India - 7/31, Ashagram

I couldn't avoid it any longer.  This was our last day.

We got up and went to breakfast.  When I saw Inder, he was noticeably not awake yet.  I asked him what happened and he told me that he was up late writing a song.  I didn't think much of it.  The rest of the boys, thinking they were really smart, had started an hourly countdown for us for 7:00 that night, when we were supposed to leave.  I told them to knock it off.  I wanted to enjoy my last day with them.  Kartik said, "Then you'll be crying!  We'll have to get you a bucket for your tears!  You'll have to take it with you for the plane!"

Thanks again, Kartik.

I actually got up and left the table at this point.  I was going to have to get a hold of myself, because the last thing I needed was to be all upset about leaving before I actually left.  I was going to have to deal with this by myself later.  I sat down at another table and Sunil joined me.  He watched me starting to pull myself together before I completely came apart, and probably to distract me,  he started singing.

For the record, I don't remember what he sang.  It was a worship song I knew, but I can't remember what it was because a few notes in, I got goosebumps despite the oppressive humidity.  This kid could sing.  His voice is a strong and pure-toned tenor.  (He would make it on the cast of any local theater production done in my area.  I can't even make it on those casts, and I take voice lessons.)  I didn't see that one coming.  I kind of just stared at him.  When he realized that I wasn't joining in (or possibly because I was staring at him), he gave me a quizzical look.  I just said, "Wow.  You can really sing."

When we returned back to our dorm, we found that we finally got our saris back from the tailor!  I pulled out the one I had gotten in London, and with the help of some of the girls, got it on for the first time.

This thing was amazing.  I felt like an Indian princess.  I knew I would be wearing these things from that point on.  I was going home to little redneck Waynesboro, VA and I was going to wear these everywhere.  I was going to wear them to church, out to eat, and just for kicks, into Wal-Mart.  I pulled a flower off the tree and headed to the service.

When I got there, they had just started with the worship songs.  I tired to sneak in the back so the guys wouldn't notice me walking in late (saris, I discovered, are labor intensive and time consuming to get on.)  I looked up and realized that everyone I would have tried to sneak in for were now looking right at me: they were all in the band.  So much for hiding.

I hadn't realized it, but all the guys I was hanging out with all week were in the worship band, with Sunil as their leader. Seeing them up front playing songs we sing in my church was really something amazing.  They sang several songs I knew, including Mighty to Save.  Sunil, as it turns out, is a gifted worship leader.  There was a sincerity and attentiveness to the way he led and the songs he picked.  He left space in the songs for worship.  When they sang "Yes, Yes, Lord" I jumped in with the younger girls in the second row and did the motions with them.  Once again, the youth leader in me came out.  The girls danced around me.  I tried not to trip over my sari as they laughed with me and called me "sister".

I hope I never stop doing stupid motions, playing ridiculous games, getting myself completely dirty and humiliating myself in creative ways in the name of creating memories for and showing my great love to teenagers.

At some point, I looked at the floor.  It was clean.  At breakfast, the floor had still been covered with the dusty remnants of the ever-expanding murals of creativity from the day before.  They had dissolved into footprints from people running all over them the previous night.  Now, there was no trace of them.  I really felt bad for whoever had to clean that, because it was my mess to clean.  I figured that I would ask around and see who had to put in that much work between breakfast and the service.

When we went up to sing our songs, they handed me a microphone while the rest of the team clustered around 2 more.  Melvin had almost lost his voice by this point.  I decided that I was just going to have to sing loud and hope for the best.  I had no idea how we sounded, but I could hear myself and I sounded on pitch.  The kids really liked it though, and that's what matters.

Casey gave the message.  She read the story where Jesus cast the demons out of a man and the nearby village asked Jesus to leave.  She talked about how Jesus wasn't always accepted by everyone and told the kids that when they went back to their villages, they may not be accepted right away but to love people anyway.  While she was speaking, I realized that we were creating missionaries.  The cycle was continuing.  The idea gave me goosebumps.  I still pray for these kids, their families and their future ministries every day.

After the message, our team was asked to come up so they could pray for us.  We were given scarves and bags that the girls had made.  Balaji and Inder came up with some of the guys, Balaji armed with a guitar.  Balaji announced that they had written us a song.  "Oh, that's what Inder meant this morning," I thought.  He stayed up all night writing us a song!  I was going to have to try really hard not to cry.

Balaji said, "You are my familia!"  To make it even more endearing, he pronounced familia like "family-a"  I stared at the ceiling, willing the tears to stay in my eyes and not go falling down my face.  Some of the other members of my team didn't even try to stop them.  The kid who didn't know who his family was or even if they were alive had just told us that we are his family.

God told me, "Look around.  This is why you are here."  I looked into the faces of the girls and guys that I had spent the week getting to know and love.  I was their family, even through they had been taken from theirs.  I was their family, even if they had been rejected and left by their own.

I am their sister.

These are my kids.  God gave me the ability to love them in a way that full, huge and unashamed, and completely outside my ability to do on my own.

Luckily for us, Balaji had not written us a sad song.  We would have needed buckets if he had.


Thank you for loving us
Thank you for dancing with us
Thank you for serving us
Thank you for eating with us

We All Are Familia

We all pray for you
God’s will be help you
Wherever you go God is with you!

He started singing different words in the verses.  I wasn't able to catch all of them, but I did hear (and Inder later confirmed for me) "Lady playing soccer, getting dirty, makes me smile!"

I love Love LOVE that God made me a youth leader with a crazy, unafraid heart.

After the service, I took pictures of anyone and everyone.  I wanted a picture of my awesome sari, so Sunil followed me over to the stone wall and got a few awesome pictures, showing the henna on my arm.

I found out who had cleaned the floor:  Inder and the boys had.  Inder was complaining, saying, "what did they DO?!  It was so messy!"  I apologized and showed him the pictures.  "Too messy, " he said.  I told him I thought I would have to clean it myself.  He said, "NO!  I'm glad I cleaned it so you didn't have to!"  I gave him a huge hug and thanked him.  I then went up to my room to change for soccer.

When I got to the field, the boys hadn't started playing yet.  Sunil ran up and stood next to me on the end of the field.  Alok gave me the update on the countdown: 5 hours.  I tried to ignore him.  Sunil made some off-hand comment about not being around when I left.  I slowly turned to look at him and said, "What was that?"  There must have been a look of death on my face, because he jumped slightly.  Casey appeared behind us and said, "Yeah, that's right.  He won't be around when we leave.  He'll be back in his room.  He did that when the last team left."  He kind of laughed a little and looked sheepish.

I just stared at him for a minute, trying to determine if he was serious.  The hurt must have registered on my face, because when he looked back at me, he completely lost the smile.  I started to grapple with this one: if he wasn't around to say goodbye, it would feel worse than if he told me that he wanted me to leave.  It would feel like he was saying he didn't care.  I knew that I am an emotionally strong person and I can take a lot, but that . . . I would not be able to simply take that one.  That one would really, really hurt.  I looked him in the eye and said, "Do NOT do that to me, Sunil.  That would really hurt me if you did."  He was still looking me in the eye, but I could see that he was thinking about how hard that was going to be for him.  I said, "If you do that, I will find you.  I don't care if I have to go wandering through the jungle, I will find you."   His smile came back, just a little.  He knew I was serious.  I was feeling a little selfish, but this was one of those things that if I didn't speak up and tell him how I felt, I would be packing around that pain for a while.  It was really important to me.

I had been hoping that soccer would be a great distraction.  For a while, it was.  Then I started having trouble.  This was more than just feeling sad that I was leaving.  I was feeling the cloak  . . . the oppressive, constrictive, suffocating cloak that I had worn for 3 months before I got to Ashagram, the one I lost before my feet even hit the ground . . . it was creeping up again.  I had to stop this one.  I made some excuse about needing tea to the guys and walked off the field.  If the guys noticed that I wasn't really ok, they didn't let on.  My guess was that they figured that I needed to go off and pull myself together.  I headed up toward the dining hall and waited for the rest of my team to get there.  I sipped at my chai, but I was already drowning.  I couldn't follow the conversation.  I felt like I was sliding back into everything that bound me before.  The idea was heartbreaking.  Then I decided:

I did not have to.  I wouldn't live like that again.

I left the table and walked down the path away from all the buildings.  I barely noticed that I was barefoot without an umbrella.  I walked until I reached the edge of the property in the grass and bushes.  I finally let it out.  I was terrified that I would have this amazing experience and not take any of what I learned and how I grew back with me.  I did NOT want to go back to my little life at Target, playing my little games with my youth group kids, hoping for something better.  Ashagram had made me thankful for everything.  I felt alive and beautiful.  I couldn't let this oppressive darkness steal all of what I had gained.  I told God I refused to pick up the cloak again and I told whatever was trying to pull me back into the darkness I had been freed from to shut up and go away.  I prayed for God to seal everything I had learned and gained in my heart so I would always have it.  I wanted India to leave its beautiful mark on me.

Only then did it occur to me that I was leaving.  That crashed over me, and I let myself feel it.  I just sat in the bushes and prayed for strength.  I was going to need a super amount of strength and grace to say goodbye to these kids and not sit sobbing in the middle of the dining room floor.  I prayed for perspective.  I prayed that I wouldn't concentrate on the fact that it was so sad that I was leaving.  I prayed that I would be able to demonstrate more love to my kids.  I prayed I would be able to leave them with something wonderful that would encourage them.  I wanted to leave them with something they would remember and cherish.  I wanted to say goodbye well.

Suddenly, my heart was too full to feel sad.  I felt like the love I had felt from God and the kids was sealed in, and I would carry that with me instead of sadness and instead of the cloak.  I stood up, looked around, and decided that I was going to do this.  I was going to tell them I loved them and that I would see them again, here on earth or in heaven.  I walked back down to the dining hall, the last of my tears being washed away by the warm rain.

When I got there, Kartik was playing on the keyboard.  He told me that he was going to break my legs.  I said, "Oh really?  And just why are you going to do that?"  He responded, "If I break your legs, then you can't leave."  I realized this was the best I was going to get out of Kartik. I gave him a huge hug and said that I like my legs, and that I would miss him.  He told me he was going to kidnap me instead.  I told him I liked that idea better.

When I made my way back down to the soccer lake, Balaji was standing under the tree.  He pulled over a chair and told me to sit.  I smiled at this wonderful and loving guy that God had blessed all of us with.  One of the guys from my soccer team knelt next to me said, "You're leaving in 3 hours!"  I looked him in the eye and said, "Yeah, I know.  But it's gonna be ok."  I turned my attention to the game.

A few minutes later, Balaji stepped in front of me.  He extended his hand toward me and jokingly (I think . . .) said, "Will you marry me?"  I laughed and said, "Sure!"  He smiled at me, but I made a point not to pick up his hand.

When it got to be 5:30, I got up to go get cleaned up and go to our early dinner.  I heard Sunil calling me from across the soccer field.  He left the game and ran over to me.  "Where are you going?" he asked.  I told him that I was going to go get cleaned up and that I was coming back down for dinner in a few minutes.  I told him that I'd see him there and then he could go hide.  He picked up my hand again.  I thought he was going to say something, but he turned away from me.  This was clearly not going to be easy for him.  I was aware of the fact that he was holding my hand in front of the 30 guys on the field, but he didn't seem to care and neither did I.  "I'll be back soon." I told him, and pulled myself away.

Up in my room, I made a symbolic gesture: I put on my good pair of skinny jeans.  While it is perfectly acceptable to wear jeans (in fact, most of the Indian girls did), I never did because I loved wearing skirts and my Indian clothing.  I hadn't worn anything strictly 'Western" in India yet.  This was my way of starting to return.  I knew that I would need to leave this oasis, where I was loved and cherished for exactly who I was, not for what I could do or how I looked like I was back home.  This was my way of starting to bring the oasis home.

When I walked back past the soccer field, I noticed that they were still playing, but Sunil had left.  Casey made some comment about him vanishing and that we probably wouldn't see him again.  I was giving the poor guy the benefit of the doubt.  I had faith in him.

Sure enough, my faith was not unfounded.  He had left early to take a shower and get cleaned up.  The rest of the guys were walking off the field and heading to their houses and he was coming up the path toward the dining hall.  I came around the wall to the dining hall to give him a hug and essentially give him a free pass on the whole situation.  He hugged me, but then to my surprise, followed me back around.  He pulled up a chair and sat next to me at the end of the table.

My hair was still soaking wet from when I had walked in the rain earlier.  He picked up a handful of it and began rubbing his hands together on it to try and dry it.  I saw some of the members of my team raise their eyebrows at this one.  I didn't stop him though, and a few more guys came along and did the same thing with portions of my hair.  These boys were showing me love to the last moment, and I was very thankful for them.

I don't think I ate more than 5 bites.  Alok showed up and yelled, "TE AMO, ERIN!" from across the dining hall.  I jumped up, ran over and gave him a huge hug, yelling, "TE AMO, ALOK!"  The smaller boys were packing around us again, giving us hugs around our waists.  Santosh handed me a card that was tied closed with a piece of string.  He told me to read it on the plane.  It had a beautiful flower vine on it that had taken him some time to draw.  I went to go put it in my bag when I realized:  I had brought my journal with me.

Alok was closest to me, so he got it first.  He wrote for a few lines and handed it back to me.  I then saw Sunil.  I handed him my journal and said, "Would you like to write something?"  He took it from me with a look of great relief.  I was thankful that I had found a way to make this easier for him.  He took it to the edge of the dining hall far away from everybody else and started writing.  At that point, Inder walked up to me and gave me a hug.  I said goodbye to him and told him how much I loved being with him.  Balaji came through a few minutes later and I got a few pictures with him.  I gave him a hug and told him he would always be my brother.  Several of the guys asked to pray for me.  They took my hands and prayed for "my beautiful sister, that she would be blessed and would be back soon."

At about this point, I realized that Casey wasn't there anymore.  Neither was Trisha.  In fact, most of the team was either leaving or had already left.  I glanced around and found Sunil, still sitting on the ledge, writing in my journal.  He had been writing for a good 20 minutes, and I wasn't about to take it away from him.  I waited a few more minutes and started walking in his direction.

Everyone else in the room either hadn't noticed me walk over there, or had just decided to give us space.  I stood in front of him, amazed that he was still there. I hadn't expected him to stick around this long.  He signed his name and handed me my journal back.  I tired to look him in the eye, but he dodged that and he pulled me into a hug.  He held me for a second, but then tried to break away.  He ended up burying his face in my hair that was over my shoulder.  I actually felt the prayer for strength and love I prayed earlier kick in, and I really needed it.  When he did that, I was approximately 2 seconds from crumpling into tears on him and making the situation so. much. worse.  God spared us both.

He pulled himself away, but said nothing.  I don't think he was able to.  He was trying to hide his face because he was an absolute mess, but he still wanted to say goodbye.  He started to try to take off, but either he still had my arm or I was still holding on to him.  It was probably both, because I moved right along with him.  I walked next to him, my arm around him, my head on his shoulder.  I told him it was going to be ok.  I told him I would see him again, that this was not the end.  I told him that I would either be back to see him on this earth, or I would see him in heaven.

At this point, we had made it back to the group.  The rest of the guys all pulled me in and gave me a huge hug.  I looked around and saw that I was the last one from my team still in the dining hall.  I was going to have to run to catch up to the rest of them.  I quickly pulled on my poncho.  Sunil hadn't left.  He was still right next to me, snapping up the sides of my poncho.  I was amazed, and so thankful that he stayed.  I grabbed everything, stuffed it in my bag and ran over to get my flip flops at the edge of the dining hall.

I took a few steps out into the rain and turned around.  There was Santosh, Kartik, Inder, a whole lot of the smaller boys and Sunil.  Still there, till the very end.  I blew them all a kiss, which Sunil returned.  I gave them all a huge smile and started laughing.  I loved these boys so much!  I turned and ran down the dirt path, hearing them yell their goodbyes.  The last thing I heard:  Kartik yelling, "You forgot your bucket!"

Thanks a lot, Kartik.  As it turns out, I didn't need it.

I ran down the path and eventually caught up to our group.  Most of the team was an absolute mess.  I had already done my difficult goodbyes and was simply grabbing my things.  I wondered where all the girls were.  I didn't need to worry.  When I pulled my bag around the corner and toward the front door, there they all were.  Two cars were parked in the courtyard, ready to take us to the airport.  The girls were standing everywhere, getting soaked by the rain, waiting to say goodbye. I hugged them all and told them that I would see them again.

When we finally did pull away, the team was silent. Jill wrote "bye" on the back window and drew a heart around it.  When we made the turn onto the main road inside Ashagram, we saw that Inder and the younger guys had come out that far to wave goodbye and see us off.  I felt huge portions of my heart being pulled . . . I was leaving my heart with these guys.  But strangely, even though I was leaving parts of it there, it was still full and whole.

When we got to our gate at the airport, I couldn't stand it anymore.  I pulled out my journal.  I came across Alok's message first:  To my dear friend Erin, I had a good time with you and getting to know you.  You blessed me with your laugh. I specially thank you for teaching us Spanish.  Te Amo Erin

I then dug out Santosh's card.  He thanked me for being there and loving them.  He told me that I was very special to everyone, and that they would miss me very much.

I turned the page in my journal and found that Sunil had written me a full page.  He said it was wonderful spending time with me and talking with me.  He would be praying for me and our team.  He loved the fact that I was in his life now, and that he would never forget God's love that showed through me and the team.  He told me that he liked my smile and that he really liked my long hair.  He said, "keep your faith in Jesus, he will provide for your needs.  Pray to God for your life partner also.  Always smile!  :)  I love you so much again."


My heart has expanded to contain the sheer amount of flowing water that poured into my parched spirit.  I walked around feeling like a fragmented mess for years.  My heart still resides in different places all over, but what I have in me is healed and able to love again.

I did not know.

I had no idea what to expect when I went on this trip, but I know it didn't involve falling in love with over one hundred amazing Indian kids.  I will always remember them: Alok, Kartik, Inder, Balaji, Nasreen and probably most of all, Sunil.  I understand why Casey was almost jumping out of her skin to get back to Ashagram.  If I ever make it back, (and I pray to God that I will)  I will be freaking out the entire drive.  I will be annoying my entire team until my feet hit the red dirt again.

The worship songs that seemed old and tired will take on new life again every time I hear them: I will remember the voices of Inder, Balaji and Sunil singing them.  It will be something I will treasure and laugh about as I raise my hands.  I will remember the love of my boys and the love that God gave to and through all of us.

What's truly amazing about all of these kids is the heartbreaking fact that these are not ordinary kids.  The girls were in the brothels.  The boys were on the streets.  The stories they tell you don't seem possible, even to me now.  How could the beautiful, graceful girl in front of you, who shines with the love of God, possibly have been abused in such a horrific and awful way?  How could this tenderhearted, strong and protective young man, who has the capacity to love so deeply and sincerely, possibly have been out on the streets, strung out on drugs and begging?

Dear Jesus, this doesn't seem possible, but here it is.  In one hundred different cases, here it is.  They are whole.  They are vibrant.  They have such a love that I can only hope to attain the ability to give in the course of my lifetime.  And they all loved me.  This is a miracle, one hundred times over.

It always costs something to leave your heart places.  You long to go back to where you left it and the people you left it with.  Having a fragmented heart is awful.  You feel it every day.  But I will gladly take it over a heart that doesn't know the love of these kids.  They have been burned with the fire of God and loved me with such a deep and sincere love that I can only hope they felt in return.

 

Reminders

I will gladly leave a piece of my heart in this land where the warm rain drips from the palm fronds and the kids share the very heartbeat of God.

India - 7/30, Ashagram

Today, boys decided it would be a great idea to continually point out that it's our last full day here.  I kept telling them that I am still here, and while I'm still here I want to enjoy every second of it and be present with them.  I told them I didn't want my thinking about leaving to spoil the precious time I had left.  That didn't stop them, but it did help me.


During our team devotion time, we picked a few songs that our team would sing for the service tomorrow.  One of the ones we picked was Your Love Never Fails.  Befitting, I think.  Also, a couple of the girls came up to give our team henna tattoos.  Henna goes on like puffy paint.  Quite a bit of it actually sits on your skin for a while before you peel it off.  It leaves behind ink that stains your skin, but you have to let it dry on you for hours.  When it's dry, you can peel off the top layer and it will leave the design.  Mine was done by Nazarene.  She's been one of our translators for the week we've been here, and I've really enjoyed being around her and getting to know her.

She did the most amazing henna on my arm and hand.  It's like she kept my personality in mind while she was doing it. There are flowers and leaves all over it with little bits of paisley mixed in.  The detail is amazing.  I hope it sticks around for a long time.  It's a visual reminder of the mark the love of these kids and the love of God has left on me while I've been here.

After lunch, I ended up with Inder again.  We sat out on the front porch of his dorm with his guitar and sang more worship songs.  I pulled out songs out of his binder that he didn't even know and helped him learn them.  Balaji showed up after a few minutes and the three of us sat out on the front porch, watching the rain fall and praising God.

The singing was interrupted when I realized that I had just left my camera out in the rain.  I did have the presence of mind to wrap it in my poncho before setting it down, knowing that it was going to rain sometime.  I ran over and grabbed it and it was still dry, thankfully.  When I rejoined the guys, I noticed that Balaji was had gone back into his dorm.  He came back out with a plastic bag and a little paper bag with handles.  He took my camera, wrapped it in the plastic and stuck it in the little bag.  I gave him a hug and told him that I always feel very taken care of when I'm around him.

After an hour of sitting with these guys, I realized that the henna on my arm was ready to come off. I began peeling it off, but it was hurting some because the hair on my arms had dried into it.  Balaji noticed my predicament.  He stuck his hands out in the rain for a few seconds and then sat down next to me with water in his palms.  He sprinkled the water on my arm and very gently began taking off the extra henna off of the entire intricate pattern.  He had to make several trips back to get more water in his hands.  It would have been easier to have me walk the 3 feet to the edge of the porch and stick my arm in the rain, but he didn't want me to get up.  I thought he would give up after a while, but he was perfectly content to sit next to me and gently pull all the henna off of my arm.  I was amazed.  This was was truly serving someone.  I was really touched by his simple act done with a great amount of love.

That afternoon, the girls from Jubilee 1 and 2 came to Ashagram.  We had planned quite a bit for this. We put together a few games, chosen shirts individually to give to each girl and put together care packages.  Melvin had been in the kitchen most of the day making the dinner meal for both the Jubilee girls and the whole of Ashagram.  This was quite an undertaking.

For the first game we played, we gave each team a bunch of long balloons you would use to make animals and a pump.  The girls had to create a costume for one of the members of their team using inflated balloons.  This was hilarious.  At the end of it, we had 4 girls standing in front of us that were absolutely covered in balloons.  One team had created a skirt, another a ridiculous hat, and another was so covered we couldn't tell what was going on with her outfit.

We then had a 'wheelbarrow relay", where one girl would hold up one girl's ankles while the other walked on her hands to the other side of the room like a wheelbarrow.  This was really funny to watch.  We had girls "running", giggling and squealing all the way to the other side.

We then had a relay where the girls had to pass eggs down the line using only spoons.  I, being an experienced youth leader, was afraid of this one.  We were playing on a marble floor.  I was afraid that the eggs would explode, and there would be screaming.  Egg doesn't clean up as well as you may think it does.  It gets everywhere, and it lingers.  We got really lucky though, and the girls were super careful.  They didn't drop one!  I was impressed.  My own youth group kids would not have been able to pull that off (no offense guys, but really.  If I put all of you in a line and did this, there would be egg everywhere.  You know it.)

We then gave the girls a few pieces of chalk and told them to make murals on the floor.  This was not one I came up with either.  In my experience of youth ministry, when you make a game that makes a mess, you get to clean said mess.  I saw them creating all of these amazing and beautiful designs, taking up half the dining room floor with their murals and thought, "Dear God.  I know how this is going to end.  It's going to end with me with a mop.  I just know it."  I prayed that I would just get over it and have a good time taking pictures of them, which I did. I laughed with them as they created ever-expanding murals of creativity.

We then sat the girls down and announced the winners, giving them crowns.  The other teams got things like bubbles, candy and plastic jewelry.  We put all the tables and chairs back in their places and the girls sat down.  We called each girl by name and gave her the shirts we had bought for each of them individually earlier in the week along with the care packages.

The entire team then went back into the kitchen to serve the food that Melvin had been preparing.  This guy had somehow managed to make Chinese food for at least 300 people.  There were huge amounts of rice on trays everywhere.  There was a massive vat of soup cooking on the stove.  I don't know where they were hiding the chicken when I went back there, but he had also made enough chicken to feed that many people and he had made teriyaki sauce for it from scratch.  I was hugely impressed.  We were assigned serving stations and got ready to serve everyone their meals.  We started with the soup because it was ready first.  It was interesting trying to serve soup into metal bowls without burning myself or the girls we were serving, but we eventually came up with little metal plates to stick them on so nobody would get hurt.  We then served the rice and the chicken to the Jubilee girls. As soon as they went through, the Ashagram girls and guys came through.  I had a lot of fun serving everyone.  They were thankful and told us that no other team had served them a meal like that.

After all the kids had gone through the line, we sat down at our usual table and they brought us Melvin's creations.  They were really good!  As usual, half the boys in the dining hall were packed around our table and my camera vanished.  I simply sat and enjoyed their company.

Alok kept playfully glaring at me from across the table.  I tried to make him feel awkward and said, "I know you think I'm pretty Alok, but you don't have to stare."  This did nothing to deter him in the slightest.  Inder was at the end of the table, talking to Casey.  For most of this week, we had been teasing Casey that she was going to end up marrying Inder.  Watching the two of them talk that night made it really seem like a wonderful possibility.  They were off in their own little world, surrounded by a dozen people.

At some point, I actually realized that my camera was gone.  I put my hand on the table where I had put it last and accidentally swiped the handle of Melvin's spoon, still in his soup.  I managed to catapult half of his soup on the table and all over me.  In this moment, I found my camera.  Santosh had it, and he was taking a perfectly brilliant picture of me with soup in my lap.

I could only laugh.  Sunil appeared behind me and handed me a box of tissues.

When I got up from the table, I picked up the scarf I had placed next to my plate and found that I also had gotten soup all over it as well. I was bummed.  This scarf was one I had bought in the Indian market in London (I had been coming home from a mission trip to Zambia, and I was shopping for the sari I mentioned in an earlier post).  It was a really pretty shade of dark blue.  I wasn't sure how I was going to get it clean.  I was looking it over and surveying the damage.  I glanced up and saw Sunil watching this happen from across the room.  He walked over to me and asked for my scarf.  I didn't know what he was going to do exactly, but I gave it to him, knowing it was in good hands.  I tracked down Santosh to see what kind of pictures he had gotten.  He had gone into the kitchen to take pictures of the guys that worked there and had awesome shots of the kids acting goofy.  There were also a dozen pictures of me sitting at the dinner table with the guys that I hadn't realized he had taken.  These were really awesome pictures!  I told him he could steal my camera anytime.

Sunil returned with my scarf around his shoulders.  He had taken it into the kitchen and washed it for me.  I was beginning to wonder how this guy was so good at catching when I needed something.  I realized it was because he was paying really close attention.  I could definitely learn something from this guy.  I may not be able to respond like that for everybody, but I could certainly pay more attention to the needs of others.

He was now standing in front of me with my scarf on his shoulders, looking up at something on the ceiling.  I cracked up and snapped a picture.  He looked like he was modeling my scarf.

He caught on and held out his arms to wear my scarf like wings.  Another hilarious picture.

He then pulled the scarf on top of his head, held out the edges away from his face and grinned right at me.

He about knocked me out.  I surprised myself with my own reaction.  I was not expecting that one, and I almost forgot to take the stinking picture, but I would be really glad that I did. (This is how I remember my dear friend: laughing and smiling, acting like a complete goof and loving every second of it.)

He then pulled out a chair for me at the nearest table and sat across from me.  As I was sitting, one of the smaller boys came over and jumped on me.  Sunil smiled, but looked slightly bewildered.  I gave the boy a hug and sent him on his way.  I suggested to Sunil that we go and sit on the outer ledge of the dining hall where it was quieter and I could actually focus on what he was saying.  We walked back and sat down.  Somewhere along the way, Sunil had picked up my camera.  I noticed that he was better at keeping track of my stuff than I was.

A few moments after I sat down, a set of hands covered my eyes.  I put my hands around the mystery person's wrists and found one bracelet on his left arm.  From that, I was able to figure that this was Kartik, and I called him out on it.  Sunil snapped this amazing picture:

After Kartik left, Sunil started telling me his story again.  Not only was he being beat up on the streets, but he also got addicted to drugs at 12 years old.  I could not believe what I was hearing.  He told me about how he wandered around in a drug-induced haze, just trying to get more drugs.  He eventually ran into one of Bombay Teen Challenge's feeding ministries, and that eventually brought him to Ashagram.  He stayed for a while, but didn't really buy it.  He didn't have a personal relationship with God.  He eventually returned to Mumbai and fell back into drugs.  He eventually reached a point of desperation and prayed, "God, if you're real, show yourself to me."  God did.  Sunil told me that he was down by the train tracks and almost fell into an oncoming train, but God pulled him back and saved his life.  Then, he was almost hit by a car stepping off a curb, but God saved his life a second time.  He prayed for a second chance, and ended up back at Ashagram.  He pursued God for the first time and turned his life around.  He learned English, started going to school and learned how to play the guitar.  He then told me all about how he ended up joining the worship band and eventually became the worship leader.

I wanted to grab him and hug him.  I wanted to praise Jesus that this amazing young man was alive and sitting in front of me.  My wonderful friend, with his amazing gentle spirit of great strength unlike anything I had ever seen, had been rescued from the hell I saw in Mumbai.

I tried to tell him all of this, but I had to stop. I ran out of words, and shortly thereafter, the ability to speak at all.  Instead of trying to fill the silence, he picked up my hand.  I looked up at him and saw the divine healing that God had given to him written all over his face.

In that moment, I knew that a huge chunk of my heart was going to end up staying at Ashagram.

He continued to tell me stories from his life and childhood.  He eventually told me that while he said he was 21 at Ashagram, he found his birth certificate when he was reunited with his family and found that he was actually 22.

At one point, Inder pulled up a chair.  He gave Sunil a strange look and I realized that he was still holding my hand.  I didn't really care, but I made a mental note that this was a little out of the ordinary for their culture and probably would make the other guys a little uncomfortable.  Inder started singing the chorus from Oh How He Loves.  I picked it up and sang along softly with him.  He asked, "You know this song?" I said, "It's one of my favorites!" and started singing the first verse.

For a while, they were both singing with me.  I eventually noticed that Sunil wasn't singing, but I was off and running, worshiping with the song.  By the time I got to the chorus again, Inder had stopped singing too. I wasn't about to stop, so I just kept going right into the second verse.  I hadn't initially been aware that I had an audience beyond the two guys, but I looked over Inder's shoulder and noticed that Balaji had picked up his guitar and was playing along with me.  By the time I got to the end of the second verse, I didn't care about what was going on around me.  I was just singing to God.  I was aware that other people were singing with me, but I didn't know that it was everybody else who was still in the dining hall.  The melody everyone was singing was strong enough for me to pull out some harmonies, so I sang some higher parts.  When we finished the song, I looked at the two young men I was sitting with.  They both gave me tender and loving smiles.  Sunil looked a little surprised, but this was nothing new for Inder.  I felt so blessed to be sitting in the same room and singing with such amazing guys, and I was especially glad that I could bless these guys with something I could do as well.

I have started to relearn how to worship because of these guys.

India - 7/29, Ashagram

This morning was the last day that we would do devotions in the mornings.  I tried not to panic as I realized that our trip was getting done.  I hung onto the fact that it wasn't done yet, and I wanted to enjoy the time I had left.

We had all the ladies in one group this morning.  After we did the devotion portion of the morning, we presented the ladies with my contribution to the team:  87 rubber watches.  Trisha had asked our team if we could find them and bring them with us because the ladies had seen these watches and loved them.  The day before I left, I got one more donation for $100.  Since I already had what I needed for the trip, I took that money to Rose's and bought as many of these rubber watches as they had.  I blew through the $100 that way.

The ladies loved them!  They got to pick the colors they wanted as we sat and gave them out.  One thing we should have done:  we should have set the watches before we handed them out.  I didn't know it at the time, but all of us would be setting these watches from that moment that we handed them out till the literal moment we left.

After lunch, the boys reappeared at our table to ask Melvin to work on some more songs with them in the music room.  At some point, Inder must have heard that I can sing (or he may have heard me singing while I was walking around. . . I do that a lot).  He asked me to come back with them and sing.  He handed me his umbrella and off we went.  When I took a look at it, I noticed that had his name along with Balaji's and Sunil's on it.  I was currently using an umbrella while 3 boys were walking around in the rain somewhere.  It made me think that I was in the company of the most amazing young men on the face of the planet.

Once in the music room, we started practicing the songs the boys would be doing for the singing competition later on that day.  We started with a Hindi song the boys had written.  This was a great song!  They had done a wonderful job with it.  I had the phonetic Hindi spelled out on a little sheet of paper, but I had no idea what I was singing.  I invented harmony parts and just sang along.

At one point, Inder wanted to practice his song: Give Thanks.  We went out on the front porch of the music room and I sang it with him.  We then started going through a huge song binder he had.  This had over a hundred songs in it, and I found that I knew most of them.  We do a lot of them in my own church.  He kept playing and I kept singing:  Offering, Clean Hands, Mighty to Save, and several old Delirious songs that I have loved for a long time.  We sat out there for hours. I began to notice that he would start singing a song with me, but then would drop out halfway through.  His explanation was that he liked to hear my singing, and he didn't want to tire out his voice before the solo competition.

After the rehearsal, we went back to the boys' housing and set up our team's contribution to the boys' half: a volleyball net.  While Melvin started to teach the boys how to play, I opted not to humiliate myself.  Playing soccer is one thing: I made them laugh.  Playing volleyball is quite another: I didn't think the guys wanted to chase the ball when I would hit it over the buildings.  Luckily for me, Santosh has also opted not to play and instead offered to give me a tour of his bunk house.  At first, I turned him down due to the basic rules of youth ministry.  I explained the concept of "boys are blue, girls are pink, no purple".  He didn't really get it.  However, one of the guys' overseers heard our conversation and offered to give me the tour.  I now could accept Santosh's invitation.

The inside of the building was quite nice.  It had colorful murals everywhere that the kids had painted.  The bunks were double stacked in rooms on either side of the entryway.  Every one of the guys had two square lockers to store all of their stuff.  It was simple, but very clean considering this was the home of the boys that I had completely covered in mud the day before.

We headed back up toward the dining hall for the boys' teatime.  It had started raining, but nobody had grabbed the umbrellas because it was only sprinkling.  Santosh insisted that I stay on the porch while he ran back in to get his umbrella.  It was a lucky thing he did too, because a few seconds later it was raining buckets.  The rest of the boys ran through the rain while Santosh and I huddled under his umbrella, laughing and jumping in the puddles.

While at teatime, the guys were picking up my hair and playing with it again.  Santosh told me he was jealous of my hair and that he wanted to cut it all off and stick it on his own head.  I said, "No, not my hair!"  I picked it up and stuck it against my head.   Kartik standing behind me was no help:  "Yeah, we'll cut it all off and stick it in an Ashagram museum.  Other teams will come and they'll be like, 'what's that?' and we can tell them that it's Erin's hair."

Thanks Kartik.  Thanks so very much.

After teatime, we all went on the soccer field again.  I was stuck on the same team as last time, and they knew just where to put me:  Defending the swampy half.  In fact, in less than 3 minutes, I slid through another mud puddle and was completely muddy from toes to ponytail.  My head was laying in the mud.  To add insult to injury, the ball was nowhere near me at the time.  I just fell.  When the rest of the guys heard my team yelling, they all turned around to see me flat on my back for no apparent reason.  I heard them laughing as I pulled my head out of the puddle.  I pulled my ponytail over my shoulder and was met with a solid stick of mud.  I was glad it wasn't braided, because I knew from experience that it would have taken approximately 30 minutes to unwind the mass of mud and hair just to get it out of the braid. And even then, it would have taken more conditioner I had with me to get the nasty snarls that would ensue.  As it was, I already knew I would need to cut that ponytail holder out of my hair.

Over the course of the game, I managed to get myself even dirtier than the day before.  That was probably because I kept wiping my hands off on the front of my clothes where it was still dry, and because I didn't have the rain to wash away the layers of mud between coatings.  At one point, Sunil jokingly told me that I looked Indian because my skin was looking darker from all the mud.  I rinsed some of the mud off my arm in a puddle to demonstrate the fact that I am in fact, Irish, and my skin was never going to get any darker.  But there was a problem.

He was right.  My skin was darker.  But only in patches.

I scrubbed at the patches a little, but realized that scrubbing muddy patches with muddy water was not a solution.  I didn't really know what was going on, but I was happy that my skin looked darker.  Being almost transparent like I am, you are happy for whatever you can get.

After the game ended, I walked back to the girls' housing.  I came onto the compound and was met by a bunch of gasping and giggling girls.  They had seen me dirty the day before, but the rain had cleaned me up some.  Now I was just an absolute mess.

The girls ran to get buckets full of water.  They then ran back to the courtyard where I was standing and started dumping and splashing the water all over me in a vain attempt to get some of the mud off.  I got a bucket and scrubbed my arms and legs while they dumped bucket after bucket over my head.  I found this completely hilarious, and so did the rest of the girls a safe distance away on the balconies.

Once I got in the building I jumped right in the shower.  All the muddy clothes went into the laundry bucket with a huge amount of laundry soap.  Once I started to get myself clean, I took a closer look at those mysterious patches.

It seemed that the mud was staining me, but it was only staining the places where I had dry skin.  There were two lines of orange running down my forearms.  My elbows and knees were orange.  My face and neck had patches.  There was a big patch across my lower back.  The tops of my feet and places around my ankles were a nice shade of burnt sienna.

I looked like a very bad self-tanning accident.

When I got out of the shower, Casey and Jill told me to go back in because I looked like I still had mud on me.  This was bad.  I explained to them that I was, in fact, clean, and that my skin was stained.  They didn't believe me at first, but  the patches didn't wash off in the sink when I tried again.  They found it absolutely hilarious.  I was going to be late for the solo competition, so I pulled on some of the nicer Indian clothing I had purchased earlier in the week and just went, stains and all.  I grabbed another white flower off the tree on my way out the door.

All the boys that were in the music room that afternoon went up first.  They sang a few songs that Melvin had been teaching them along with their Hindi song.

Then they got to the competition.  They had judges like American (or Indian) Idol, minus Simon Cowell that would encourage the kids after they sang.  It was pretty cool.  Inder got up and did a great job with his song.  Then Balaji got up and sang a song he wrote about his family.  This was especially impactful for us, as we knew Balaji's story.

Balaji told us that he didn't really know where he was from.  He boarded a train to Mumbai when he was 4.  He has had no contact with his family, and he doesn't even know if they're alive.  He wrote the song about missing his family and as a prayer for them.  I wanted to run up there and give him a hug.

At one point, the judges asked if there was anybody else who wanted to sing.  Melvin next to me yelled for Sunil to get up there and sing.  The girls behind me all started giggling and cheering.  Apparently, he had a fanclub.  I was thinking, "Dear Jesus, he sings?"

At dinner, some of the small boys stole my camera.  I saw them running around taking pictures of everything and thought that I would have some really interesting ones when I got it back.  As it turns out, a third of the pictures they took were of me in my Indian outfit.

Check out my arm.  That's not the light, that's what the mud did to my skin, but only in patches.

The rest of them were of them taking pictures with the older boys and putting their hands behind the older boys' heads.

At one point, Alok grabbed my wrist and gently picked my arm up.  I knew what he was looking at.  He got a napkin off the table and poured some water on it.  I tried to tell him it wasn't going to come off, but he was scrubbing anyway.  After a few seconds of this, he just cracked up.  "What happened!?  You're not still dirty!" he yelled.  "I told you!  The mud stained my skin!" I yelled.  Inder standing next to him said, "Oh, so you're more Indian now!  Your skin is getting darker!  Now you have to stay here."

After dinner, Sunil sat down next to me at the table and started asking me a few questions about my life.  He asked me when I came to God and when I felt a calling on my life.  When he determined that I had never done any real wandering from the Lord, he stared at the ground for a second.  I could sense something shifting around in him, like he was deciding whether or not to say something.  I waited for a moment for him to sort it out.  Eventually he met my gaze again.  He said that his family kicked him out of their house when he was young because he wasn't going to school and he didn't have a job.  He left his village and went to Mumbai.  Once he got there, he found that the street like was really rough and hard.  He got beat up a lot.  I was thinking,"who in the world would beat up Sunil?  I mean, really?"  That was hard for me to picture.  I didn't know it at the time, but that was not Sunil's biggest problem out there.

At that moment, Trisha behind me yelled that it was time for our team to go to bed.  For the first time in our conversation, Sunil broke eye contact with me to glare at her over my shoulder.  His shoulders slumped forward and he sighed in irritation.   I hadn't realized it, but I had just been talking to Sunil for an hour and a half.  I had no idea what went on around me or even where my camera was.  I had only vaguely been aware of the fact that there were still people running around me while I was sitting at the table.  When I realized I didn't have my camera and started looking for it, without asking what I needed, Sunil jumped up and tracked down the smaller boy that still had it.  I thought "Dear Jesus, can he read my mind, too?"  He ran back to me and handed me both my bag and my camera.  I was wondering how exactly he could anticipate the needs of someone else that well.  I gave him a hug and told him that I really wanted to hear the rest of the story, and that I would sit with him tomorrow night and hear the rest.

I didn't know it, but I was about to be even more amazed by this young man and the awesome power of God in his life.

India - 7/28, Ashagram

This day was the best day I've had in a very long time.

I was sitting at breakfast drinking the last of my chai when one of the older boys came and sat across from me.  I'd seen this guy before, but he'd never talked to me.  I don't know what he was waiting for, but I got the sense that he'd been hanging back for some reason and now he didn't want to do that any longer.  I can't really explain this one, other than it being a complete and total God thing.  I looked up at this kid and suddenly we just clicked.  I just knew this kid with his huge bright smile and I were going to be really close friends.  This doesn't happen to me real often, and when it does, it throws me off.  I don't think he said anything, he just sat there and watched me figure this out for a minute.  If there's such a thing as kindred spirits, we share one.  Like I said, I don't know how this happened, but it must have been a God thing.  He did eventually start a conversation with me about how I liked Ashagram, but my head was still trying to figure out what and why this had just happened. Halfway through this conversation, I realized that I didn't even know his name.  He asked for mine when he got up to leave, but when I asked for his he wouldn't give it to me, playfully acting shocked that I didn't know who he was.  He told me to guess his name and I, of course, guessed the wrong one.  He laughed it off . . . and still didn't tell me.  Later, one of the guys called him from across the room and I caught it:  this was Sunil.

The other guys started whining to me that I never played soccer with them.  I had told them that I would play with them, but I was kind of thinking they'd forget about it.  They hadn't.  So, at 4:00 that afternoon, I put on some clothes that I could get really muddy and headed down to the soccer field/lake.

When I got there, I realized that this was going to be an adventure.  I'd played mud football.  I'd played mud volleyball.  I was now going to play mud soccer.  It was my duty as a youth leader to get out there and get myself and everyone else as dirty as possible.  If I failed in this endeavor, I would be remiss in my duties as a youth leader.

Mud was now a requirement.

When the guys on one side of the field picked me to be on their team, they stuck me on as a defender.  They told me to be careful and not to fall.  I told them, "No, I'm going to fall, and I'm going to get very dirty."  They all laughed.  They didn't know I was serious.  I was determined to get muddy, whether I fell or rolled through the mud.

I started to demonstrate the fact that I wasn't going to just stand around on the field, and tried to kick the ball around some.  These boys were really good.  I mean, really good.  They were serious about this game.  They bounced the ball off their heads and shoulders, getting ball prints all over themselves.  The ran and skidded through the mud like they were skating.  But they still cheered when I'd kick the ball, saying "nice play".  It wasn't long before I hit dirt. I slid and got mud on my arm.

The boys were like, "Now you're dirty!"  I said, "Not dirty enough!"  It was about this time that I realized that Kunal on the sidelines had just picked up my camera and was snapping pictures of me sliding around all over the place.

We switched sides on the field and suddenly I was in a swamp.  I was in a massive mud puddle.  Sure enough, the second I went for the ball, I slid.  But I didn't just fall into a puddle.  I slid through it and completely hosed myself.  The boys all stopped playing and yelled to see if I was ok.  I was still sitting in this puddle, cracking up.  I got up and took a bow.  I could hear them gasp, but then laughter broke out across the field.

Suddenly, the focus of the game shifted.  It was no longer just about soccer.  I was throwing mud at anybody that came near me, while the guys dodged it and yelled, "No sister, please!"  Alok ran over and tried to kick mud on me.  I threw mud at him, yelling "You don't know what you're messing with!  You are not going to like how this ends!"  Balaji picked up two huge fistfuls of mud and grinned at me.  "Do it!" I yelled, "I dare you!"  He came over to me and rubbed the mud all over my arms.  I took the mud off my arms and slathered it on my face.  He was not expecting that one.  The guys were cracking up.

At this point, I was trying to get dirty.  I danced through the puddles.  The guys asked me if I knew how to dance, so I demonstrated the goofiest dance moves I could come up with.  Attempted moonwalk and all.  The guys tried to teach me how to slide through the mud, and I ended up falling backwards directly into a huge mud puddle on my inglorious first attempt.

I looked up from my puddle and there was Sunil.  I think he came over to try to help me up, but he didn't get that far.  He was laughing at me.  But this was not an ordinary laugh.  This kid had one of those laughs you never forget.  He was doubled over and pointing at my capris dripping mud, my shirt that was no longer blue, my arms that were still completely covered from Balaji, and something on my head.  I think it was my mud-coated braids.  He was laughing so hard he was downright squealing.  I have never heard anybody laugh so hard, at me at least.  I pulled myself out of the mud and he just pointed at my feet, still immersed in the puddle.  I attempted to wipe my face, but my hands were muddy.  I tried to wipe my hands off on my clothes, but my hands got muddier the more I tried because my clothes were completely hosed.   This did not help him in the slightest.  I held up my muddy and dripping arms in bewilderment and he only laughed harder.  He was laughing so hard he couldn't breathe.  He just stood there: doubled over, shoulders shaking and pointing at me, occasionally squeaking to catch his breath.

He wasn't the only one laughing.  I looked around and realized that the ball was just sitting in the middle of the field.  I had just stopped the game.  The other guys were staring at me with shocked and amused faces.  I threw my arms in the air and cheered.  Comedians only wish they could get a laugh like the one I got.

My team rotated off the field for a round.  Kunal showed me some of the pictures he had gotten on my camera.  It was a visual story of progressive layers of mud.  At that moment, the monsoon season made itself known.  It was raining buckets.  I stood out in the warm, refreshing rain and let it wash some of the mud off of me.  The field was now a river, and getting deeper.

When my team rotated back in, I don't think the boys expected me to make it back on.  They cracked up again as I took my position in the swamp.  The game started up again, but there was a problem: We were all swimming.  One guy would fall and take out 3 more.  I tripped over the small boys and they all tripped over me.  The ball would keep rolling untouched while half a dozen guys slipped and fell all around it.   We ended up in a huge pile on the swampy end.  I think it was at about this point when I realized that there was laughter from the dining hall.  My mission team was sitting in the dining hall and watching the game, and had just seen me trip over some small boy and take out the guys that were skating to try to kick the ball.  I lost track of just how many guys got hosed in the pile-up, but it was a dozen at least.

This was epic.  I was getting mud thrown and kicked at me while I thrashed around and tried to get anyone in a 10 foot radius.  The game did eventually end, but not before I had sufficiently muddied up at least a dozen guys.  When I emerged from the pile-up, Balaji gave me a high five and dubbed me the "Mud Sweetheart".

I walked over to the side and saw that Kunal still had my camera.  They boys tossed me the ball and I posed with it.

I pulled in some of the guys and got some of the most amazing pictures ever: white me, covered in mud, standing in the middle of a bunch of Indian guys with their arms in the air, standing in the field/river.  (Sunil's right next to me in the red, Balaji's next to him in the green hat, Inder is in the Virginia shirt.)

This is why I do youth ministry.  I was able to give these guys a wonderful gift: A soccer game they'll never forget.


Later that night, the girls had a party for all the birthdays in July.  They made a special for all the girls and we ate in the girls' housing.  Now, up until this point, we hadn't been eating the food the kids were eating.  (We also had been using silverware.)  We had been lucky enough to have special food made that I knew wasn't as spicy.  I didn't know how much less spicy it was.

They had been treating us with kid gloves.

When I was served the daal, it smelled spicy.  That was a tip off.  The girls served it to me on the typical metal plate the kids use in the dining hall, no silverware.  I knew there was a problem when I picked up the rice and daal and it actually stung the cut I had on my hand.  I glanced around the room.  Everyone was staring at the team, waiting to see us take our first bites.  Some had bemused smiles.  They knew something we didn't.  The last thing I wanted was to seem rude or ungrateful, so I shoveled it in my mouth.

This stuff burned!  Oh my gosh did it burn!  It was this or nothing, so I decided that I was just going to tough it out.  I managed to shovel in a few mouthfuls before I realized that I had a larger problem than the initial spiciness: I had stumbled into a slowly building inferno.  It only got worse.  I felt like I could feel my taste buds scarring.

Only then did I realize that we had another problem:  We had no water!  In the dining hall, we were usually served 3 or 4 liters of cold water with our meals and some amazing chai tea.  Here, we had nothing to drink!  One of the girls saw our plight and took pity on us.  She brought us a water bottle, which we shared.  Eventually, my mouth went numb.  I quickly found that my lips did not.  They continued to burn so much that I kept checking to see if they were chapping or bleeding or something.

The girls were laughing at us and asking, "Spicy?" from across the room.  I didn't need to respond.  My eyes were watering as I tried not to hyperventilate while breathing through my nose.

A few minutes later, pieces of cake appeared for us.  I gratefully ate mine, knowing it would cut the fire.  They didn't actually serve the cake to everyone else for another half an hour.

All in all, a day I'll never forget.

India - 7/27, Ashagram

I love these kids.

No, really.  I'm starting to hear stories about where they come from and where they've been.  Honestly, it's making my head hurt trying to get my head around this.

I don't know why this didn't dawn on me before, but this is the place that keeps turning up in ANM newsletters when they're talking about the Village of Hope.  The newsletters and articles talk about the young men that are recovering drug addicts, coming from the streets of Mumbai.  They talk about the girls that were formerly in brothels that are now safe and have hope again.

These are those kids.

These amazing real-life heroes are those kids.  When I go home and look at the newsletters, I'll probably see some very familiar faces.  These girls were in brothels.  These guys were drug addicts on the streets.  Casey has given us a wonderful gift in that she has been asking the kids for their stories.  While I'm teaching these guys how to swing dance in the dining hall and having my hair braided 3 times a day by the girls, Casey is sitting them down and asking for their stories.  She has the benefit of already knowing these kids because she was here with the first team.  I'm just forming relationships while she's continuing to build hers.  And what she hears is nothing short of astounding.  These kids lived through the hell I saw . . . the hell I ran through  . . . in Mumbai.  You hear about how the girls were sold into this awful life.  You hear about how these boys were addicted to drugs before they were teenagers.

And who they are now . . . you would never know.

These kids have a faith and a strength I know nothing about.  They know the restoring power of God in a way that I will probably never understand.  There is a sincerity to their worship and their times of devotion and Bible study that runs much deeper.  God has restored them.  All that love I keep giving out and all the goofy little things I do with these kids seems to pale in significance to anything they could want or need.  It seems too small somehow.  What could I possibly add to their life?   But they never hesitate to tell us that they are so thankful that we're here.  They seek us out and want to be around us all the time, even if we're just sitting at the table.  They're loving us more than we're loving them.

Melvin is playing his guitar in every spare moment to teach these kids some new songs, and I know that he's going to lose his voice by the end of the week.  Jill has a following of younger boys that just love being around her.  Marla is hanging out with the Aunties a lot.  Casey has her group of girls and guys, and they have some very strong friendships with her.  I'm finding that I'm settling into friendships with some of these guys pretty well.  It's surprising to me, because I thought I'd be hanging out with only the girls.  That's what I usually do.  But for whatever reason, it hasn't happened that way.

Today we went to a neighboring city to buy t-shirts and gifts for the Jubilee girls.  We are planning a day of games and fun for them on Saturday.  We went to a pretty good sized mall in a fairly good sized city, but I felt like I was at the zoo.  Apparently, they don't see as many foreigners here than they do in Mumbai.  People really just stared at us when we drove by.  I had the benefit of sitting in the back of the jeep again, so I could watch the heads turn when they noticed the girls sitting ahead of me in the jeep.  When we went to get ice cream at McDonalds, one of the employees sat down next to us and asked if she could take her picture with our team.  Then she wanted one with me.  I had to laugh.  Jill took one with her camera too, for good measure.

In my music class, I tried to teach a few more chords and scales.  She's got around 6 now that she's working on.  When I'm not working with her, I can hear her practicing.  It's pretty cool that I was able to teach her something.

We went back to Jubilee 1&2 today, and played some games with them.  We discovered: Do not play the telephone game when you do not speak the language.  Results WILL vary.  We also played this goofy little game:  you stand in a circle, and the person in the middle has to walk up to someone and say, "I love you, will you please smile?"  The person has to say, "I love you, but I just can't smile" back with a completely straight face.  I am terrible at this game.  The kids just have to walk up to me and I'm already laughing.  I ended up in the middle a lot.

At dinner, somebody started teaching Alok Spanish.  This kid claims he already speaks 7 languages or something like that, so when he heard that a lot of us took Spanish in high school he was all over it.  Before long, he was standing directly across from me at the table, yelling "TE AMO, ERIN!"  I jokingly told him to knock it off . . . so of course he kept doing it to the point where the other guys around were laughing at me and how I kept trying to get him to stop.

Alok is kind of a spaz and is prone to saying or doing whatever pops into his head without much consideration.  This often leads to some awesome times of laughter and some times when I want to smack him upside the head.  I love this kid a lot.  I can see his heart through all his crazy antics.

Santosh sat down next to me at one point during dinner and picked up the arm that has the bracelet I got from Kartik tied on it.  He tied a second one on: two different shades of green and pink.  He made me promise never to take it off.  I don't think I ever will.  I now have 4 bracelets from different kids.  I wear them all the time, and they will serve as great reminders of these awesome kids.

India - 7/26, Ashagram

My life in VA is a good one, but it's on a holding pattern.  I get restless with that.  Very fast.  I flail around and my spirit starts yelling for me to get out of the little box I'm in.  Somehow.  Any way.  I have to be careful with that.  That spirit that fuels my famously crazy passion and adventurous side can burn me alive if I'm not careful.  It can leave scars on me.  God put it there, but I have to steward it.  I want to find something Godly to throw it at, but all my original ideas of what that could be never materialized.  It could be that I had to learn how to use it instead of let it burn me alive.  Is this some of what God wanted to teach me in these years between?  I think it might be one aspect.

After feeling dry for months and months (and I knew it too, I couldn't shake it), I suddenly stumbled into this massive oasis, not having any idea what I was getting myself into.  Before my feet hit dirt here, the healing spirit of this place crashed over me and filled all the desert places in me.  It has not stopped.  I used to speak of this season in my life as being a desert.  I don't know if this place will single-handedly bring about a change in the season of my life, but I'm certainly sensing a change on a deep level.  I'm healing in ways I'm sure I'm not fully aware of.

The last place I grew a lot was Crystal Peaks in Oregon a few years ago.  It was beautiful, difficult, and felt like hot purifying fire.  Ashagram is beautiful, healing, and feels like the soaking rain that falls from the Indian sky.

I'm sitting on my bed in my room, surrounded by my mosquito net.  I hear the rain falling on the jungle outside and the girls calling each other in the courtyard.  I am the most blessed person in the world right now.  I am doing something I'm passionate about.  I'm doing something I'm good at.  I can DO something here, because God has equipped me and continues to equip me as I go with whatever I need.  I'm like a human toolbox.  Whenever the kids need something, I can rummage around inside my 'toolbox of useless skills' I have accumulated over the years.  The things I thought I would never use, like ballroom dancing lessons and that ill-fated aerobics course in college, surprisingly have uses here.

Lord, I want to find a way to serve you like this for the long term.  This might mean missions somewhere, or it might mean going right back where I came from and giving everyone back home what I now have.  I have no idea.  But I want to take up the word that was given to me that I will bear fruit until the day I die.  I want nothing more than to serve you and go where you want me to go.  Even if it's nowhere.

I did get my daily "out of my comfort zone" experience.  Trisha once again found one of those dwindling areas where I still have things I don't want to do or revisit.  She found my musical tough spot.

Melvin has started teaching the guys in music classes, and the girls wanted to be taught too.  He needed another leader to be in there with him when he taught his class for the girls (as per the general common-sense rules of youth ministry).  In the DC airport before we actually left, he showed me a goofy little app he has on his phone where you touch the screen in a pattern and it plays a song.  I picked Fur Elise and Turkish March and joked that I could play the songs again now.  He asked if I played and I told him that I used to, but I don't anymore.

In truth, I took years of piano lessons.  I can still read music.  I remember chords, scales and music theory.  I stopped taking lessons because I burned completely out.  I felt like an utter failure with my piano stuff, and I quit with a vengeance.  I was (and still kind of am) really hard on myself because I really wanted to be good.  I just wasn't as good as I wanted to be.  I actually told my parents that they wasted their money because I was so bad it it and I didn't want to keep trying.  It is one of the few things I have ever given up on in my life, and is a really sore subject.

And Trisha poked it with a big stick.

She asked me to teach the girls how to play piano.  I was like, "Really?"  I tried to dance my way out of it.  I tried denial.  I tried to tell her I had nothing to teach.  Melvin nailed me with my comment from the airport.  I told him, "Just because I could then doesn't mean I can now!  I haven't gone near a piano in over 10 years!"

They made me do it.

I tried not to have a bad attitude about it, but I was terrified.  This was years of crap they were asking me to face down in the next 15 minutes.  I walked over to the room with Melvin and was simply praying that God would give me something I could teach them.  I had no sheet music, chord charts, workbooks . . . nothing.  I couldn't teach them where to place their fingers for the few songs I can still remember how to play.

I started with middle C and showed them a few major chords as Melvin taught the other girls the chords on the guitar.  I tried to show them where they would go on the staff.  I showed how the chords can be found from major scales, and how to find the major scales in the first place.  I taught 3 chords and their scales, and prayed that they would get it.  After sweating bullets for 45 minutes, we left for lunch.  I felt like there was no way I was going to be able to do that again tomorrow . . . but I also knew I had to.

After lunch, we went to the tailor to get our saris finished.  I brought the four I had just bought and the one I had bought in London a few years ago.  I was so excited, I actually did a happy dance.  The team laughed at me and told me that I wouldn't wear them nearly as much as I thought I would.  I told them to wait and see.  I got to pick how I wanted the tops to be made, and I was measured for them.  We'll pick them up later this week, and I just know that I'll put one on the second I get it.

Also today, we went Jubilee 4.  This would be one of those more difficult trips.  I had heard that half the kids in this one were HIV positive.  What I didn't know was that most were under 12 years old.  These were little kids!

Predictably, when we arrived, there was mass chaos.  The kids pulled out every toy and book they had and sat us on the floor to read to them.  They weren't interested in the words.  They were interested in sitting on us and just being near us.

We played a few little games and sang a few songs.  Then we gave them a bunch of little yo-yo balloons we had made.  These were balloons with a little water in them on the end of a rubber band.  The kids thought this was the best thing in the world.  They ran around and hit each other with them, squealing and screaming.  It was great to watch.  It was also sad to see that there was one girl who was very sick.  She couldn't walk, and sat on the side at a little table.  Casey, being the observant and tender-hearted person she is, saw her and sat with her.  We gave them a lot of love and left feeling tired, but like we did something that they really enjoyed.

When we returned for dinner, Kartik asked me to hold out my arm.  He tied a green and white friendship bracelet on my wrist.  I can make these, so I knew just how labor intensive this was.  It takes hours.  It was here that he mentioned that he didn't make it, but he had actually asked Santosh to make it for him.  With a sheepish smile, he explained that he didn't have that much spare time (being the leader for the smaller boys), but wanted me to have one.  I was overjoyed that he thought of me and wanted to give me one.

It was another great blessing on a very full day.  I prayed that the days would feel long and that I would squeeze every drop out of them I could possibly get.