, hair mussed from early waking, all hands folded and lifted in prayer, eyes shut tightly, they fervently murmured their own prayers together out loud.  We knelt too.  Soon my knees started to hurt.  What began as admiration for this event turned to discomfort.  They are praying a long time.  I focused and counted to 100 to keep me kneeling, pacing my steps in the make believe marathon.  I thought of a beach.  I tried to pray but I kept thinking about my knees sinking into the cement.

Pushpa, a widow and caretaker, opened a Bible and gave it to a child to read (still on our knees).  More praying and then Puspha said to come and take some pictures (I was relieved I had a camera).

That moment confirmed that I am physically and spiritually soft.   The children sleep on that cement every night, on a straw mat.  They pray on their knees each morning and evening.  I decided I would create ways to experience discomfort sometimes at home, to stretch myself, and to choose the kind of discomfort that would better use my resources. 

Mother Teresa once said, “Why should a child die while I live as I wish.”

About 7 am, the girls drifted away to various chores.  Most of the children carried brooms made of long pine needles tied together with string. Each child staked out specific areas of the campus to sweep and pick up trash.  With 1,000 children, it doesn’t take long at all.  A group of ten little boys dragged a branch to the lean-to kitchen, dipped it into the roaring open fire, and hustled the flames to a waiting pile of trash outside.   Lots of trash meant a bigger fire!

Children wandered around outside taking shifts visiting the covered outdoor toilets (which need some sanitation work), sweeping, pouring water over themselves in a sort of shower bath.  They washed their second set of clothes and laid them on the cement rooftop to dry in the sun.  They combed oil into each other’s hair and braided it, and helped dress the littler ones.  The children carried chipped plastic buckets and each a toothbrush to the outdoor water faucets. 

The boys finished chores and started a few rousing games of cricket.  We caught a tiny naked boy dripping and shivering as he escaped from a recent bath, running across the field to his dry clothes. 

A group of chatty pre-teens grabbed Melissa and I and pulled us into their room.  They finished rolling up their sleeping mats, closed their trunks and swept the last dust out the door.  Twenty girls sleep in this cement room the size of my bedroom.  A picture of Jesus hung on the bare wall, taped next to an open window.  They giggled and sat us on the floor and combed our fluffy hair flat and smooth like theirs.  My nails got painted a bright red, truly a team effort.  One girl held my finger, the other painted, another wiped off the dripping parts, another painted glitter on it, and the others stroked my skin and laughed and smiled and yanked on my hair to get those crazy curls out. 

Two girls showed us their dances, among a constant chitter chatter. 

“Asine!" they announced to me.  Melissa became “Nandria”, a popular movie star.  Apparently, I looked like a famous dancer.  I told them, “I can’t dance, but I’ll sing for you.”  No good.  The singers are not famous, just the dancers.  They said I had to perform during the dances the next evening.  (I didn’t).  When the girls saw me the rest of the time, they asked with raised eyebrows, “Your name?”  And I had to say, “Asine!” and they all laughed.

Sigmani came in with her baby.  The girls surrounded her with hugs and kisses, “Photo, photo, photo!”  This young widow cares for about forty children in two rooms, as well as her own little ones.

I pointed to their trunks.  “Can I see what you have?” I asked.  They crowded around while Girja opened hers.  She showed me everything she owned in the world -- two dresses, her school notebook, a tin plate, some candy and a couple half-empty bottles of gels.  Another girl carefully pulled out a still unopened plastic-wrapped package of pretty hair bows.  “Sponsor!”  she explained.

“Do you wear them?”  I asked pointing to her hair.  No, she said.  I understood that she was saving it.  I looked around at all the other girls and wished I had hair bows to give them too.  My life could be much simpler.  I have too much stuff.  Too much stuff to keep working and clean and organized.  More things and bigger and better things take my attention and time away from people and work that God wants me to do.  The more things I have, the more time and money and space it takes to fix, protect, clean, store, and use, and less time to have spontaneous moments with real people. 

I resolved to live more simply. 

 I see people as individuals.  India sees people more as units, groups, families, and castes.  Sharing things, sharing daily life is more necessary for them than for me, and thus more natural, even though I have more things.

“Do you have photos of your sponsors?” I asked.  Ashokan kept her photos at home from her “sponsor uncle” but she told me every detail of the four photos she owned.  One had waterfalls, one was of his garden, one of his cat, and one of his daughter. 

Word gets around fast there, so outside, a boy ran up to me and showed me a faded photo of a very white American family, a girl and a boy and a mom and dad, the edges worn and ripped from over-handling.

“Is this your sponsor family?”  I asked.  No, he said.  They were his friends sponsored family but he was proud of them just the same.  He dragged the boy to me and said, "Friend."  He pointed around to instant gathering of little boys. "Friend.  Friend.  Not friend. Friend.  Not Friend."

It is universal.  Everyone wants to feel they are worth something to someone.  Everyone wants to belong to someone.  I decided I would send them photos of themselves when I got home.

One teen boy came walking down the path with a single live chicken.  “Is that for breakfast?”  I asked, drawing a line across my neck and trying to look like a chopped off chicken head. 

“Yes.  One chicken.  We cook.”

Later in the week 300 chickens met their demise for a single Chicken Briyani meal for 2,000 staff and children.  I asked the boy who had to supervise the middle-of-the night slaughter, “Sundamoorthy, how did the chickens run go last night?”  Peter, a head caretaker, laughed and said, “They cried.”

The cooks stoked the fire and the huge cauldrons of water boiled while they poured in 50 kilos of rice for each hostel.

A circle of younger boys stood on their knees, looking properly submissive.  Isaac, a head caretaker, saw us eyeing them and he explained, “They did not do their chores.”  The Indian version of a time-out.  I should try that with my little boys when I get home.  (And I’ll never complain about cooking for a family of five again).

In our quarters for breakfast, I talked with Ruth, one of the original orphans who is now a caretaker.  She told me about her sponsor Dorothy Oxford.  A retired teacher from Australia, Dorothy came to teach English for six months and lived at the House of Peace when Ruth was a teenager.  Normally stoic, Ruth broke down into sobs as she told me of Dorothy’s death last year.  She said Dorothy was like a mother to her.

Dorothy had made friends with a rich lady from the Brahmin caste that lived across from the House of Peace.  The lady gave Dorothy a new sari.  Dorothy gave it to an orphan from the untouchable caste named Joy.  Joy had recently married a man from a higher caste.  The family did not approve and they burned her in a ritual called “bride burning” so he would be free to marry another.  She escaped to the hospital and called Dorothy who came and brought her back to the House of Peace.  She nursed her back to health and gave her the sari.  The rich Brahmin lady saw Joy wearing it one day. 

“That untouchable girl cannot wear my sari!” she screamed.  She came outside and ripped the sari off the girl.  Amid much chaos, Dr Jay finally came outside too.  He took the sari, spit on it, and wrapped it around the rich lady’s head three times.  Apparently, that is one way to symbolically curse someone. 

It would take years living in India for me to grasp the depth of traditions woven into the fabric of this culture.  But it only took a few months for Dorothy to make a lifelong impression on the hearts of these motherless girls.

We shed more quiet and intimate tears at breakfast.  Little Samuel was sitting alone at breakfast, a bit apart from the other children.  He used to sit happily under his sister Gokila’s watchful care, even though she just turned ten.  But she was in Heaven now, gone to be with her Jesus just before Christmas, of Typhoid complications.  In a world with few adults and few certainties at home and life, orphan siblings are fiercely loyal and play the role of protector and provider to each other.  Oh Lord, please wrap these wounded hearts in the arms of real people, to love and care for the souls of these little ones.

Later, I heard more singing.  All the children studied quietly in their classes, so who could it be?  Four ladies sat sideways on a mat in an open room, heads draped with a cloth.  Rukmani led the other widow caretakers in singing from their Tamil hymn book.  Young Mary, Mary and the wrinkled and aged Jebarani sang rotely and loudly.  I removed my shoes, covered my head and sat beside them.  After a few songs, they said, “Fasting.  Praying.”  They motioned for me to choose a song.  Their toddlers played on a mat close by, with only themselves and the edge of the mat to keep them occupied.  They didn’t whine or complain but kept making faces at each other, playing with a piece of loose string.  The sun made a happy circle on the floor.  The plainness of the room contrasted with the beauty of the thick palms, green grass and foggy Yercaud mountains in the open doorway.  I listened to the songs and the quiet.

Why do I rush about so?  What is so important that there must be a deadline for everything?  Time seems to stretch and melt into an endless hour here at the Promised Land.  There is always tomorrow.  The needs are simple.  Water, food, prayer and education.  God would meet those needs for them.  I felt a quiet peace. 

I also thought, eternity might feel like this moment.  (If eternity could also have some chocolate in it and a nice, soft pillow, I’m really going to like it).

But this isn’t heaven, and it’s not going to be an easy life for a church planter in northern India.

That afternoon, we listened to the Timothy church planting students tell us their stories.  I took my laptop and wrote them down word for word as they spoke (on the website).  A deeply spiritual country, these young people’s journey to faith in the one, true God included freedom from a bondage that we don’t see so visibly in America – idol worship, demon possession, excommunication, never hearing about Jesus, and not having access to a Bible.  God used extraordinary means to reach these called young people – including finding a Bible on the beach, healing of bone cancer, dreams and visions, freedom from addictions, that always ended in a person sent by God to explain these happenings through the person of Jesus, the one and only God who is worthy of all worship.

Santosh Pradan shared, “When I came here to the Timothy School, I learned many things.  I hear new things here.  The teachers are like my fathers.  I have a vision for the state of Orissa.  Only 2 percent are Christians in our state.  I know that many outside villages, they say, 'You stand before me and I will kill you.'  But I say that whenever I stand in Your name, I stand before God.” 

This morning at 5:30, we found Jhandi practicing his preaching on the outside veranda, to a congregation of one.  Jhandi invited Melissa and I to join his practice church and asked me open in prayer.  He switched from his native dialect to English and proceeded to give us a full-fledged, five-minute, three-point sermon entitled, “How is your heart?”  You must have a 1) pure heart – walking in the Spirit  2) understanding heart – asking for fruit and a 3) true heart – knowing and believing the truth.  (I took notes).

Santosh, the listener shivering violently in the unusual 70 chill, told us first there about Orissa.

“I have a burden for those that worship idols, that make cast stone idols and worship many things,” he said.  “Orissa is a difficult place.   Everywhere temple, temple.  My grandfather did not know about Christ.  My father died and a pastor came and built a church in our village.  My grandfather believed twelve years ago. . . My father never heard.”

Perhaps we in America feed on Christianity so much -- and have such access to Jesus, the Bible, churches, literature, radio, and elaborate media -- that our faith can become casual and not precious.  We have the Truth and we know Who is Truth while others die never hearing the Truth.  How unworthy the privilege and how great the responsibility.

Pray for these young people as they go back to their villages in the north.

That evening, our team visited a real life village church in the mountains north of the Promised Land.  Peering out of the van windows, looking for imaginary guerillas, a huge, ornate Hindu temple emerged from the trees. 

We stopped.  Millions of people come to worship here.  An inscription on the ancient building estimated the age of the temple at 5,000 years old.  A newspaper article tacked to the post verified this bold claim to be undeniably true.  Re-painted quite a few times (every 100 years or so, they said), ornate in a gaudy way, images of hundreds of different gods covered the face of the temple.  India is 82% Hindu.  Old Testament passages come to life when it speaks of those who replace the Living God with worship of idols made of wood and stone, made by human hands out of the same wood from which they make their fire to cook food -- gods who are lifeless and without power.  In Isaiah it says, “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.  I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come.  I say:  My purpose will stand and I will do all that I please.”

The people ushered us into the inner place where a rail separated us from the area only a Brahmin priest could enter.  The priest, clothed in a simple white loin cloth, offered a sacrifice of flowers and a mixture of something to a dark and dingy statue.  The sick smell of incense drifted our way.  Half the group left because of the demonic feeling.  The other half stayed,  drawn by curiosity.  Dr Jay said the idols have no power.  On the way out, some people gathered in the courtyard, watching us.  Dr Jay stopped to talk to them.  I asked him to please tell them that we were not there to worship, but just to see.

Dr Jay did more than that.  He told them about the one and only God who made the sun, moon, and stars.  He told them of a powerful God stronger (and more alive) than any statue they worshipped.   About fifteen minutes later, he said to us, “I preach to them only because you are all here.  If you are not here, I may be arrested.”

In the middle of the lush jungle, the van stopped next to a dirt walking path.  The village church was in there somewhere.  We walked single-file to reach two small, white cement buildings covered with low, thatched roofs, tucked into a scenic clearing.  We saw the cross of two sticks wrapped with twine.  Swept clean and fresh and welcoming, we ducked our heads through the doorway and barely all fit into the room.  The smiling pastor and his family lived in the other one room hut.  Here in the middle of the week, at a time not advertised to anyone, we held a simple service outside under the trees.  Villagers heard us and started to gather, children sitting in the front rows.  It was surreal.  We kept looking at each other thinking, "Are we really in the middle of a jungle having church?"  (I don't know if it's really called a jungle, but it felt like one).

Melissa taught a song with actions.  Brendon and Shannon used the beautiful murals that artist Staci Edwards painted to tell the story of creation and the cross.  Jason told a story about his life and Dr Jay translated it however he wanted.  When Brendon said, “We’ve all done bad things…” Dr Jay would say (all his words are accompanied by lots of actions), “You have to stop beating your wives and drinking too much.”

At one point Dr Jay overheard one of the men leaning against a tree say sarcastically, "Oh oh, here comes the white people trying to convert us."   Dr Jay repeated it in English and gave the guy a good, long animated response as he cowered in silence. I thought of our many missionary friends with New Tribes Mission who spend their lives earning their way into the culture.

Afterwards, the people served us hot tea and many asked us to pray for them.  A little girl with a fever, a mother with a growth on her neck, a woman with a headache, a man paralyzed on one side.  Diana, our nurse, started giving out Advil until Dr Jay whisked us away to show us the nearby lake where they baptize everyone.

Sundamoorthy, who led the way to the village on a motorcycle, asked if we could please come visit his village home nearby.  Now named Joseph, (his Christian name), Sundamoorthy came to ICMC as a teenager.  His parents died when he was a little boy, and he went to live with his grandparents.  He is just finishing a degree in Civil Engineering while caring for 40 boys in Salem.  He gets up at 3:00 am each morning to buy fresh vegetables at the market for the next day.  Then he helps the boys do prayers and breakfast and get ready for school.  He goes to school himself all day, helps the boys do dinner, homework, prayers and bedtime, then studies for his classes.  He says he sleeps three to four hours a night.  He said he is happy to go to the Promised Land to work with the children and development projects there when he graduates.  They will be fortunate to have him.

His three-room village home, made of packed mud, cement, and a thatched roof, had a lot of old world charm, sort of like a Swiss Family Robinson tree house--only not in a tree, and not as big, and not by the ocean.  Warm and inviting, the main room had a black iron wood stove, kettles hung from a branch, a cot, and a few blankets.  A cement ledge all around the outside of the house provides a place to sit and eat meals.  His grandparents hung a lantern outside, produced some plastic chairs from thin air, and served us hot tea.

We arrived back at the Promised Land to a delicious dinner of seasoned rice, dahl, chicken, and other dishes whose names I don’t know.  By that time in the week, I ate all meals with my fingers and I happily arranged each bite with just the right amount of everything in each scoop.  Eating with my fingers is a kinesthetic experience.  Feeling the texture of the food makes eating more of a wholistic pleasure.  I was also very hungry.

Our little group stayed up late talking and telling stories and laughing so hard we cried. 

And so here is what I see through the magic lenses of perspective. The world is bigger than what happens in my life.  The world is bigger than my house, my workplace, my church involvement, my community, even, blessed America...my country.  The world is bigger than even this world itself.  I know this.  I feel it. I believe it.  And I choose to follow an abiding kind of relationship with Jesus that stirs me to action, in my life, in my family, my church, my neighborhood, and in that big, other world, for me...it's in India.  We are blessed in order to be a blessing.  I can't plead ignorance.  And knowledge without action accomplishes nothing. 

Besides, it really IS exciting.

After a quick, cold, bucket shower, gargling my toothpaste with bottled water, and heading for my cot, I lay there thinking it would be a long time before I had such a day again.

Then I woke up the next morning. 

To send a comment to the author of this article, please write to Jeanne at jzahn@icmcindia.org