Woke up to an eery, but somehow beautiful, song of the Muslim’s call to prayer.    I will try to put it on here, so you can hear it too.  I felt really far from home this morning.

Our team would eat most of our meals in the hotel’s restaurant.  This morning I ate a vegetable dosa: a triangle-shaped, fried, pancake sort of thing with a thin layer of shredded vegetables (onion, carrot and cabbage) inside... oh, and the usual dose of Indian spices.  I like Indian spices and can tolerate some heat.  I am not so used to fried foods anymore, so the grease was a little much.  But it was good.

We met with the section president of Seventh-day Adventist churches.  He is new in this district and oversees about 86 Bibleworkers/pastors.  We talked finances and made plans for the next 3 weeks.  My team would consist of Pr. Kelly, I, and two of the college girls - Rachel and Toni (yes, another Toni!).  We would be preaching in a village called Ballawallan, and more people would be brought in from two other villages nearby.

My first impression of our brothers in India is that they are just like Americans - some are business-like, some are playful rather than work-oriented, some are social, and some are more indifferent.  But all of them have something in common that is not like anything we see in America.  They don’t shake their head up and down for yes, or side to side for no; they wobble their head in a sort of yes/no, side to side... oh, there is no way to describe it in words.  The closest thing I can come to is one of the motions you might see from those dogs or other animals that some people stick in their car where the head bobbles around with the motion of the car.  And EVERYONE in India does that while they are talking to you.

Our first meeting would be tonight, and I was going to preach.  So after our meeting with the leadership, I nervously went to my room to look over the slides we were given to use in our preaching.  I chose the slides with the Telugu verses I would be speaking about.  Most people here don’t have Bibles of course.  So the verses on the screen help those who read to see what our translators are saying as they read the Bible.

I ate aloo gobi for lunch (my favorite Indian dish in the States - really good, though it’s even more spicy here than in the restaurants at home).  It is a potato and cauliflower curry with an oily tomato sauce and the usual Indian spices.

The drivers were supposed to arrive at 4pm each night to take us to our various villages.  I soon learned that 4pm means 6:30pm in India.  It’s too hot to drive in the daylight.  (It was over 100F and got up to 120F at times!)

Since the college girls are not here yet, Pr. Kelly and I are the only ones to go to our village.  We rode out of town, through a village, and then through the pitch blackness for what seemed like hours.  It was so dark I couldn’t see anything outside of the headlights’ reach.  But the red dirt roads had bumps, ditches, and turns enough to add adventure.

In Ballawallan, 8 children were singing with a song leader in the little (20x30ft?) white stucco church.  They sit on the floor on either mats made of thin sticks of bamboo (or something like that) or on blue plastic tarps that look like they came from Lowes hardware.  The stucco walls were painted with brightly colored flowers, a rainbow, and some Bible verses in Telugu.  Shiny foil garlands hung from the ceiling for decoration.  We were “garlanded” too with marigolds and sweet-smelling jasmine flowers tied into a scratchy greenery - all “gilded” with strands of silver foil tinsel.

The PA system blared the song-leader’s loud and not-so-melodic voice.  After an hour and a half of singing (which was broadcasted by their PA system connected to speakers on top of the tin roof of the church) about 150 people were drawn in, most sitting outside the open door and windows of the church.

A typical inside of a church.

The women sit on one side, the men on the other, children in the front on their respective sides, and the prominent men on plastic chairs in the back.  Women cover their heads with the loose end of their saris when in public.  I also learned that no one wears their shoes in the church.  One middle-aged woman sitting near me saw my sandals as I sat cross-legged next to her; she unceremoniously pulled them off my feet and threw them out the window.  Ok, I don’t need to know Telugu to understand that!

We didn’t bother to set up the projector.  Pr. Kelly had the Bible story first and shared half of what I was supposed to preach about.  He caught himself and finished up quickly, then went on to the stop smoking, health talk.  I was praying that God would give me words to share since I had only half of my prepared sermon remaining and no projected power points to go on.  I can’t remember what I talked about, but I said something.

After each meeting people would come up to us and put our hand on their head wanting us to “bless” them.  I was told about this, so I knew that I would simply pray for them.  It was difficult that first night to know what to pray about since I didn’t know anyone or what their daily lives were like.  The translators didn’t ever bother to help me, so I guessed at what each face was pleading for and asked God to work on their behalf in the way HE KNEW would be best.

Yissy "blessing" a family during a house to house visit.

On the ride home we caught a glimpse of a rodent of some sort by the side of the road in the headlights, and a rabbit with really long ears ran down the middle of the road in front of us for a long ways before it finally turned off into the bushes.  Our translator and driver tried to help me learn one of their songs in Telugu.  As we drove through that little village we could see how cots were placed outside the houses and whole families were piled onto their one cot, sleeping.  Pigs blocked the road as we tried to drive through.  

The driver was telling us through the translator that when a person becomes a Christian in India they change their name from a Hindi name to a Christian one.  They usually lose their job, and always lose their social status, meaning that they can no longer receive priority hospital statues, or government help in any way (e.g. no scholarship for education).  The driver had not changed his name yet because he wanted his son to be able to finish his education; he was wondering if that was a deceptive thing to do and if it would be displeasing to God.