From New Zealand to India
[Adventures in Faith: India; 1991] Alexander and I departed New Zealand and arrived in India.
The flight for Alexander and me was a few days before Tom and Yuki’s. I felt sad at departing from them, although it would only be for a short while. Then we would be reunited in India.
From Aukland, our flight took Alexander and me to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
For the first time in our lives, we were in the Middle East. We felt very fortunate to be there. The men in the airport wore a white thawb. It is a traditional ankle-length robe.
The airport was very elegant. We realized we were among the extremely wealthy, for there was a booth where people bought $10,000 raffle tickets for a Ferrari.
We transited in Dubai for just a short time. Then it was onto the next airplane.
That flight took us from Dubai to Sri Lanka. In Colombo, we would transit one more time before departing for our final destination of Chennai.
It’s just that our transit time in Columbo was 40 hours!
We didn’t want to spend money on a motel room. So we stayed inside the airport. For 40 hours. It wasn’t fun.
The background music sounded like someone played it with a toy piano and one finger and no imagination. It was on a ten-minute loop. After 20 minutes, we were sick of it.
In our 40 hours in the terminal, we heard that loop 240 times.
The terminal didn’t have a food court. It just had vending machines. After an hour, the candy bars and sodas made us hyper and jittery. And we had 39 more hours to go.
The seats were made of fiberglass. They were designed to be form fitting. As we sat in them, the curved shape of the seats slid us down into a slump.
We couldn’t lay across the seats, because each seat was an individual bucket seat, complete with individual armrests.
They were the exact same miserable fiberglass seats that we encountered during our Bitter Defeat at Awaji Island.
There were groups of four seats that were bolted into fixed positions on a common steel base. So we couldn’t even adjust their position.
The terminal didn’t have beds. So we took turns lying on the concrete floor. After a very short while, though, our hips and shoulders became really sore from the concrete. Neither of us could sleep because we were too sore.
By the end of our 40 hours, we were a mess. We were hyper and jittery, bored and irritated, sore and strung out.
We were so glad to finally board the airplane. Finally, we were off to our destination: Madras, or as it’s now called, Chennai.
The flight was unremarkable, except that it had real airplane food! It was like manna from heaven! Finally, we were set free from candy bars and sodas!
Also, the airplane had real airplane seats! They were a hundred times more comfortable than the fiberglass seats back at the airport.
Far too soon, we landed in Chennai. After we passed the appropriate check-points, we arrived in the terminal.
At long last, we were in India!
Out in the lobby, we could see a few members of the Believers group. They were happy to welcome us to India.
Soon, we were in a taxi that sped us to the apartment. The group rented two floors of a large house. Finally at our address, the taxi stopped. We grabbed our bags. The group unlocked the padlock at the gate, and we went up the concrete stairs.
Halfway up the stairs, I stopped. I turned around and looked back down the stairs. The stairwell was dark. But at the foot of the stairs, looking through the gate, I could see the bright sunlight, the street, and its never-ending stream of people.
It looked exactly like something I’d seen back about a year before.
Back when we lived in Kamagasaki, I had a mystical vision one day. It was quite clear. That day, I had no idea what it was. But it always stuck with me.
Now, two nations and almost a year later, I saw exactly what the vision was. It was from within this very house I was now living in.
I was assigned a cot in a big room on the second floor. It was the room where the bachelors slept. For the next six months, this would be my home.
There were usually ten to twelve people living there. New people arrived at random times, and others departed at different random times.
The new people would arrive with heaps of luggage, stuffed to the breaking point with shoes and children’s clothing. All of it would be given away to poor people.
The new people arrived wearing money belts. Those money belts were stuffed with money. Some people carried as much as $10,000 U.S. into India, even though the official limit was only $1,000.
This money would go into a common purse:
- It would pay for rent and food and medical
- It would pay for our outreach projects
- A large portion would be given away to homeless people
One person smuggled in a bunch of grass. No, not that kind of grass!
They smuggled in bags of desert grass seeds. It was just about the only grass that might be able to survive the sweltering heat of Chennai’s summer.
The customary thing to do with foreign currency was to take it to a bank and exchange it for Indian Rupees. In those days, the exchange rate was around 26 Rupees per U.S. dollar.
But I later learned that the Believers group exchanged their foreign currency on the black market. In the black market, they got around 30 Rupees per dollar U.S. That was about 15% better.
But it seemed illegal. And I wondered why the black market gave better prices. Were we funding things we wouldn’t want to be funding?
But the group didn’t worry itself about such concerns. Their focus was elsewhere.
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ADVENTURES IN FAITH
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