OK, so you wouldn't believe the past 2 days if you had lived them with us!!! There is so very much to share, but so little time to share it as it's already after 12:15 am here and we will be leaving early for the Taj Mahal on Wednesday. But, I'm going to try to sum it all up as best I can.
On Monday, our group was privileged to visit with some of the women and some of the men that live in the Shaihabad Dairy (please excuse spelling as I'm pretty sure that this is incorrect) and discuss community issues that they face on a daily basis. Shayna, Jamie and Bethany visited with the women and played with the children and Cara and I were able to visit with the 6 men that came. Amongst the challenges they discussed were lack of respect from children toward their parents, alcoholism in the community (80,000 people who live in 15,000 houses and approximately 80% of the men in the community are alcoholics), gambling, and access to healthcare and post offices. It was a great time for a little bit of conversation and to begin to develop a relationship with the local church there in the dairy, which is pastored by Naresh. After these sessions, we took a break to talk with Vijay about many topics, one in particular being the impact of short-term missions from the point of view of the local church and specifically his experiences. We were so happy to have his open and honest responses to these questions and to hear how uplifting it is for him to be able to share his culture with others and for the relationships that do develop because we come to their city and specifically these communities. After this long and very encouraging conversation (if you want to know specifics about it, please ask any one of us and we'll be happy to tell you), we headed out to the slums in the dairy. This was an experience like I hadn't seen.....I had seen poverty like this and people living in "houses" like this, but not on this grand a scale. To hear the stories of the ladies who lived there, specifically the story of the mother of one Muslim family who lives there was such an amazing experience. After this, we had lunch, rode the metro to try to get a glimpse of these size of the city and it is absolutely huge!!!!!! After the metro ride, we visited a saree shop where we each picked out at least 1 traditional set of clothing, which we are all very excited about!! We visited a shop that Vijay had been to only once before and since we were able to purchase a few items from them, have them fitted and stitched them up for us while we are here. Since we bought a few things from them and we are white Americans, they also began to beg Vijay for us to come and join them in their home for dinner. Vijay told them repeatedly no, but.......
We ended Monday late and were a little excited to start Tuesday a little later in the morning. This morning, we participated in a service at one of the churches in honor of International Women's Day. We were able to share testimonies of God in our lives - everything from our salvation to carrying out good works, by God's grace, in hard times, and even the great commission. They seemed to understand very well what we were talking about, which is always a blessing. They also had questions for us.....of course, the kind that we hate answering, like, "are you married?" "how old are you?" "why aren't you married, you don't want to be?"........oh the cultural barriers that make us smile, right? :-) After the women's day celebration, we went to KFC for a little "snack" and then to a monument in Delhi, called Humayun's Tomb, and walked around a bit to see that structure.
You remember my mentioning the family from the saree shop and their persistence, WELL, we headed to their house for dinner and to pick up our sarees. We met at the shop at 7:00 pm (we also met with Vijay's wife, Marie, there) and they had been preparing the whole day for us to visit and the whole community was aware that we were coming and helping to prepare......most of the community is their family. They fed us a 4-curry meal (typical in India is 7 curries) and dessert and kept trying to feed us more and more and more. We were miserably full and ready to try on our sarees and head back to the hotel. But, some alterations were needed, so we couldn't leave right away. They were able to make the alterations right there. During the visiting time, we learned about the hindu god that they worship as well as more information about their family. This opened an opportunity for us to leave a gift with them.....it was a gift of a book of Bible stories for their children, then the family told us that they had a gift for us. Before we were able to leave, they presented us with our gifts, which, were small replicas of hindu gods. Please be in prayer for this family, Garg is their family name, as they have such great dispositions and want so desperately to work hard, be honest and share their possessions, but they don't have Christ.
There are so many, many, many prayer requests from yesterday and today that I can't mention them all here and they range from health-related concerns to persecution of women by their families because of their conversion to Christianity. Please remember these women, men, and children that we've come into contact with over the past few days and the ones that we will encounter during the remainder of our journey here. God has done some amazing things......I can't share them all through this message, but just wanted you to have a glimpse of them. Tomorrow, we will visit the Taj Mahal and Thursday and Friday, we plan to take part in more meetings of women and children.
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