(I totally let the blog game slip. Sorry about that. But these are just a few thoughts from India.)
– Best Fail: As we were leaving a village a woman came up to the van and handed Kendra a water bottle. We didn’t know what she wanted us to do, so audrey and I told kendra to drink from the water bottle; you should have seen the look on the woman face. She was halfway laughing halfway horrified. Turns out kendra had just taken a sip of this random woman’s prayer oil which is basically straight vegetable oil. We still didn’t understand what she wanted, so we fumbled around for about five minutes trying to figure out what to do while everyone watching was laughing at us; we finally just decided to pray for the woman and hand her back her oil. Some of the best laughs come from the language barrier.
– It’s crazy that even with all the craziness and abnormality of being halfway around the world, I can still get too comfortable. I forget what it’s like to not eat rice for all three meals. I forget that normal people don’t get the opportunity to ever swim in the Bay of Bengal, let alone every week. I forget that I have dreamt of coming to India for such a long time and every new thing should bring excitement. I forget to be curious about the people, culture, food. And I forget how incredible it is that I get to bring hope to these people who are so excited for the good news. I didn’t know that I could get used to seeing this much poverty every day, but at some point I did and consequently completely forgot what the Lord has lead us here to do. No matter how many times I forget though, there’s always something that someone says or something I see that kind of jolts me back to why I’m even here. The other day I was asked if I could help a man get to the United States; when I asked him what would happen if it wasn’t as good as everyone made it out to be, he said it didn’t matter because his parents always dreamt of something better for him. When my phone was stolen, someone asked me how many US dollars it was. He then calculated how many rupees it was on his phone and when he saw the number, he looked so shocked and told me how sorry he was that I lost “a little fortune”. The locals serve us with so much worry and excitement when they themselves don’t have enough to eat. They view us as the sacrificial ones rather than themselves. Although it’s not about me at all; these things that bring me back to reality, as difficult as they may be to witness, are what brought me here in the first place.
– The Holidays: Christmas was surprisingly amazing; it felt more like the holidays at home than I would have ever thought. New Year’s Eve was amazing though and it was a complete 180 from any New Year’s Eve I have celebrated or seen celebrated back home. We were lucky enough to be invited to a church service that would start at 9:30 PM and go on until 1:00 the next morning. The way they celebrate the New Year isn’t by drinking or fireworks or a big dinner party; they pray and worship into the New Year together. It was so incredibly humbling to see so many men and women who’s only ambition for the New Year was to start it with awe for the Lord. The parts of India that we got to see were so spiritual, whether Christian, Hindu, or Muslim, partly because faith is often the only thing that these people have to hold onto and partly because it’s so embedded in their culture.
– Things I have seen/learned in India:
– They have the most unique way of serving each other. People are very blunt about what they want. At first it seems kind of rude and gruff, but most of the time the heart behind it is so genuine; they want people to be served in a way that they actually want. I think politeness (or at least my version of it) is kind of viewed as unnecessary; they don’t care if you keep asking for things because they want to serve you in the way that you want.
– There’s a vigilante group of guys called the “Love Commandos” that protects young couples who are from different castes or religions who want to get married.
– The locals call any soda a “cool drink”.
– Even if you don’t understand anything they are trying to tell you, you can usually get away with pretending if you “Indian head bobble” the entire time.
– I still haven’t met an Indian who can carry a tune.
– My name is a derogatory/ abusive way to say “come here woman”. Nobody told me until our last night in India.
– Most Indians that we’ve met are totally foreign to the concept of hugging; so when they try to hug you it’s either really violent or really halfhearted.
