February 3, 2013

This week has had several more “If My Friends Could See Me Now . . .“ moments.

 . . . the first of which was my first attempt at cricket.

I was on the boys’ courtyard for their free time, goofing off and attempting to play racquetball with Akram with rackets that had holes large enough for the birdie to pass through untouched.  One of the younger Sunils (There’s three.  No, that’s not confusing or anything.  I’m pretty sure this is the middle one, who’s a teenager) came over to me and asked if I wanted to play cricket.  I laughed and was like, “Yeah, right” until Akram said I should give it a shot.  I was handed what appeared to be a flattened wooden club.  I was staring at it, wondering what the heck to swing the thing when I suddenly found a rubber ball flying at me.  I blindly swung the thing like a baseball bat and cracked the ball over the house on the other side, clear out of the compound.  There was a moment of silence when all the boys just stared at where the ball had gone, followed by hysterical laughter.

“Ok, so um . . . I guess I’m going to play cricket now?”

It took me a few more tries to realize that this was not actually a baseball bat, and I probably shouldn’t swing it like one.  The boys’ laughter was kind of a tip off.  Every time I took a swing, the middle Sunil about fell over he was laughing so hard.  But he wouldn’t tell me how to actually swing the thing.  I think he didn’t want to lose the entertainment.  I got a crash course on how to swing from one of the little guys.  You are supposed to tap the bat on the ground next to your right pinky toe (which explains why a lot of the boys have bandaged right pinky toes) before you swing. Then, you’re supposed to swing it almost low enough to take off your toes, with an upward follow-through.  It reminded me of a mix between a baseball and a golf swing.  It doesn’t matter if the ball is rolling on the ground when it gets to you, you have to try to hit it.  There doesn’t seem to be a concept of a wild pitch or a ‘ball’ in this sport.  If there is, these boys didn’t tell me so they could laugh at me trying to hit everything that came at me.  At one point, one of the boys got a whistle and pretended to be umpire, blowing the whistle twice and waving his arms at the imaginary opposing team whenever I would miss the ball.  This was unhelpful.

I’m sure this was a funny sight: me, standing there holding a cricket bat about as long as one of my legs, in my black cotton MC Hammer pants and a bright blue t-shirt.  I probably swung that bat 100 times.  Toward the end, I got fairly consistent in bouncing the ball off the roof of the house across from me, when the boys weren’t throwing the ball directly at my ankles.  My arms were pretty much useless for the next two days after that.

On Saturday, I had a chance to go to church in Mumbai.  I had been to this service before when I was here the last time.  These are some awesome services . . . it’s ground zero ministry.  We like to talk about ‘outside the doors of the church’ in the US like it’s a jungle out there or something.  Well, right outside the doors of this church is the largest red-light district in Asia.  This was the service that I had walked through the red-light district with 50 kids to get to the last time I was here.  This time, I would be taking the bus with the aunties.  I was told to be ready to leave at 12:30.  It occurred to me that the service happened near sunset, about 50 miles away. 

Question: Why do I need to leave 5 hours early for a church service 50 miles away?

Answer: Don’t ask stupid questions.

Ok, so first off, I would like to say that I was fortunate that I was going on a BTC bus, because at least I knew I was safe on the bus.  I was also glad that it wasn’t overcrowded.  Everyone had a seat.

But this was a 4 hour bus ride in India.

I had known that we had been pampered quite a bit the last time I was here, traveling around in enclosed jeeps with air-conditioning.  This was a whole new kind of adventure.  The smells alternated between spicy food to hot metal exhaust fumes to burning trash.  Within 10 minutes, my face had a clammy, coated feeling.  We were pretty high up on this bus, so I could see everyone staring back at me in my window seat. 

The BTC bus that has “Ruby Wedding” (that one has yet to be explained) printed on the side has been granted with the most ear-splitting, shrill horn in the entire city of Mumbai.  There are regular car horns that are incessant in this city (No, really, I do mean ‘not ever ceasing’), but then there’s this . . . an octave above that and three times as loud.  I do wish I was exaggerating.  I was sitting on the bus trying to come up with the right words to describe it, thinking that this description was an exaggeration then  . . . but then the driver would lay into it again and I would realize that yes, this is an accurate description.  This does, however, make it quite efficient at weaving in and out of Mumbai traffic.  I think people just wanted to get away from that sound as fast as possible.

I also noticed an interesting bit of communication between the driver and the co-driver.  The co-driver would have his arm out the left window (because the steering wheel is on the right side) and would periodically bang on the side of the bus twice.  The entire ride, I couldn’t figure out if he was acting as a turn signal and warning other drivers of our massive presence . . . or if he was signaling the driver that there was a car or motorcycle attempting to run between us and the car in the next lane over.  When the traffic got especially thick, the co-driver would actually leave the front compartment and go hang out the open bus door at the end of my seat.  I don’t know if this was so he could see the traffic better or if he wanted to stare down other drivers who tried to squeeze past us.  At any rate, he pounded on the side of the bus from outside the door.

The adventure was further compounded by a mysterious and surprisingly persistent beeping alarm sound I kept hearing from the front of the bus.  Michael had told me that this particular bus had broken down in Mumbai traffic a few days before I got there, causing everyone on it to have to catch those dubious black auto-rickshaw scooter-engine things.  I kept praying that this beeping was not the sound of the bus’ imminent demise . . . In Mumbai traffic . . . going uphill on a one-lane flyover onramp.  (I did figure out later when we were returning at night that the beeping sound is the bus’ indicator that the 4-way flashers are on.  And I thought that we were overheating or something every time we tried to pull up a hill . . . or pulled up to a toll booth . . . or sat in traffic.  It was beyond nerve-wracking, but that bus got enough prayer for a week in my bus ride.)

Oh, and Mumbai traffic . . . my memory had not exaggerated on that either.  In fact, it seemed worse than I remembered.  At least when I was in it the last time I was here, traffic felt like it was moving.  This . . . not so much.  Gridlock everywhere.  Lane lines, stoplights, and turning lanes optional.  Motorcycles seemed to defy the laws of physics, squeezing into spaces between cars that seemed smaller than their handlebars.  And it apparently doesn’t matter if you are moving or not, you can still use your horn.  As my friend put it, “In the US, the horn is only used if something is wrong.  In India, it is used to say ‘I am a vehicle and I am moving.  Or I am not moving and I want to move.’”

When we got there, we were joined by the kids from another BTC ministry called Jeevan Jyoti.  This is a children’s home that is inside the district itself for kids that have been born there.  It’s a safe place for them to live and grow up, otherwise they would be living in the brothels.  Really.  I had seen some of these kids before and I remembered them, but they have so many visitors that they did not remember me.  I was cool with that and sat with them anyway.

I had a surreal moment in the service when we sang a song with this as the chorus: “There is power in the name of Jesus/to break every chain, break every chain, break every chain”.  Suddenly, it hit me: I was singing about Jesus breaking every chain while standing in a red-light district.  There was a question: did I really believe what I was singing?  Did I act like I really believed what I was singing?  You want to talk about chains?  This is modern-day slavery of the ugliest sort, and I’m just standing here singing this song.

What was I going to do about it?

It was in this moment that I realized that I’m pretty much ruined for life in the United States.  I knew this before, but now I’m probably going to end up with a serious problem when I get back home.  I prayed that God would not make me stay in the US.  I prayed that I would be of some usefulness to this ministry and that I would be able to help them in any way I could.  I prayed that I would be able to stay on and help them break every chain. 

I don’t know how I’m going to go back.  If I’m going back to the exact same place I was before . . . putting clearance stickers on things and straightening shampoo bottles, I really will have a problem.  You can get me back in that job, sure . . . but I’m going to have a hard time caring about accuracy counts.  I can tell you that I will not give a rat’s left whisker about the drama that happens as a daily thing on the pricing team.  In light of what I had just seen and done, all that really doesn’t matter to me anymore.  And really, to some extent, it shouldn’t matter as much as it does to most people anyway.

God help me, I have no idea where my life is going.  I think I know what I want, but I have no idea how to get there.

One night, I was just leaving the dining hall to go back to the girls’ unit with the aunties when the power was cut, causing all the path lights to go out.  There are deadly scorpions (really, you can die if you get stung) and snakes here, so that’s really not good. I stopped in my tracks and said, ‘Um, hey . . . I kinda need the lights so I can . . . you know, not find a snake accidentally and die?  Ok thanks!”  5 seconds after I said that, the lights flickered back on.  I was like ” . . . ok, um . . . I was sort of kidding.  I didn’t think anybody heard me . . .”

Just then, our friendly neighborhood handyman/snake killing superhero emerged from a little building (that just happens to have a transformer station and a generator attached to it) just up the path from me and triumphantly announced, “Lights on!” 

I just stared at him for a second as it dawned on me: this crazy-hyper little man with the big snake killing stick has control over the electricity, and I suspected the water as well.  This was the man that had his devious little finger on the ‘power button’.   There is a schedule because  he makes it so there is a schedule.

Note to self: be friends with the man who controls the electricity.   Do not make this man mad.  He has the power to make your life miserable, quickly.

I started my teaching schedule this week, and it is an adventure.

First class: Bible study with the aunties, right after morning devotions, for a half an hour.  I wasn’t going to try to go on a theme or try to pick stuff out from all over the Bible every day for two months.  I decided to start in Romans and just read it, adding in some of the historical knowledge and cross-referencing knowledge I have.  There are some problems with this though: I don’t have a commentary.  I don’t have a concordance.  I don’t even have an index in my Bible!  I’m just going by what I know.  For instance, I went through Isaiah basically looking for any of the lyrics from Handel’s Messiah.    If I could sing it, it was a prophecy about the coming of Jesus.  I have been systematically pointing out all the ways that Jesus fulfilled those prophecies, weaving those in and out of my explanation of Romans and how Jesus fulfilled the law.

God keeps pulling out more and more detail for me to tell them, and they really appear to be getting things out of it.  Yesterday, I told them about David and Bathsheba because of a reference to Psalm 51 in Romans 3 (David wrote Psalm 51 right after Nathan called him out on Bathsheba.)  Today, I told them the story of Paul’s pre-Jesus life because he cross-referenced 6 different Psalms and some Ezekiel in 3:10-18, and the ladies were wondering how he knew the scriptures so well.  I told them that Paul was once called Saul, that he was a very prominent Jewish leader that studied the law for many years, and that he was known for killing Christians.  When I got raised eyebrows, I told them the whole story.  They then told me that they wished the class was longer.  Yay, I’m doing some good here!

Then there’s English.  Now, this is a trip.  I have a workbook that all the students have as well.  It looks like a standard upper-level English as a Second Language book.  Then I have another textbook that looks like the one I used for my Advanced Composition course my senior year of college.  This is nuts.  I’m reading this thing and going “. . . How do I teach students who just learned what an adjective is about how to form gerundial infinitives?  Do I even know what a gerundial infinitive is!?”  I have to simplify and narrow that one down quite a bit.

I’m also tutoring someone on what resembles my “good citizenship’ course I had my freshman year of college; conservation, values systems, sources of stress and how to deal with it . . . stuff like that. 

I’ve also got Bible studies on the guy’s side twice a week: once for the young boys and once for the older guys. 

This doesn’t sound like a whole lot . . . until you have to do it between 24/7 on-the-job ministry.  I did it this week without too much trouble.  We’ll see what happens next week.

Also this week, I jumped in with the worship team and sang on Sunday.  We did 6 songs in the service, but I only sang 2 because they were the only two we did in English.  I don’t know the Hindi songs, and Sunday morning worship is not the time to guess or screw up the words.  It was really good though . . . I was up there singing with Sunil and my friend Rajani.  She would mostly sing the melody with Sunil, but it was really cool when she sang a harmony.  I would pick a different harmony line and we’d end up with 3 parts.  I also discovered that the songs take on new meaning when you’re up front and leading.  It becomes much more important to understand what you are singing, and God really helps you concentrate and enter in.  You become aware of the fact that you are like God’s amplifier.  Other people can see you connecting with God and they can follow your lead.  I didn’t understand a word of what Sunil actually said between the songs, but I could tell that he was very gifted at leading worship.  I didn’t have to know what he was saying; I could actually see where his heart was.  It made it very easy to follow his lead.  The kids responded beautifully.

This coming week, I hope to teach the worship team some songs . . . maybe Give Me Faith, the song I used in my message last week.  I’d also love to learn the Hindi songs . . . or at least the chorus of Hindi songs so I could sing a harmony line on those.

The staff have asked me to spend more time with the smaller boys, hanging out on their unit and just playing with them.  I can handle that one.  These boys are the most fun kids in the world.  Not to mention, they don’t laugh at me when I try to play cricket.

Oh and for the record, I still don’t have a consistent way to get the internet  To actually get the internet, I have to either get a car to take me to town or another campus, or use one of the guys' cell phones.  I love getting messages on Facebook, they make my day . . . I just can’t always respond to them very fast.