Namaste from India!
Apologies for my radio silence on this thing… blogging has not been easy this month. India was the one country I was most nervous for on the Race, hearing rumors of life being street evangelism, food so spicy it burns your esophagus, with the only thing hotter than the food being the weather. Essentially I assumed it’d be physically demanding. But we arrived to a beautiful house and the even more beautiful Bangalore weather, and quickly realized any difficulties would have to come from elsewhere. My team has been wrestling with questions of purpose and life calling, so our hosts leaned into the hard questions of faith with us and allowed us the time to wrestle. So mentally I’ve been pretty burned out. Not to mention that each moment in India has been so infused with meaning and experience, it’s nearly paralyzing to try and dissect it all via blogging.
SO, an update on what we’ve been doing this month in Bangalore, India— My team and I have been working in a bunch of different settings, including hanging out with kids in the slums, teaching English at the school our hosts started, spending intentional time with our host family, and building relationships with girls in an orphanage. It’s all been absolutely incredible, but I found that my heart was with the girls home.
Before my team left, the girls of New Kids knew we wanted to have a sleepover party at the orphanage. It’s home to one boy and 20 girls, so the New Kids boys took little Akashi out for pizza and bowling, while the rest of us had a girls night at the home. We came armed with Cokes, pizza money, cookies, popcorn, pillows, movies, face masks, and assorted nail polishes. We were fully ready to steal the show and give them the best night of their lives! However, they ended up making it the best night of our lives too.
First things first, is Friendship Day secretly a thing everywhere, or did they just make it up for us? Either way we arrived to a swarm of girls decked out in hot pink shirts and black pants (they gave us some of their clothes so we could match them), yelling “HAPPY FRIENDSHIP DAY!!!!!” as we came in. They had decorated our Party Central room with streamers and loud music and balloons that said “happy friendship day”.
We brought out the nail polish and face masks and they went berserk. We listened to girl power pop songs, dancing around with neon nails and painted faces. Exactly what one thinks when one is casually thinking of a classic sleepover.
But, they then came out with bags full of accessories and proceeded to don us with colorful bracelets, earrings, and hair pieces that they had made or bought for us individually. They said these were friendship gifts to remember them even after we had gone.
I wanted to cry, though I’d done enough of that during the day saying goodbye to some of our students. I had a sobering moment realizing this was real life while one girl fixed my hair, one put earrings in my ears, and about four other girls put bracelets on my wrists. I’m at an Indian orphanage expecting to serve and be the fun sleepover-thrower, but ending up getting pampered by the orphans.
These girls don’t have anyone besides each other. I mean you know going into an orphanage that they don’t have parents… But I don’t really ponder all that truly entails until something like this hits me. They’re not going to have the luxury of a “typical” childhood. They won’t grow up with memories of a “typical” sleepover where mom bakes cookies and buys bags of M&Ms to mix into the greasy-buttery popcorn. But THIS is going to be their memory of a sleepover, and my team got to be a part of it. We got to be “mom” buying sodas and pizzas and trying not to embarrass anyone too much (including ourselves) in front of the friends. I got to be a part of a memory they’ll hold dear forever.
And there was so much of Kingdom vision in it all. Both groups, the Indian girls and American girls, came and pulled out all the stops to serve the other. Which then meant that both got served extremely well. Of course we all left the sleepover exhausted from late night fun and festivities, but we also left so full of true community and friendship.
When everyone serves everyone, everyone gets served. It reminds me of the early church in Acts 2:42-47.
It was one of the best examples of true church I’ve seen in a while, a friendship-themed sleepover in an orphanage. This is a cool life.
