withHim

The 7 hour layover in Mumbai, India went pretty quickly as we visited and ate samosas (a deep fried pastry thing stuffed with potatoes, carrots, peas and spices). I NEVER would have found my way from the international arrival area of the airport to the domestic departure area. You had to walk a long ways and go through several checkpoints and ride a bus for 15 minutes... as we rode to the domestic departure airport I caught my first glimpse of the shanty style houses that many city dwellers live in - nothing more than scraps of sheet metal or plastic with some plaster here and there. It looked like a junkyard, not a neighborhood. The few “streetlights” (and some red lights in windows) were all that kept the darkness at bay. Another flight (2-3hours?).

In ridiculous contrast, the airport here in Hyderabad, India looked very much like a western-styled mall. Bright lights, plants, modern architecture, marble floors and escalators... one whole side of the building was open to the outside. It was weird to go down an escalator and feel the breeze of “outside.” But I guess walls are not a necessity in a place that is always warm.

The guys on the team commented, “Smell it? The smell of India.” It was a curious smell indeed. Anyone who has traveled knows that each place has its own smell. The type of dirt probably has a lot to do with the smell of most countries. But in this case there was that curry smell again, and... well... the smell of trash. Everything is nicely baked in the warm sunshine. I’ll leave it up to your imagination.

The trees, flowers, birds and other creatures of India are beautiful! There was a black bird flying around in the airport rafters that had white patches on its shoulder and resembled a jay of some kind. Locust trees with clusters of orange-red flowers - pretty!

We loaded up into three vehicles and drove for quite a while to the conference office. The car I rode in was made in India. They have made the same model for 50 years now. The traffic was WAY scarier than Ukraine. There are no lines in the road to divide it into lanes, no traffic lights (we actually saw a few somewhere), no rules it seemed. But there had to be some sort of rules. By the time we left, I had figured it out: You drive only where there is room for your vehicle. If there is no room in the direction you want to go, you honk incessantly until some little space appears. Then you lurch forward into that space and start honking again. And all this usually happens at around 40mph.

Locksmaya's car: the India produced body style.

A typical one-way highway in the city.

A view of the traffic from my hotel room - an intersection.

Most of the vehicles are auto-rickshaws - a three wheeled, diesel powered, floor and seats with a little bit of roof over it (note there are no doors or seat belts). These vehicles are taxis, mostly. Not many people actually own their own car. Business men use mopeds or bicycles. And people from the villages bring their oxen-pulled carts into town. Incredibly, you will see people in their most common form of transportation (i.e. sandals) walking among the traffic jams of auto-rickshaws, oxen, bicycles and buses as if “close calls” were nothing to raise the adrenaline.

At the church conference office we cleaned up a little and slept for 2-4 hours. Then we visited a school run by the Adventists there in Hyderabad. The teachers write their own textbooks each year which get approved by the headmaster. The children each receive a blank copybook, and they copy the lesson into it each day as the teacher puts it on the chalkboard. That is it! No other books, pictures, or anything in the classroom. At this location, 90% of the students are not Christian. But all students who choose to come to the school must take and pass the Bible classes in order to graduate. Quite a number of the Muslim and Hindu families have converted to Christianity as they learn from their children about Jesus.

While we were there, a Muslim lady and her son came to visit the boy’s teacher. The little boy had a serious illness and was prescribed a medicine that caused him to break out in hives which left him partially blind. He wore sunglasses and tried to hide his face the whole time. Such handicaps are looked at as a judgement of the gods by the Hindus or as an “uncleanness” by the Muslims. The Christian teacher has been encouraging the family that their boy can still live a purpose-filled life and may yet heal completely. The mother brings the boy frequently and frantically to be prayed over.

The Muslim lady taking her boy (blue shirt at right) back home from the school visit for prayer.

We exchanged our money (1 dollar = 44 rupees); ate at a restaurant - various types of curry and rice; and went back to the conference office to sleep a little more. It was too hot to travel in the cars until the sun went down. The drive to Kurnool was something like 5 hours long. Having the windows down and the night air blowing on me that whole time - I actually got cold. That was the last time I was cold while outside in India! : )

The hotel we were staying at as “home base” was really nice. It had A/C (to some degree... in one of the guy’s rooms the lowest degree was probably around 85F), running water, toilets, and wood box beds with 4 inch mattresses on them. Our hotel was actually better than the Taj Mahal, because the Taj doesn’t have A/C or any of those other things! The most interesting thing to me was that the shower had no curtain or anything around it; the shower head was on the wall just three feet from the toilet and four feet from the sink in a completely tiled room. Once you got used to the fact that the only other person in there was the “you” in the wall-sized mirror, it was OK.