Things I’ve done this week I’ve never done before:

• Traveled on the left side of the road
• Showered from a bucket
• Eaten with my hands
• Altered my clothes without a machine
• Washed laundry by hand
• Ridden with ten people in a jeep made to comfortably seat six
• Gone to two church services in the same day in two different languages
• Eaten around a table of six where each person was from a different country
• Not paid attention when the electricity goes out
• Been peed on
• Learned to sing part of a song in Hindi
• Successfully eaten Indian curry for breakfast (this is the most recent and important accomplishment)

Why?

“Why does she come?” a woman in the pipe village asked our driver while nodding in my direction.

Translating, the driver explains, she does not understand why I would come here, to India, to a slum, in the heat, to sit with her on a matt in the dirt. People who are rich in India, they do not care. They would not come. Why would I?

“Someone spoke to her,” the driver said about me. “Told her to come to you because you are loved.”

She bobbled her head side to side in assent, but her eyes still revealed disbelief.

In that moment, I knew it was worth it. To travel forty-two hours to reach her country. To fight the heat, the traffic. To sit in the dirt, sweating, flies buzzing around us. To hold her baby, let it pee in my lap. It will be worth it to come every day and just sit with her if it helps her understand that there is no length my father will not go to help her understand his love.

I cannot speak her language, but I pray my smile and the light in my eyes would speak of the love of my father, and I make a mental note to learn to tell her myself of his love in her own words by the time I am gone.

Legos

There is one bag of mega-block legos here at the base. Every morning it goes into the back of the jeep and travels with us to the slums. Yellow, blue, pink, green. The hands of different children reach to play with the faded, dirt-worn colors each day.

Somehow I envisioned children in the slums to be different than children in America. I expected them to have so little they would gratefully take whatever they were given. I expected them to play together nicely. My bad.

For the third day in a row I found myself acting as a referee of legos, splitting up fights and saying no just like I’ve done a thousand times in my all-but-expired, Western, babysitting career. These slum children are hardened. They have a sinful nature just like anyone else. They fight and hoard, whine for more, and steal when they think no one is looking. They are vicious over their legos, over anything they can claim and call their own.


I should’ve expected this. I should’ve anticipated that children who are given nothing by the world, who are forced to fight for anything they have—they would also fight over legos. I should’ve expected that these children would not always be easy to love.

Self-generated pity for others can only last so long. I can feel compassion for someone because they have so little, but unless this compassion stems from the heart of a big God—who’s love will not run out for his children no matter how cruel or selfish their hearts become—then I will quickly become frustrated and impatient. This I can tell after only three days. I think it is going to take all of the four months for me to learn what it means to let God love his children through me. More than that, I think it will take a lifetime.

I pray as I rise in the morning, as I travel in the jeep, as I walk the streets of the slums, as I sit barefoot in the dirt with aging women, that God will be patient and diligent with my heart. That he will show me his love until it is channeling through my eyes, my hands, my feet to whoever he chooses to reach.

Being in India means...

India crawls over you. It’s impossible to be an observer from the other side of a glass window. You carry her dust and her dirt in your hair, on your feet, with your hands, in your eyes. It sticks to your sweat in the heat. You step out of the shower and immediately it clings to you again.

The first few days here were relatively cool, lingering from the passing of a monsoon rain. Yesterday was hot. The kind of hot you can’t wash away. I sweated all day in the sun with the children in the slums. Then I went up to my room and lay on my bed perfectly still with the fan running full blast and even then there was sweat. Yesterday was the first day I noticeably realized—there is no air conditioning.

But you don’t complain.

You come back from the slums where families live in cast-off, cement drainage pipes, where a seventy-year-old woman’s feet have turned to leather from walking barefoot all her life, where the eggs we bring them may be their only protein all week, and you realize that your small stucco room with a fan and water for a cold shower is like a palace. And then you wonder, what do I call the home I left a week ago?


There are moments it’s hard (and more than just a few), when I want to sit down and complain, to act like an American. There are afternoons when I don’t want to get up from my nap and go tutor children in the school. I’m too tired. It’s too hot. I want to eat something because it tastes good, not because I need it to survive. But every time I stop myself. I have to remember why I came, that all my needs are met, that I have more than enough—even in the simplicity I’m adjusting to. So even though my strength is less than one hundred percent from eating small amounts of strange food and interrupted nights of sleep on a bed that feels more like a board, I get up an go, and I pray that God becomes my sufficiency. I pray that he teaches me what it means to serve, shows me what it is like to watch him move despite everything about myself.

Loving India is a choice I’ve been given to make. And I do.

Beginnings

I feel at home here, in this land half a world away from what I know. As I walk through the rough streets my feet are covered in dust, my scarf blows in the breeze behind my back, and I find new places awakening within my heart that have never stirred before. It’s a hard life here. People work for everything, needs follow like a constant shadow, but no one is in a rush. There is time to breath, time to pause, time to make room for a big God, time to ask this God to show up, and time to believe that He will.

Today I went out into the slums for the first time. Eight of us piled into a small jeep and bumped our way down a dirt road to a small village of makeshift huts and a few cement houses built on loan. The streets were muddy. Flies swarmed. A baby peed on the floor. But the children flocked at our arrival. Their smiles made me at home.



My first thought was to wonder what I was doing there. It wasn’t because of the filth. I looked at myself and thought, “what do I have to give?” I felt out of place, like an unwanted piece of furniture that everyone is bound to keep tripping over. But the women I was with were reassuring. They wanted me there. The children wanted me there. I played with them all morning while others trained girls in tailoring and met basic medical needs.



The truth is, there is not much I can offer to India. But there is a lot that my father can offer to the people that he loves. As we prayed this afternoon, the hearts of the women who do this day in and day out were another reminder to me of how much my father is the one to come and save and redeem and heal in our lives. There is nothing we can do to meet the needs of these people in the slums, but there is a lot we can do in making room for someone else who can.

The Sounds of the Street

The sounds of the city streets are the last thing I hear at night, they rouse me in the morning with their cadenced rhythms and they filter through my dreams while I hover on the edge of sleep. The trucks rumble and grunt in their heaviness of passing. Breaks screech to avoid collision. The beeping horns of all the smaller cars and taxis layer a chorus in the background. There is one kind of horn that rises above the rest every so often. It’s sound hangs on in a dissonant rising and dipping of announcement. I do not yet know what kind of vehicle to link with this jingle. Together the river of traffic creates a thrum that never ceases, a constant throb of the city, like an echo of the people saying we are here, living, moving, we will not go away. There are birds not far outside my window cawing and twirpping their existence too, as if they are answering back to the living mass of traffic outside their door.

At first the clatter and verbalization is strange and invades my sleep like a stranger. However, though I have only been here for two nights, I can already sense my body slipping into its lilting tempo. I know that once these sounds are gone I will lie at night kept awake by the silence of their absence.

Arrived

I knew flexibility was going to be important in India; however, I needed it much sooner than expected.

My flight from Omaha to Chicago was supposed to leave at 10:39am. First the flight was delayed an hour. At 11:39 the entire plane was boarded and waiting for take-off when the pilot said they had found something wrong with two tires during inspection. They needed replaced and the parts had to be flown in. The repair would take hours, so the flight was canceled. We de-boarded and I spent over an hour in a line back at the ticket counter getting rerouted. Despite the frustration of so many people around me, I found my spirit curiously calm. As I worshipped and waited, I pray for God to make a way for me. An hour later I had changed airlines and flight plans.

The result was, despite the fact that I had already boarded a plane for the second time and had been “traveling” for 8 hours, I was still sitting at the Omaha airport waiting for take-off at 2 in the afternoon. But the flight did leave, and I had the last available seat. God had made a way.

Originally I was supposed to fly from Chicago to Frankfurt and then connect directly to Hyderabad. Now, I was taking a direct flight from Chicago to Delhi, but then had a ten=hour layover waiting for my domestic flight to Hyderabad. I was blessed by an American Indian family with the same two flights. We spent the layover together and it was nice to not feel so alone.

So now, 42 hours later, I find myself in Hyderabad. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the hour and half car ride from the airport.

Slums. Flats. Camels. Dogs. Babies cradled on the backs motorcycles. Muslim women shrouded in black veils. Cows in the road. Four lanes of cars squeezing into two. Brightly colored saris. A woman in veils driving a motorcycle with an ipod nano strapped to her hip. Temples. Our car stopping an inch from collision; the driver says, “that happens around here.” Advertisements. One reads, “Happiness for sale. Up to 51% off.”

India. I have so many questions for you, but for now I am content just to be here, knowing God has made a way. My goal this evening—to stay awake a few hours longer so that hopefully I will sleep through the night.