Getting Oriented

Daily life is a continual negotiation involving strange little bills and coins which we call money. We stop by the grocery store or bargain with a street vendor to buy our food. We stop by the office of the Hindi language school to pay our bill. We bargain again with the auto rickshaw drivers who take us to school. They absolutely refuse to use their meters when they see us foreigners.

Our Indian friends tell us we’re paying too much, but how long does one haggle over fifty cents. We know the amount means much more to those drivers than it does to us. Yet, we hate feeling like we’re being taken advantage of. And it doesn’t stop there. The delivery boys want a tip when they see us even though we’re told it’s not the normal custom in India. Some act very offended if the amount we give is deemed too small.

Another level of negotiation involves the beggars who approach us when our auto rickshaw stops at a traffic light or when we walk through the commercial center near our place. We can see the desperation beneath the theatrics thy use to try to win our sympathy. Yet we made the decision to not give the coins they want. It would hardly begin to address their needs and we would be continually swamped by street children seeking handouts as we go about our daily routines.

Still, we cannot help feeling guilty when a hungry child peers in the door of a lunch counter where we’re eating. I struggle to put such experiences into perspective. There are 50,000 homeless children in Delhi. They are at the bottom rung of the economic system and have fallen through every social safety net. I do not want to become hardened to that human misery but I also want to find appropriate ways to channel my compassion.

India has one of the world’s fastest growing economies and is home to more than one billion people. One third of the society is doing quite well in the new India fueled by information technology, science, and business. By many social indicators, India has done reasonably well since winning independence from Britain in 1947. There has been no repeat of the massive famines which wracked India when it was part of the British colonial system. By itself, that has been a huge success.

Rev. Asheervadam, an Indian Mennonite historian, recently told us that Mennonite missionaries from Russia and then North American first came to India in the end of the nineteenth century in response to a massive famine in central India. They began their ministry among the Dalit or untouchable castes who were the most disadvantaged part of Indian society at the time. Response to great social need has always been part of Mennonite work in India. Likewise, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) began working in Kolkata in 1942 in response to the Bengal famine.

Then thousands were killed or driven from their homes in the communal riots that accompanied the partition of India and Pakistan when the British left in 1947. While there has been no social calamity of that scale in recent history, those events continue to shape the perceptions of Indians today. Our MCC India staff members still tell stories about the things that happened to their families during the partition. Such memories fuel interfaith and social tensions in India.

Those memories are especially poignant for the two-thirds of Indians who live on two dollars a day or less. One of the biggest social challenges will be to find ways to enable them to participate in the recent economic prosperity. This is an absolute necessity if India wishes to avoid future catastrophic social upheavals. Most of the poor still live in rural communities where there is little opportunity for social advancement.

As we think of the role of MCC India in the coming years, it will certainly be focused on this social divide and find its expression in programs designed to address it. Global Family programs in elementary and vocational education will continue to be a significant ministry. There are exceptional universities and other academic centers in India, yet thirty percent of the society is still illiterate. The whole primary education system is inadequate and not up to the task. It will be a huge challenge to help address this need.

Education, however, cannot be an end in itself. People need opportunities to use their education in meaningful ways. Rural and urban development and livelihood programs are equal challenges that go hand-in-hand with better education. Additionally, interfaith and communal violence is always right beneath the surface. What can our Mennonite tradition contribute to interfaith understanding and peacebuilding? On one hand, we will want to learn from India’s rich and varied religions tapestry and, on the other hand, we will want to unabashedly bring what we have to contribute from our faith tradition.

As I study Hindi and as I meet street children begging for coins, I’m always aware that I’m an American Christian. Part of the struggle is to figure out how that relates to our work here. Surely, it will include being an advocate for India’s poor in American churches and in American society. As I write, US Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson is touring India and urging Indians to further open up their economy to the global market. He’s certainly an advocate for American business interests but nothing he says indicates that he understands the challenge of raising the economic and social standing of poor people in India. Part of our task is to be that voice to Americans.

My prayer is that I will become a savvy negotiator for the reign of God as we serve in India. To that end, perhaps I can even borrow a page from the negotiation skills of those wily Indian auto rickshaw drivers.

Transitions

The decision to take an assignment with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in India with responsibilities for program in Afghanistan, India, and Nepal felt exotic and challenging. Beyond that, Ruth and I were keen to lean from Christians and other people from outside our American context. Ruth wanted to develop the many international relationships she hand built up during her years of working at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University. I was gradually feeling more and more distance between the global ethics courses I was teaching at Eastern Mennonite University and my experience on the field. Both of us felt a pull toward returning to Asia that is hard to explain. We just felt it in our spirits. And we clearly felt the call to follow Jesus wherever our adventure would take us.

Saying goodbye to our home and community in Virginia to take a mission assignment in India, however, was more difficult, when it came down to the process of uprooting ourselves and welcoming our new lives, than either Ruth or I had imagined. We had underestimated how firmly we had put down our roots in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where we had lived and worked for fourteen years.

Our professional positions had deeply shaped our identities. Ruth was the administrative director at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU); I was a professor at EMU and a long-time pastor of Shalom Mennonite Congregation. Fortunately I had the summer to prepare for our move but Ruth worked right up until the day we left. There were so many last minute details that neither of us had anticipated. Tensions rose as we both felt the strain.

Giving up her identity and relationships at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding was painful for Ruth. Likewise, I found it very difficult to leave my identity as a pastor. We had both developed deep friendships. The process of saying goodbye that actually began months earlier seemed to drag on indefinitely. Eventually, we just wanted it to end.

It was difficult to leave the passive-solar house we had built early in our marriage when I was a seminary student and our children were still young. Again, we didn’t completely realize the extent to which our identities were wrapped up in our home. Ruth had spent countless enjoyable hours laying out and caring for flower gardens, perennials, and groundcovers. I had planted trees, built a deck in various installations, and undertook various house remodeling projects through the years.

Both of us sensed that our house no longer fit what we felt called to in the next phase of our lives. Yet, how does one say goodbye to something like that? It was made easier by being able to sell it to a family that was so thrilled with what we had created and loved it from the first time they laid eyes on it. Even so, we shed some bitter tears when we finally had to say goodbye.

The hardest part was saying goodbye to our three children. They had gone with us to the Philippines on our first Asian adventure twenty six years ago. Now they had their own lives even though we were still very close as a family. At a family gathering last Christmas, they had all encouraged us to follow our hearts back to Asia. This summer we had a wonderful family vacation in the highlands of Virginia in anticipation of our new adventure. But it hurt so much to say goodbye to our youngest daughter Sara at the end of the summer when she returned to her theatre studies in California. Finally saying goodbye to our daughter Krista, our son Stephen, and Stephen’s wife Stacy hurt equally much when we finally flew from Washington, DC to Kolkata India,.

During the summer, Ruth and I had read many books and watched various films on India to prepare ourselves for our new assignment. But nothing could prepare us for our final arrival in Kolkata. Our frame of reference had been the six years in which we lived in Manila. The old city of Manila was a helpful reference point but it did not prepare us for the yellow ambassador taxis, auto rickshaws, pedi-cabs, and even hand-pulled rickshaws plying the hot, crowded streets of Kolkata.

It rapidly sank in that this was all very foreign even though we had previously lived in Manila for six years. We would need to start over in a very different life. We swallowed our rising panic and tried to put on a brave face. What had possessed us to leave our secure world in Virginia? How would we ever cope? Our restless sense of adventure had taken us too far from the familiar and the comfortable.

A redeeming factor was the welcoming hospitality we received from the Indian MCC staff in Kolkata. They were a wonderful oasis in this strange teeming city with an infrastructure that felt twenty years behind what we had known in Manila. We saw the passion on the faces of the MCC staff as they explained the various ministries they were involved. And they so much wanted us to succeed. What an opportunity to be part of this ministry.

At a regional MCC meeting in Bangkok, several days after we dropped off our bags in Kolkata, we were quickly immersed in the MCC world in a way that felt a little overwhelming. We were now the new people rather than the people who knew our organizational family from the inside out. I found myself thinking like a detached anthropologist studying the peculiar habits and relationships of the natives.

Now we’re back in Kolkata waiting for our train ride across India to New Delhi where we will study Hindi for three months. Yesterday we walked to the Sisters of Charity mother house where Mother Theresa lived and worked. We have had various meetings with our Indian team and feel excited to be part of the many program activities they are involved in. We’re beginning to design our respective roles and figure out what we bring to MCC India. We’ll keep you posted.