I am writing a book.

Three days ago, we had the first snowfall of the season, and it’s still on the ground. Here in Canada, everything is cold and white right now, and I sleep under thick blankets, type next to a space heater during the day, and try to learn how to dress properly with layers and layers of wool. I still remember those TV infomercials a few years ago about “Snuggies,” the blankets with arms that looked like cultic robes when the ad showed what looked like a family of suburban Druids enjoying a nighttime camp fire in their matching fleece ensemble. Now I am cold enough to wear a snuggie around the house without shame, cold enough not to care whether I look like an infomercial from the last decade or a member of a pagan cult.Advent has just begun: the season of waiting for the first spark of hope in the dead of winter, of looking for signs of life in the midst of death. Even Christmas itself will not the triumphant victory of Easter–it will be the quiet celebration of hope born into the world, even while oppression reigns. Shepherds and wise men visit this child in secret, because baby Jesus will still have to flee Herod’s genocide and grow up under foreign occupation before he leads justice to victory and inaugurates the Kingdom. I feel the tension and the hope of this waiting, this hope that is stubborn but uncertain of when fulfillment and completion will come.

I look at squirrel and bird tracks in the snow on the roof outside my window as I edit the manuscript of my book. The scenes outside are so different from the ones that linger in my mind. I’m writing about my life in India: what it was like to be an outsider accepted into community across boundaries of race, religion, culture, and socioeconomic background. I’m writing about how life with Muslim friends shaped my own faith, and how confronting suffering in the lives of my neighbors who were materially poor has challenged me to make sense of where God is in the midst of all the pain. I’m writing about how Muslims and Christians and rich and poor need one another, about what it means for us to love our enemies, and about the changes that community brings in us as individuals and in our world. I’m primarily writing about my own journey, and the love that I have continued to discover no matter how far I travel in any direction.

The process of writing has been good for me. It forces me to be present to process rather than destination, and this is certainly a process over which I have only limited control and knowledge about how long it will take or what the final result will be.

But it’s difficult, because sometimes spending my days writing feels like living with ghosts—not only of my friends and neighbors in India, but of many of my own dreams, expectations, and self-definitions as well. Aside from that, daring to ask for help, to show my writing to others, or to even say out loud that I am working on a book brings my insecurities out of the shadows, revealing my fears about whether this story really will come together in the end, whether it will get published, what people will think about it (and about me) if it is published.

But I believe that it is a story worth telling, even a story that needs to be told, and so I keep on writing. I am struggling, not to bring characters to life, but to allow the vibrant life of the real people I have known to shine through the pages. I want you to see them, to care about them, to learn from them. I am still learning from them myself.

Advent has begun: the season of waiting, expectation, and hope. Whispered promises of new possibilities to come. I am living towards these possibilities, working towards what, as yet, I have never seen but still believe is possible. I struggle on despite my fears, my fresh memories of loss, and the uncertainties of the future.

I trust that new life can begin even in the dead of winter, that those whispers of hope are trustworthy, and that we are but the midwives of the dreams God wants to birth into this world.

Stay tuned.

A new beginning (and a poem from the ashes)

We’ve been in Canada for a month now. In some ways, it feels that we’ve been here much longer: we have been the eager recipients of hospitality in a loving community that has sheltered us and softened our landing in this new country. Even as new arrivals, we have shared most meals with friends, entered into daily and weekly rhythms of prayer and worship with others, played with children, and felt at home. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this as we begin to get our feet under us again. Just sharing the domestic sphere of cooking, cleaning, and common space with others brings a sense of belonging that is rare to find so quickly when one shows up in a new city without an existing network of relationships, or even a job. It’s ironic to think that we’ve moved into a “joint family” living situation only after leaving India, where we were surrounded by people who found it strange for the two of us to be living “alone”!

This community is centered around hospitality. When we briefly passed through this community several years ago, we were inspired to participate in extending this invitation of hospitality to neighbors who often brought their struggles with mental illness, addiction, prostitution, homelessness, or poverty into the house. Some of them are refugees and migrants. Others have been internally displaced within their own culture and society.

This time, however, we’ve returned to the community as strangers and foreigners in need of hospitality ourselves. This time, we feel most inspired by the hospitality that has been extended to us, from community members and neighbors alike. Community dinners at our house bring the whole diverse and quirky lot of us together, and it can be quite the adventure. The lines are blurred between who is hosting and who is being hosted; who is extending grace and who is receiving it. Several people from the neighborhood are long-time friends of the community who know what it’s like to live on the streets or to fight through an addiction, and they have become important partners in extending hospitality to others—they are some of the best cooks we have, they share their insight and their stories with us, and they offer compassionate, listening ears to newcomers.

***

We have yet to really process what it means to have uprooted ourselves from the slum in India and moved here. It will take time to unpack that experience; even our last day in the slum was stuffed full of the roller coaster of emotions I had felt throughout the time I lived there: waves of sadness, anger, tenderness, frustration, laughter, happiness, and grief. I felt exhausted by everyone’s desire to be with us as much as possible in those last hours. I felt overwhelmed by the intensity of their need. I felt humbled, too, by the gifts we received: one last, home cooked meal with our Indian family; hugs and kisses on the cheek from the little children who have become like nieces and nephews to us; a painting from my “little sister.”

“Just think,” our former landlady had told us earlier that week, “when you first arrived here, no one even wanted to offer you a room, because they didn’t know you. Now there’s not a single person in this neighborhood who isn’t sad you’re leaving.”

Those words express the heart and soul of what our time in India meant. By the time we actually walked out of the community, it felt like we were attending our own funeral. Thirty or forty people escorted us up to the main road in a somber procession and blocked traffic as they crowded around to hug us, say their final goodbyes, and flag down an auto rickshaw for us. Many people were sobbing openly. So were we, by the time we drove away. I feel many things about leaving, but in that moment the only thing I felt was immeasurable loss.

Sometimes these experiences elude the grasp of everyday language. They can’t find full expression in words of any kind, but poetry more closely approximates their meaning. I wrote some poetry a few days before our departure:

On the occasion of my leaving
this battlefield and second home,
strewn with unfulfilled hopes, half-discovered mysteries,
love, laughter, triumph, and sorrow,
a poem:

For the children locked up in dark rooms,
and the ones singing film songs, flying kites, playing marbles in the alleyway;

For the parents screaming at their children,
and for the mothers tenderly nursing infants; the proud fathers with toddlers in their arms;

For the women with broken bangles and bruised eyes,
for the grown-up boys who beat them;

For the men earning survival with their sweat and exhaustion,
and for the ones drowning in a malaise of alcohol and ganja,

For the feuds and fights and angry words,
reverberating off the narrow brick walls of the alleyways, and lodging in wounded hearts;

For the communal prayers also, and the generosity of neighbors:
meals for widows, and foreigners, and orphans;

For all the beauty and pain I have seen,
For the cruelty and the love.
Both have taken my breath away, in turns.

No victims here, and no heroes;
No one evil and no one righteous
(myself included)
All facets of the human heart laid bare
In these dusty alleyways and close quarters

Where there are no secrets
(except the ones we keep from ourselves),
And no illusions
(besides the ones in our own minds).

For all of us:
May we find peace
Instead of everything else we go in search of,
To fill the space where love alone belongs.

For Andy 

Picture

with your Thai grandmother, Tong.

Maybe it started when we were sitting in that bamboo house with the hundred-year-old man, feeling comically out of place among the village elders who dropped their chicken bones through the floor as they ate. We were in the strangest of situations and we both loved it—I caught your eye from across the room and you were grinning from ear to ear.Or maybe it was when we got lost in that cave and our candle burnt out. I was clinging to you, scared, but we still tried to make jokes as we stomped through the bat guano, and you somehow found the way out ­­and we were saved.Maybe it happened much later. I don’t know when it started, but by the time we were in the airport saying our goodbyes at the end of our semester in Thailand, I was accidentally saying “I love you” as I gave you a hug. My eyes widened when I heard the words escape spontaneously, without my permission. Turns out you didn’t hear them muffled into your shoulder… and I was glad.

Then that first hard summer after I had lived in the poor places and had my eyes opened, nothing seemed right anymore, not even the sheer number of napkins everyone used at the café where I worked. I would be laid low by the recognition of my part in all the injustice and pain, and thrilled by all of the new ideas and possibilities surging through my mind, and then you would call. My family started calling you the “Trudy whisperer” because you always seemed to call at the crescendo of my tearful or angsty maladjustment, and after getting off the phone with you I would be all smiles, and calm. It wasn’t that you talked me out of my ideas. If anything, you talked me further into them (we were co-conspirators from the beginning). But after talking to you I didn’t feel alone or crazy anymore. If I was an outlier, then we were outliers together.

You’ve always had that effect on me. Your peaceful presence, your gentle strength—they are the stability and trust that I’ve needed so often over the years. So many times, as I’ve voiced my confessions and my fears to you, I have met that steady, loving gaze of yours: those undaunted eyes remind me that even the worst will be made well. Your unconditional acceptance proves to me again and again that love is strong enough to ride out the worst of storms, even and especially the ones that rage within me.

After a few more months, a few adventures, ideas, and plans later, you were telling me you were falling in love—this time we both heard the words. We haven’t stopped dreaming and planning and adventuring since then, pursuing this slippery notion of the Kingdom of God to the ends of the earth and the depths of our souls.

The day after our wedding, we flew back to Asia, backpacked and hitchhiked and motorbiked through Vietnam, started work in a Chinese city we had never heard of before, befriended whomever we met. Two years later we were starting again in India, with a new language, new culture, new community. All along the way, your calming presence makes you dependable in crises, your patient ear and gentle humor defuses conflict, and your disarming smile always seems to set people at ease.  You take everyone seriously, and they notice that. You’re a born peacemaker, but I like to joke that your uncanny ability to make friends with anyone, from vegetable sellers and homeless people to grumpy old men and shy toddlers (who call you by name and refuse to let you pass without shaking your hand), is also a spiritual gift. Sometimes I grow weary of welcoming strangers into my life, but your open-handed generosity in this regard challenges me to continue opening myself to community, even when it’s hard.

Four years into marriage, here we are again in a new place, entering the unknown. We’re starting fresh with a new culture and a new community (though we do have a head start on the language this time). Our address has bounced back and forth across the Pacific, and we still don’t own a house or even a stick of furniture, but we’ve found a home in each other.

We’ve grown up a lot in these past four years, and we’ve learned more about ourselves and one another than we even knew was possible when we were vowing to journey through life together forever. We’ve found limitations and explored wounds we didn’t realize we had, and we’ve wounded each other a fair bit, too. But we’ve also discovered more beauty and humanity in one another than we could have imagined at the outset. We have challenged one another, offered healing and understanding to one another, and have carried each other when we couldn’t have carried on alone. In this most recent season—arguably the most difficult season of my life thus far—I know you have especially done that for me, and I feel more thankful than ever to have you as my co-conspirator and beloved companion on this journey.

So, happy birthday to my favorite human. Here’s to you and to our wild and beautiful life together.

Unconditionally present

As many of you already know, we’ll be leaving India soon. It’s the place I’ve called home for more than two years now, and it’s a place that has gotten under my skin and become part of me forever; changing me irrevocably, mostly for the better. It’s a place that has expanded my capacity for love, and for pain, and it has opened my eyes in ways that perhaps nothing and nowhere else could have. It’s also worn me thin, exhausted me, and very frequently brought me to the end of myself. All of this means that leaving is a very significant event for me: a significant relief, and a significant loss.

I look forward to the season ahead of me, living in my own culture, speaking my own language, and having the space to process many of the things that have arisen within myself while I have been so engaged with the outside world. Thinking about the season ahead and the many welcome changes it will entail has sometimes made it more difficult to face the ongoing challenges of Indian life. But in spite of my hopeful expectations for the future, I feel deeply saddened by the separation that is on the horizon. We’ve begun having conversations with our friends and neighbors about our impending departure, and there have been a lot of tears—theirs, and mine. Outings together or even simple moments spent drinking chai in my friends’ homes have taken on new significance for me. Friends find excuses to come and visit us more often than usual: coming to borrow our rat trap and staying to talk for an hour; coming to practice reading and staying for the afternoon. We know that this moment is all we have.

So in spite of the expected stresses and unpleasant elements of the next few weeks, I have committed myself to trying to remain unconditionally present in order to be available for the unexpected gifts and joys in the next few weeks. The lanky, half-grown monkeys comically wrestling each other on the roof next to mine. The three-year-old boy from downstairs standing in the doorway and gleefully shouting my name at the top of his lungs with a welcoming smile as I come home after a few days’ absence. The buzz of life filtering into my room from all directions: Hindi love songs blaring from downstairs, the hum of the fan stirring the sticky heat from overhead, the crackle of boiling oil from my neighbor’s kitchen, children’s cries and laughter coming in through the window as they fly kites outside.

A few days ago A. and I were on our bicycle, headed to a small café for our date night, when a cool wind kicked up, blowing away the sticky heat of the day. Dark clouds moved in, lush, green foliage swayed and rustled in suspense above our heads, and soon cold rain was pouring down onto us as A. continued to peddle into the storm. We were caught in a monsoon downpour, and we loved it. We enjoyed the novelty of chill bumps on our skin instead of sweat, and the beauty of glistening drops of water dripping down through palm leaves, fruit trees, and other vibrant, jungle foliage. Rain turns the dusty streets instantly to mud, but India is beautiful in the rain. When we arrived at the café, we parked our bike next to the quickly-flooding street and laughed at our thoroughly soaked clothes before heading to the bathroom to wring them out. Date night had turned into an unexpected adventure.

The present isn’t always easy or fun.  A lot of the time it can be downright distressing, but I am slowly discovering that the present really is all we have. Future planning and reflection on the past are good and necessary parts of life, but we can so easily fall into living life one step ahead of ourselves (or several steps behind), so that “mental time travel” prevents us from ever truly engaging with life now. It is through choosing to be fully alive to the present moment that we unlock the transformative possibilities of joy as well as suffering, allowing both to become gateways into deeper connection with ourselves, with God, and with the people around us.

 

 

Economy is ecology is community

This has been the hottest week so far this year in our city. Fortunately, we aren’t there—we’re in Darjeeling, one of India’s colonial-era hill stations perched on a steep slope in West Bengal, within sight of the snow-capped Himalayas. Our room has a view of the third largest peak in the world, if there aren’t clouds in the way. Unfortunately, since we arrived there have been clouds in the way. Or to be more precise, we’ve been inside a cloud much of the time: a thick, mysterious soup of white that smudges the hills as it rolls in, gently drains their color, and eventually obliterates them from view.Still, the vivid green of the nearby hillsides, the majestic trees lifting into the clouds, and the cool weather have been beautiful. Arriving in the temperate calm after sweating for more than 24 hours on a loud, crowded train across the burning, desolate plains right up to the foot of the hills felt like a fever finally breaking. We’re enjoying the simple pleasures of wandering down Darjeeling’s narrow, sloped alleyways in our sweaters(!), and searching among the tall, stacked buildings for cafes to enjoy baked goods, American breakfast, Tibetan dumplings, real coffee, and local Darjeeling tea.

Picture

photo credit: google images. This is what we saw but we didn’t have our camera in hand!
The tea is what made Darjeeling famous. If you’ve ever had English breakfast tea, then you’ve likely tasted it; it’s exported around the world. Darjeeling was founded in the nineteenth century as a strategic outpost for the British, who created large tea estates on the surrounding hillsides. These plantations were extremely profitable—for the owners, that is. The local Nepali and tribal people who actually produce the tea, plucking it leaf by leaf in the fields, don’t see much of the money that consumers around the world pay for this luxury good. The British occupation is now a thing of the past, but the tea plantations continue, and most are still owned by wealthy foreigners or at least by outsiders to the region.

As we sip our steaming brews, we’ve been reading essays by Wendell Berry, mulling over our trip to a small village in Uttar Pradesh, our daily life in an urban slum, and now visiting this heartland of Indian tea production. The words of this 79-year-old Kentucky farmer have given us pause for reflection:

“Common sense tells us—and our experience shows us—that economy and ecology are ultimately the same, just as economy and community are ultimately the same; ultimately, people cannot expect to prosper by doing damage to the land and to human communities.” (p. 82, Citizenship Papers by Wendell Berry)

We visited a tea estate one morning, following a winding dirt path down through waves of green bushes spreading away into the morning mist, to the small factory building in the middle. The whole wood-paneled building smells like a tea chest, having soaked in years of fragrant tea leaves—four harvests per year, each one different in flavor and quality based on the unique conditions in which it grew. In fact, our tour guide told us, no two days of picked tea leaves will produce exactly the same tea; they have been plucked and dried and processed in different temperatures and humidity, and they have come from different sections of the tea garden, each with slightly different soil and elevation. What we realized as we toured the small factory, is that producing tea is not a man-made process. It is a collaborative effort between humans and nature in which even human expertise can only influence the natural growth and oxidation process that is already in motion. Producing high quality tea is an art form in which you can’t completely control the outcome, because your partners are the rain, the soil, the weather, and the enzymes in the leaves.

We learned that this particular estate, Happy Valley, has recently gone organic, adhering to “biodynamic” approaches to modern agriculture which use natural processes and materials in a scientific way to ensure that soil stays fertile, water is conserved, and yields are high. This seems like a positive long-term investment in this beautiful and profitable landscape, and in the livelihood of the people who depend on it. Economy is ecology is community.

We also learned that the estate produces “fair trade” tea, but were surprised to learn what that meant. The people who pick the tea are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the laborers who originally picked tea for the British when the estates were established. These hillsides are their ancestral homeland, and they have depended on this land for their survival for more than a hundred years, yet they do not own the land or the factory. They receive lower wages than the day laborers in our city who line up on the side of the road each day waiting to be hired for manual jobs like construction: 90-110 rupees ($1.50-$2 USD) compared with the 200-250 rupees ($3.50-$4.25 USD) that a day laborer would make. Our tour guide told us that they have the power to strike and stop production in order to force out a boss who breaks his promises and pays them less than previously agreed, but that when that owner sells out and leaves he is always replaced by another wealthy boss from outside who assumes ownership of the whole operation again. The current owner is a foreigner, and Happy Valley is only one of eleven tea estates owned by this man (there are only 84 tea estates in the Darjeeling area).

Most of the tea estates in the Darjeeling area are neither organic nor fair trade, but all of the tea is either exported or sold domestically at a lucrative price. The price of tea from this particular estate is made even higher by the fair trade label, but these profits are not reflected directly in the tea pickers’ wages. What the “fair trade” label does ensure is that out of those profits, a certain percentage is given back to the workers in the form of benefits like medical care, school fees for the workers’ children, and houses on the edge of the tea estate which they own outright, instead of renting. We haven’t had the chance to talk with the tea pickers directly, so we have no firsthand insight into how they feel about this arrangement—perhaps it works well. Undeniably, education, housing, and medical care are a good thing. But we couldn’t help wondering whether workers might prefer to have the option of cash in hand to spend their wages however they decide is best instead of having so much of it converted into benefits for them after tea is sold? And is it fair that the bulk of the profit from this famous, local product should go to a wealthy outsider who has no hand in the growing, harvesting, or production process instead of to the local people who live and work on the land?

We couldn’t help but wonder whether getting paid in welfare benefits rather than cash makes the workers more dependent on the tea estate. Could it be that people with cash in hand might use their increased range of options to opt for something other than a life of picking tea? Or that they might even opt to buy the land and the factory themselves, taking control of their own natural resources and economy? Maybe. Maybe not. We’re just outsiders passing through, so we don’t have enough pieces of the puzzle to say one way or the other.

Even with our limited insight, however, visiting this tea estate felt significant because gave us the rare opportunity to visit the place of origin of a product we usually consume without any sense of that product’s history; with complete ignorance of the positive and negative ways that people and places have been impacted by the process of bringing it into being. We, like most people in the world, are “living on the far side of a broken connection… fed, clothed, and sheltered from sources, in nature and in the work of other people, toward which [we] feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility” (p. 48, Citizenship Papers). Visiting the estate reminded us that we are connected to those people and places, for better or worse, and that there are complex realities we don’t usually think about when we brew a pot of tea. The same is true for putting on a shirt, or buying a bag of chips, or eating a piece of fruit that has come to us from halfway around the world.

Wendell Berry points out that we often think about economic activity only in terms of “profitability and utility”, which means that we go about our work and our consumption in this global economy without asking the basic questions which are crucial to understanding what is really going on: “Is the worker diminished or in any way abused by this work? What is the effect of the work upon the place, its ecosystem, its watershed, its atmosphere, its community? What is the effect of the product upon its user, and upon the place whee it is used?” (p.38) The answers to these questions tell us more about what is really helpful or productive than a strictly financial analysis ever could.

As that wise old Kentuckian would say, you can’t ensure the health of an economy without taking care of the people and the land it depends on. Seeing behind the grocery store aisle to the tea garden has, in this case, reminded us of the land and people we depend on, and made us interested in learning more about this vast web of connections so that we can respect the people and places with which we are linked.

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A tea plucker at Happy Valley (photo credit: google images)

 

A routine de-stoning

I had first learned about gallstones in China. When my husband and I showed up to teach English at an obscure college in Jiangxi province, we were promptly taken to an assembly line-style clinic for an extremely comprehensive round of medical examinations. I guess the school figured there was no point in going to the trouble of importing English teachers all the way from America if they were just going to get sick and die on them before the end of the school year. So, our boss accompanied us into each room along the corridor: make a fist for the blood test, pull up your shirt for the EKG, lay on your side for the ultrasound. Her presence was a bit awkward, but her limited English was helpful since no one else at the clinic spoke any, and our Chinese wasn’t good enough yet to understand most of what was happening. When it came to the ultrasound, the nurse rolled the jellied sensor around on my side and then began pointing as the fuzzy image on the screen with apparent concern. She was pointing out the problem to my boss of course, not to me.

“What is it?” I asked. “What is she saying?” My boss furrowed her brow. “Uh… it is a kind of disease. I am not sure how to say in English.” Fear began to gnaw open a space through my stomach, but that didn’t show up on the screen. “Well, what kind of disease?” I asked again. My boss was thinking. “Mmmm… my father has this kind of disease. He is very elderly. I will look up the words and tell you later. Maybe tomorrow.” Maybe tomorrow? We moved onto the next test in the next room, and I worried over whatever terrible thing the nurse thought she had found in my abdomen until the next day when my pestering texts and phone calls finally elicited a response from my boss: gallstones.

That didn’t seem too scary. I left it alone, not convinced that there was any truth behind it anyway. What could they really tell from such a scrambled, nondescript image? ThThen a few months ago I was under the jellied ultrasound wand again, here in India, investigating what seems now to be completely unrelated stomach pain. “Gallstones,” the Indian doctor told me in English. This time he pointed them out to me on the crystal clear image enlarged on the screen in front of me. No getting out of it this time.

I began telling my neighbors about the upcoming operation. Most of them were really worried about it, since nearly everyone knows someone who’s died in hospital. There’s very little understanding of anatomy or healthcare, so the reasons why some operations work and others don’t remain a mystery. Some people wanted to take me to see their doctor and get a second opinion. Others wanted to stay at the hospital with me. “Your husband can just stay home and I’ll be with you every minute while you’re there!” one friend told me. The most restful recovery my Indian friends can imagine is one surrounded by a great cloud of concerned friends and relatives, so the idea of my husband and I “alone” in the hospital pained them. Someone else confidently told me that there was no need for surgery when eating enough papaya would be sufficient to get rid of the stones.

An old grandmother I know took me to meet her son, who promptly took a matchbox from off the shelf and showed me the kidney stone he passed a few months ago. What’s the appropriate response when a stranger shows you the lump of sandstone that he passed through his body? I raised my eyebrows with an appreciative, “Oh,” and inquired about the treatment that had produced this unique keepsake.

Another family had a grandmother visiting from the village who I had never met before. When I told them about the upcoming surgery, she related the story of her sister-in-law’s sister’s somebody who had gotten surgery (though it was unclear by the end exactly what kind of surgery it had been). “She didn’t survive that,” the grandmother concluded with sagely detachment, staring ahead of her. “Nope, she’s dead.” I felt like laughing, but the family seemed embarrassed by their relative’s unsettling anecdote. Her daughter began explaining to the woman what a good friend I was and how long they had known me. Her expression didn’t change, but the grandmother seemed to take the hint. “Pray to God,” she said, turning to me. “If He wills it, all will go well.”

The morning of the surgery, I was feeling a bit nervous in spite of the rational knowledge that this was a fairly safe procedure. A man with a folder in his hand arrived in the waiting room. “Aiye,” he said, and turned to leave. “Come.” We followed. He took us upstairs to the general ward, where two nurses were tasked with “helping” me change clothes: one of them dressed me like an invalid doll, and the other observed. A little while later, another group of nurses and doctors came in to give various shots and start an IV of antibiotics and then glucose. We could communicate well enough in Hindi, but there was rarely explanation or warning of what was coming beforehand. We read books and listened to the sounds of Indian music videos and soap operas wafting through the dividing curtain between my bed and the rest of the ward until eventually, another person appeared at the foot of my bed: “Aiye.” I followed her downstairs, took off my shoes outside of a siding door, walked barefoot into the operating room, and laid down on the table, awake. Watching the surgeons make their final preparations next to me was unnerving. I felt as though the operation was going to start at any moment with me still lying there fully conscious! The anesthesiologist noticed my agitation and asked why I was so nervous. I explained that in my country, the patient never sees the inside of the operating theater because they’re already out cold by that point. He laughed and assured me that I “wouldn’t know anything” while the surgery was going on. I had the irrational fear that the drug might not be able to knock me out of such a hyper-vigilant state, but no sooner had I watched the syringe empty into my arm than my eyes went out of focus and I fell asleep wondering how long it would take to fall asleep.

For some reason, I only spoke in Hindi while I was coming off the anesthesia, even in response to A.’s questions in English. While I was still coming to, the doctor called A. into another room where my gallbladder was sitting in a bowl. The doctor sliced it open in front of him, dug out six gallstones, and handed them to him in a plastic bag.

After a day of painful, nauseous recovery and a night in the ward, we headed back to the slum. I was still feeling too weak to do much of anything, but our neighbors took such good care of us. One family made lunch for us, and after coming to visit in the afternoon, decided to cater our dinner as well. When we tried to protest, the mother put on her stern face and waved away our concerns with her hand as she started resolutely down the stairs to go home and begin cooking. The next day, our landlady downstairs graciously made roti for us since my abs still weren’t up to kneading the flour. “Why shouldn’t I do it? We all live in one house!” she said. We have felt very loved by all the help and the stream of visitors.

And we had joked about what to do with the gallstones, but now it’s become obvious that the real purpose was for show-and-tell. After making their inquiries after my health and dispensing advice on what I should avoid eating or doing while I recovered, people always analyzed the stones in the plastic bag, or if we had forgotten to offer, they would ask to see them. Maybe I need to find a matchbox for them.

 

Home

When we landed in Delhi, we noticed the usual things first: the crowds, the grime, the thick smoke hanging in the air from the little fires everyone burns this time of year to keep warm in the mornings and evenings. The area around the train station isn’t necessarily a fair representation of the country, because parts of India are beautiful, peaceful, and clean, but this was the gritty neighborhood where we took a small, dingy hotel room to await the departure of our train a day and a half after we flew in. The train was of course delayed, but this time we had bunks to ourselves and the car wasn’t nearly as crowded as the one that had taken us to Delhi two months before. I was feeling irritated by the delay and by the grimy railway station platform where we had waited before even boarding the train. I was also irritated that someone had stolen A.’s shoes on the train while we were sleeping, so that on arrival he walked off the train barefoot like an Indian holy man. But as we left the train station I felt my spirits lifting in spite of myself. It was sunny and cool, and as we sped along in the autorickshaw, I had to smile at the familiar scenes of street life that we breezed past: chai stands, laborers waiting for work, goats, cows, rickshaws, and pedestrians everywhere—chaotic and pulsing with life, the way that all of India is, with an energy that makes you excited and makes you want to be part of it all. It was less crowded and more laid-back than in Delhi. And the sky was actually blue.

Then back into our community: smiles, laughter, holding new babies that were born while we were gone, and somberly receiving news about the old men who died in our absence. People are happy, people are sad; some are healthy and some are sick. People have engagements and sorrows and secrets to tell us about, and we are part of it all, again. Everyone is telling us how much they missed us and how glad they are that we’re back. Our landlord’s two-year-old son started talking since we left and one of the few words he knows is my husband’s name, which he apparently began calling out at our door while we were gone and which he now happily yells up the stairwell when we are sitting in our room with the door open. I feel a sense of belonging that I have missed without realizing it; that I had been searching for without realizing it was here. I make roti in my simple kitchen, looking at the happy colors of the fresh green peppers and orange dal and red and yellow spices sitting in glass jars on my counter. I savor the familiar sound of the call to prayer, I rediscover the taste of chai with salt, I get my tongue around those strange d’s and r’s again and remember what things are called in Hindi. I wonder how we ever slept through all the night noises, but then I do. I feel a sense of peace and gratitude that I haven’t felt for a very long time, even before we left for the States.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this point. In fact, while we waited in limbo for our visas I had gone back and forth many times in my mind over whether or not I could really survive in India, or whether or not I even wanted to—you can survive a lot more than you would like to, sometimes.  These were questions I was afraid to even ask, feeling paralyzed in both directions if I were actually to make a decision. Or be told what to decide. If God asked me to stay, then I would feel trapped; if He asked me to leave, I felt I would be a failure. To my surprise (and initial horror), God turned the question back around on me and asked me what I wanted. After it became quite clear that He had no intention of making the decision for me, that there could be good and fruitful outcomes no matter what, and that I had complete freedom to do as I pleased, I initially felt more confusion than relief. But this realization then launched me into several weeks of contemplating the future without guilt or fear to drive the process.

I eventually found that in spite of my stressful experiences in India thus far, my uncertainty about what the future would hold, and my doubts about how much I can handle, I really wanted to go back to my community in India– not out of duty or guilt or fear or anything else, but out of love. I want to see some of my hopes for this place realized. I want to be there for people over time. I want to press on, for the first time in my life, past the restlessness and boredom and difficulty and frustration that so often tempt me to distract myself with something new and exciting. I do enjoy all of the great food, comforts, conveniences, and familiar cultural experiences that India does NOT have to offer, but I want to experience the deeper joy that comes from committing to a particular place and to particular people past the point where it’s just fun and convenient. I want to stick around long enough for me to actually change, instead of just opting for a change of scenery. That’s not easy when I have friends scattered around the world and can travel between nearly any two points on the globe in 24 hours. All that mobility and connectedness gives me the sense that I could go almost anywhere and do nearly anything (all the while comparing my situation side-by-side with others’ on social media), but I believe that committing to throw in our lot with a particular community—limiting ourselves to one choice among all the hypothetical possibilities that remain—is a universal challenge we all must face. In my own life, I am convinced that my spiritual growth depends on it.

So we’re back in our “village” again, and this time it feels like a gift. That has made all the difference. The air is thick with possibilities, and yet the present moment itself is full.

On Miracles and Justice through Community

          This week I heard a moving story about a family’s brush with death and their experience of God’s miraculous intervention to save the life of their newborn daughter. They described the six hundred people who were interceding for them all at the same time, the nearness of God throughout the whole ordeal, the state-of-the-art medical facilities and the world-class doctors they were able to get treatment from. I appreciated hearing an honest and personal account of a very difficult situation, and at the end of the story I felt happy and relieved to see a photo of their adorable little girl who continues to develop as a normal, healthy child. But this story of miraculous intervention and the avoidance of tragedy also brought up more complex emotions and questions for me. I couldn’t help but think of all the babies and children in my neighborhood in India who have died of preventable causes over the past few years– things much simpler than the condition this baby suffered from. I wondered whether those children are any less precious to God than this little girl who was saved. I wondered whether God is really petty enough to count the number of intercessors before deciding whether to get involved.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve begun trying to sort out the difference between God’s blessings and the privileges that we hold onto for ourselves. In this story, it was remarkable that the child survived a very serious health condition and a very rare complication after a high-risk surgery– her recovery is certainly a miracle that goes beyond the limits of medical treatment. But still, a part of her story is that she was operated on by, literally, the best surgeon in the world. A part of her story is that her family had access to some of the best medical centers in the world, that they could afford it, and that their families were wealthy enough to put them up in a hotel and provide for their every need while they waited for their daughter to be able to leave the hospital. All of these factors of geography, income, and family connections played a significant role in determining whether the child would live or die.

I’ve waited outside of crappy public hospitals in India with families who shuttle relatives back and forth from home to bring meager provisions for the patient and the people who are waiting at their bedside. I’ve seen the families who come in from the villages for treatment and who just sleep outside on the grass or curl into the fetal position on one corner of their patient’s hospital bed for nights on end because there’s nowhere else to stay and no money to pay for accommodation. I’ve seen situations in which so many odds are stacked against them that it would take a big miracle to save anyone, and I wonder– have we taken some of our privileges for granted and given God credit for things that global economics, or politics, or we personally have allotted to ourselves? How many Indian doctors and nurses are competing for high-paying positions in American hospitals instead of taking positions at hospitals and clinics in their home country where there are severe staff shortages because our country can afford to pay them more, and because treating wealthy patients in spacious, private offices is less stressful than treating poor patients in overcrowded clinics?

I’m not resentful that children in my home country get great medical care. On the contrary, I join this child’s parents in celebrating the gift of her life! But I am also disturbed that children in my adopted home country hardly get any medical care at all, and I also grieve with the parents of so many children whose lives have been lost– not for lack of divine intrvention, but for lack of basic medical care… and maybe for lack of God’s people intervening.

I’m struck by how much relationships can determine in our lives. I know many wealthy people who are extremely generous amongst their friends and relatives. They are often quick to respond to any need that is brought to their attention, but the problem is that few needs are likely to crop up in their network of relationships, because everyone they know is also likely to be fairly educated, wealthy, and well-placed in the world. Likewise, when entire families, neighborhoods, groups of peope, or nations are poor, chances are that the neediest people will only have other needy people in their networks of relationships when some crisis arises.

What if we could change that? What if we who are wealthy (if you’re literate and have access to a computer and an internet connection to read this, then you are in that category) could expand our circle of friends and family to include those who are poor? If a stranger needs housing, or cancer treatment, or a hot meal, we may or may not contribute through some indirect, sterile line of charitable donation. But if our sister or father or friend is the one who is ill or without a job or in need of a place to stay, there’s no way we would let them go without!

The redefinition of family and responsibility for our fellow human beings is at the very heart of the Kingdom Jesus preached. He scandalized his listeners by declaring that his mother and brother and sisters were not merely his biological kin, but included all those who did the will of God. He revolutionized our concept of the “neighbor” whom we are to love as we love ourselves to include not just those who are ethnically, religiously, or geographically close to us but even those who are our enemies. Many people were offended by these teachings because they believed that Jesus was devaluing the relationships between parents and children, or between people of the same nation or religion. Those people didn’t understand him. He was actually telling us that we owe that same level of committed care and compassion to whoever is in need of it, whether they’re biological family or not.

Expanding our sense of family and neighborhood goes beyond just moving money around. It means making our time, our energy, our resources, our connections, and our know-how available to those we have accepted as part of our surrogate family. Maybe that means moving into a neighborhood where poor people will live nextdoor to us. Maybe it means creating opportunities to build relationship with people in need by volunteering somewhere where we will cross paths with people we wouldn’t meet in the course of our usual routine. However we go about it, it’s bound to take some intentional effort and creativity because it will take us beyond our comfort zone. But I believe that if we can do that, then all of the advantages we’ve been given in life—whether direct gifts from God or the unjust gains of an unequal system—will become true blessings to those who give and to those who receive.

Eyes to see

          A few days away in the mountains was the perfect retreat after a busy month of hosting visitors. The first day when we arrived at the remote ashram in the forest, we were overwhelmed by the natural beauty around us. When the silence wasn’t making our ears ache, the gentle music of birds and insects in the trees was reminding us of life’s original soundtrack—one that we had nearly forgotten amidst the mechanical roar of city life. We sat through a rainstorm marveling at the genius of evaporation and clouds condensing and water falling out of the sky to water acres or square miles of plants at a time. I literally started crying thinking about the goodness of God while we watched the water falling in sheets over the unspoiled wilderness and the emerald lakes in the valleys below. At nighttime, we remembered how many stars are in the sky, because for the first time in months they weren’t obscured by city lights.
          Sometimes it’s easier to feel that God is present in all of Her gentleness and goodness when I’m surrounded by the beauty that She created. God is still present in the city and in the slum, of course, but remarkably it is often more of a challenge to recognize God among the human beings in which She resides than it is to recognize Her in the breathtaking vistas of the mountains, or the beach, or pretty much anywhere else where human civilization hasn’t crowded in. They belong together, of course, nature and human civilization, but they rarely coexist well… the trash-clogged, black, sludgy waterways, the polluted air, the dismal lack of color in many of the big cities I’ve visited around the world comes to mind.  Feeling the peace of the mountains, it occurred to me that our alienation from nature in the city is no small thing.          Back in my room in the slum, listening to the whir of the fan and the distant horns of traffic and the wail of a toddler in the alley downstairs, I realize that living where I do is a kind of fast—from external silence (though we can’t really live without finding a silent space within ourselves), from stars. I almost think, it’s a fast from beauty, too—but I have to stop myself there. Because there is beauty in the slums, and God’s goodness is still there to be seen. It’s more of a challenge to recognize it, though, because it is hidden amongst the ugliness of poverty, and violence; amid broken systems and relationships that leave trash lying everywhere, leave poor patients at the hospital lying in their own blood for hours before any doctor or nurse pays attention, leave children crying alone in the street with no one to comfort them. There’s a reason that Mother Teresa calls poverty Jesus’ most distressing disguise: in that filth, noise, and desperation, it’s possible for us to miss recognizing him altogether.

But God’s goodness is there in the generosity of our landlady, bringing us some of the hot meal she’s just prepared for her family because she wants us to share the experience of a traditional food we’ve never eaten before. I see Joy in the smiles of our youngest neighbors; I see Mercy in the love and concern that young mothers demonstrate in responding to the feeble cries of their helpless newborn babies who rely on them for everything. And I experience Grace when God carries me through days of anger, stress, exhaustion, or sadness through the support of my husband and my friends. Sometimes it takes a different kind of eye to recognize God With Us in the places where human brokenness has taken its toll, but when we find God there, we have found Her in the place She most desires to dwell with us.

          I want eyes to see that beauty. I want the will to create more of it; to bring it to greater fullness. I want to uproot the weeds of injustice and fear that are obscure that greater Reality in the same way that streetlights obscure the stars that are still there in the sky. When I think of God’s beauty in that way, then planting a garden, cleaning up trash, sharing a meal, or working to reconcile people to one another all seem like part of the same thing.

Ramazan and Eid

          We decided to try the fast that first day of Ramazan, just to see what it was like for our neighbors. We set our alarms to wake up at 2:45 am, early enough to make breakfast and eat before the first azan, or call to prayer, reverberates through the the pre-dawn darkness and everyone stops eating or drinking anything for the next 16 hours—until the fourth call to prayer ends the fast a little after 7 pm. It was difficult to do, especially in such hot, muggy weather. We’re used to feeling hungry from time to time, but the most intense thing was the thirst. I was amazed by the way that our neighbors—and especially the women—go about their same routine of housework all day without food or water: scrubbing their family’s clothes, making food for small children or working men in their household who aren’t fasting, hauling water for cooking, bathing, and laundry, walking out in the sun to buy vegetables at the market.

Then, in the early afternoon, preparations begin for aftar (or iftar), the fast-breaking snacks that everyone eats in the evening before going to pray namaz and later having dinner. I spent hours at my friend’s house learning how to make the chana (spicy chickpeas), pakori (onions deep-fried in spicy chickpea flour), tamarind chutney, papar (deep-fried potato chips), and sarbat (lemonade) that people eat at iftar, along with fruit and dates and other tasty snacks. That evening, another family invited us to come over and break the fast with them. The mother of the family waited patiently for the azan, lost in silent prayer, while the younger children restlessly awaited the voice over the loudspeaker that would signal it was time to dig in.  The call rose from the nearest minaret in melodic Arabic, “God is great…” and along with the thousands of others sitting together in their own houses throughout the community, we broke our fast with a date, then lemonade, fruit, and all the deep-fried goodness on the plates in front of us.

Picture

aftar (“iftar” in Arabic), fast-breaking food

          We haven’t fasted since that first day, but we have continued to be welcomed into the celebration of aftar with our neighbors. We’ve tried our hand at making a few pakori ourselves, and we’ve run around delivering fruit and pakori to different families as they send plates of their homemade aftar to our house.

One night, we were invited to the home of a wealthy Muslim lawyer who lives nearby our slum and invites anyone who wants to come—mostly poor people from our community—to eat aftar, biryani, and sweets at his house. Despite our not having fasted and our complete ignorance of how to pray namaz, we were welcomed to eat, to watch, and to talk. That open feast for the poor reminded us a bit of the kind of party Jesus describes in Luke 14:12-14.  Right after that grand feast, we had the experience of breaking the fast in a more humble setting with friends of ours who hadn’t made aftar most nights at all because of the expense. We chipped in supplies and they did most of the cooking, teaching me how to make even more kinds of ramazan treats. I love the patience and the devotion to God, the sacrificial hospitality, and the vigor of celebration that I saw in the way my neighbors observe Ramazan.

          After a full month of fasting came three days of celebration: Eid. In preparation, everyone cleaned their homes from floor to ceiling, painted their houses in bold colors, and decorated with shiny paper with designs cut into it. The women stayed up all night preparing simai (a sugary dessert), pulki (a spicy yogurt curry), and mattar (peas—also spicy), and on that first day everyone dons expensive new clothes and goes out visiting one another, dressed to the hilt. Andy and I ate in fourteen different homes that first day alone, which made us feel very included and happy—but also VERY full, and a bit sick from the ridiculous blood sugar spike that so many servings of simai brought on!
On the second day, we participated in another Eid tradition: big family outings to different parks and attractions around the city. We went with a large family to the zoo, and since one of the sons in the family makes his living as an auto rickshaw driver, all 13 of us piled into his auto for the half-hour trip!  The zoo was, well, a zoo—that’s really the best way to describe the atmosphere of noisy crowds packed in everywhere.  I think at least a hundred other people from our slum must have been there; we ran into people we knew everywhere. It was a lot of fun to go around to all of the different exhibits with these incredibly excited kids (and excited parents) who had never been to a zoo in their lives and were fascinated by each new creature.
          Eid is one of the few times that families in our community get a day off to do something fun together, and the zoo is one of the few fun places in the city that is cheap enough for almost anyone to afford, so we weren’t really all that surprised to see how crowded it was. We were a bit taken aback, though, to see how a giant playground inside the zoo drew even bigger crowds than the animal exhibits—and by the fact that most of the people making use of the equipment were teenage and adult men!
          The third day of Eid was thankfully a bit more low-key, although house-to-house visiting and simai consumption continued. We’re glad to have been able to share another important cultural experience with our friends here, but also tired enough to be happy that all the celebration is over!