Is This Real Life? (India)

 
1. After 7 months on the Race, I was pretty used to the fact that people like to stare at us. We have often felt like animals in a zoo with the way that people have pointed, stared, and even petted us. However, India took this to a whole new level. This month, people would walk up to us, stand less than a foot away, and just stare. Most of them didn’t speak English, so we had little ability to communicate. That didn’t seem to bother them at all. They would stand for 15 minutes at a time and just stare while we stood waiting for a bus or sat in church services, completely oblivious to how visibly uncomfortable it made us. Awesome.
 
2. I’m not sure why, but this month our Pastor and his wife, Rachel, took a particular liking to me. They decided that I was their baby. Literally. They have one son and a baby on the way, but this month I took on the role of the baby daughter they never had. They spent the month trying to teach me the tamil language like I was learning the first words I had ever spoken in my life. Rachel would delight in talking in her best “mommy to baby voice” and have me repeat the words “manipudi” and “panipudi” at least 10 times each day.  I’m still not sure what either of those words mean. Pastor would make fun of the way I talked and insist that I take more food at almost every single meal. Because there are so many people of the Hindu faith in that part of India who wear large amounts of jewelry, the majority of Christians in the area wear no jewelry in order to set themselves apart. Even though Pastor didn’t mind us wearing jewelry as missionaries, he would still pick at me every day by threatening to “pluck” my jewelry off of me.
 
3. When we arrived at our home in India, we were met with some great news. Our contacts told us that we would have a running shower AND a washing machine! We thought we were in heaven! Josh did 2 loads of his laundry that first day, and then reality hit. Our contacts came to us to tell us that there was no more water. It was dry season, and the little water that was left in our well was the only water that our contacts would have until the rain came again. We went from having unlimited access to a shower and washing machine to having almost no water at all. We were allotted one bucket of water to split between the 5 of us every 2 or 3 days. This bucket was used for showers, washing faces, washing clothes, and brushing teeth.
 
4. Having no water was very trying at times, but God taught me 2 specific things through this experience. First of all, I was given an entirely new perspective of the people in Biblical times who spent their days drawing water from a well. It is not an easy job, especially in the Indian heat. Second, we spent our month preaching at least twice, and sometimes 5 or 6 times, each day. God gave me the words for two specific sermons that were both related to rain, water, wells, and dry seasons. I was able to preach about things that these people could relate to, and God rewarded them for their attentiveness. One night, I had just finished a sermon on the book: “The Circle Maker”. The book begins by telling a legend of a man named Honi who drew a circle around himself in the sand and refused to move from the circle until God sent rain for his people. I told this story to the people in our church in India and encouraged them to pray boldly for the things that they desired in their life. That night, the rain came. Because the rain came, many people in the church were refreshed in their faith and in their prayer life. God used me to help to show them how much he cares about them and desires to answer the prayers in their hearts.
 
5. Our series of travel days to India were quite interesting. I guess I should technically start by saying that the night before we left Nepal, I was the sickest that I have ever been on the Race. I ate spoiled ice cream and got a bad case of food poisoning that resulted in me projectile vomiting all over the front porch of the church where we were living.  Thank the Lord for Cassie and Mikala who used buckets to wash it away while I continued vomiting for the next straight hour. After everything had been sufficiently rejected from my body, I was able to leave the bathroom, but had to return every 2 hours for the rest of the night. Needless to say, I was weak and exhausted when we packed up the bus to head to the airport at 4:30 A.M. We arrived at the Kathmandu airport at 6 A.M. We waited with our bags in the dark of the morning until the airport opened at 7. We had full body checks every 15 feet (literally) until we finally reached the gate for our flight that would be leaving at 10 A.M. There was no air conditioning at the airport, and I was still feeling very queasy. We found out around 11 A.M. that our flight had been canceled. The airport staff tried to console us by feeding us potato chips and apple juice. At around 4 P.M., we were finally able to board a flight to New Delhi. Because our original flight had been canceled, we missed our flight from New Delhi to Mumbai. We sat around the New Delhi airport for about 4 hours. Finally, the airport decided to provide us with hotel rooms for the night so that we could get rest before our newly rescheduled flight in the morning. We got to the hotel around 11 P.M. and were stunned by how beautiful it was. There were two Hindu weddings taking place in the hotel that night, and they were so extravagantly beautiful. We only had to share a room with one other person, which felt like the biggest blessing of all. We grabbed a buddy, went to our rooms, took the first hot/actual showers that many of us had taken in months, and fell sound asleep, only to awake at 3 A.M. to head back to the airport. We flew from New Delhi to Mumbai, and Mumbai to Hyderabad with little other interference. When we arrived in Hyderabad, we were picked up from the airport and taken to a YMCA. It was a little sketchy, but there were beds and we were happy to have a day or 2 to recover. Our team was the last team to leave the YMCA and had a couple creepy experiences, like someone trying to jiggle the door to the girls’ room open in the middle of the night, but we made it through it all and finally arrived at the home of our contact in the far south of India.