Sweet Victory at a Remote Village in India
[Adventures in Faith: India; 1991] My friends and I went on an overnight outreach journey. We brought no money and no supplies. We helped the people we met. It went well, but we all got sick.
In the New Testament, the Lord Jesus sends his followers on a mission. They are to go out.
When they get to wherever they’re going, they’re to do things for people. They’re to preach and teach. They are to serve and heal.
For this trip, they’re to take no money.
Previously, I wrote two articles about Tom and I going on such trips in Japan. The first trip was a Sweet Victory. The second trip was a Bitter Defeat.
Now in India, some of us in the Believers group felt inspired to go on a faith journey. So we made simple preparations:
Step 1. We carved out two days from our calendar.
Step 2. Someone from our group went to the Royapuram railway station and bought tickets for us. That person was not going on the trip.
The tickets were one-way, in keeping with the biblical injunction to not bring provision with us.
Our destination was unknown to the six people who were actually going on the trip.
As the time for our departure approached, we tried to build up our faith that God would provide for us.
What did we need? Things like these:
- Food
- Sanitary water
- A safe place to sleep
- Safety from communicable diseases
- A return to our rented house in Chennai
When the day arrived, we went to Royapuram railway station. We boarded the train and it departed.
The train oozed along at a glacial pace. It was nothing like the super-fast Shinkansen in Japan.
From our windows, we could glimpse the endless sprawl of India.
After an hour or so, we had passed the boundary of Chennai. We were on our own. We were on the faith journey.
Tom looked like he was deep in thought. Yuki-chan had a Buddha-like calm. Alexander re-read the Bible passages about faith-journeys such as ours. Gloriana seemed excited to be on the trip.
For my part, I felt nervous. Yet I was confident that God would have ministry opportunities in store for us.
Some time later, the train arrived at our destination. It was clear that we were in the remote countryside.
We disembarked. From the platform, we looked around, wondering what was next.
We got the idea to walk to a nearby village. It seemed as good as anything.
We inquired at the ticket booth, and learned of a village a half mile away. That became our destination.
It was late morning. We walked away from the train station with no food, no drink, no money, no extra clothes, no place to stay for the night, and no sense of what to do.
We arrived at the rural village. For the looks of it, it was home to no more than a few hundred people. We stood at the edge of the village, beholding everything we could see.
Someone in our group called the houses “coconut houses.” That meant they were constructed from coconut leaves.
Fortunately for us, the village was not a frenzy of activity.
The last thing we needed was a crowd. We were foreigners, we couldn’t speak the local dialect, we didn’t know what to do, and we were nervous.
We could do whatever we felt inspired to do, without being surrounded by curious onlookers.
Almost immediately, one thing riveted our attention. The sewer.
The sewer was a concrete trench. It was about one foot wide by one foot deep. In cross-section, it was shaped like the capital letter “U.”
The top of the sewer trench was not covered. So whenever you looked at the sewer, you had a direct glimpse of human urine and human feces.
However, the sewer trench was plugged. In a bunch of separate locations.
Human feces had flowed out of the houses, flowed down the sewer trench, and then piled into mounds, like dams, thereby blocking the path.
The mounds of poop were big. Distressingly big.
Normally, the unclogging of the sewer would be reserved for the untouchables.
Untouchables are people not born into a respectable caste of Hindu society.
Rejected everywhere they go, and denied the possibility of mainstream work, they had to be the garbage pickers and sewer cleaners of India.
Without knowing the local dialect, we didn’t have any way to talk with the local people. So we decided to let our actions speak for us.
We noticed some shovels. Through gestures, we asked the owner of the shovels if we could borrow them. We were granted permission.
So we each grabbed a shovel. We each claimed a section of the sewer trench as our own. And we shoveled. And shoveled. And shoveled.
After many hours, we had unclogged the sewer for them.
It was backbreaking work. Fortunately, it wasn’t summer. The weather was around 80° F.
And it wasn’t the monsoon season either. For southern India, it was “moderate.”
But for me, it was hot. Really hot.
Doing heavy labor in the hot sun, I had been sweating profusely for hours.
I needed water badly, as did all us foreigners.
A local resident guided us to their water supply. It was a hand pump like you might see in a movie with an old-time farm.
There was a cast-iron gadget with a long lever. To get water, you pumped the lever up-and-down. Eventually, water would be lifted from deep down. It would gush out the pump’s spigot.
But that water was groundwater.
It wasn’t distilled. It wasn’t filtered. It wasn’t sanitized. It was almost certainly laced with parasites and pathogens, bacteria and human sewage.
None of us foreigners had built up any resistance to that local groundwater. So we should not have drank it.
But we were doing heavy labor and sweating away our internal water supply.
We had to drink water, and we had no other option available to us.
So we drank from the pump. And yes, later, it turned out to be a poison for most of us.
By late afternoon, we had finished unclogging their sewers. Men were returning to the village from their day’s work elsewhere. They were gathering around us.
They were astonished that foreigners would clean their sewers for them. They interpreted our presence, and what we had done, as a special sign of favor from God.
As suppertime drew near, some women guided us to the center of the village. There was a concrete building there. It had a sort of awning.
Compared to all the other buildings in the village, it stuck out like a sore thumb.
The other buildings were mostly made of coconut leaves. But this building was made of concrete. And it looked new.
We speculated that it was a community center, possibly built as a government project.
They asked us to sit under the awning. Then people started gathering around us.
In a short while, the whole village was present. They circled around us.
After people had gathered, some men brought us food. It was chicken biryani. It smelled wonderful.
But I had a problem. For about three years, I had been on a vegetarian diet.
My vegetarian diet began during my years in Japan. In those days I was very poor, relative to the Japanese people I lived among. In those days I couldn’t afford meat. So I lived as a vegetarian. I mostly lived on bread and rice.
That vegetarian diet gradually became a conscious choice. It was a way for me to have solidarity with poor people throughout the world.
Later still, it became necessary, as my body could no longer digest animal meat.
The week before our faith journey, I had been sent to the market. It was my turn to buy groceries. I had to buy two chickens.
I witnessed the farmer slit the throats of two wonderful chickens. Before my eyes, they flapped and squawked. And then died.
That image shocked me every day for a decade. Even now, decades later, I still see it from time to time.
We were the center of attention of a whole village. They probably sacrificed a great deal to give us the chicken biryani. It was probably the greatest gift they could give us.
If I had rejected their generous gift, it would have been rude. It would have been like rejecting them.
Plus, the Lord Jesus gave us a very clear command about this exact situation.
To his people on a faith journey like ours, he said:
Into whatever city you enter, and they receive you, eat the things that are set before you. (Luke 10:8).
So that’s what I did. I ate it.
After the meal, a number of young women gathered around Yuki-chan. She was Japanese.
But to people in southern India, thanks to her light complexion, she looked like a high-caste Hindu.
To the people in the village, Yuki was a very important person.
These young women brought their babies to Yuki. They asked her to name their babies!
Yuki named quite a few babies. She was thrilled with the privilege.
Later, it began to get dark. They walked us to a different place. It was a somewhat open area. They had all of us stand in a line.
The whole village stood in a half-circle, facing us. A man appeared. He was wearing garb that seemed religious in nature.
He walked around in the center. He said things that, naturally, we couldn’t understand.
He took into his hands a clay dish. It was filled with burning embers and incense. Smoke was rising from it.
He held the dish out toward us. He moved it up and down and side-to-side. He walked across us six foreigners.
We had no idea what he was doing.
They led us back to the Community Center. They indicated that we should sleep there. So that’s what we did.
Or at least, that’s what we tried to do.
There were mosquitoes. Lot’s of ’em. All night long, mosquitoes were buzzing in our ears and stinging us everywhere.
Plus, most of us were having a violent reaction to the well water. That meant cramps and fever, nausea and diarrhea.
Plus, we were trying to sleep on concrete.
For some years previous, I had taken up a habit of sleeping on the floor. It began when I learned that Japanese people slept on the floor.
Later, in both Japan and India, I saw homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk.
To experience some solidarity with those homeless people, I often slept on the floor.
But in the U.S., to sleep on the floor meant sleeping on carpet. And in Japan, it meant sleeping on tatami floor mats.
Once in Japan, Tom and I had slept on the concrete at a Buddhist shelter in Kamagasaki.
And when Alexander and I transited in Sri Lanka, we had a jaw-dropping 46-hour layover. We tried to sleep on the floor of the airport. But neither of us couldn’t sleep. Not at all.
Now in a remote village in India, I had to try again.
Concrete is hard! Unbelievably hard. Try to sleep on concrete sometime.
The next day, they fed us fruit for breakfast. Then some men walked us to the train station.
I was miserable. I hadn’t slept the whole night.
At the train station, the men from the village bought us train tickets back home!
On the train ride home, we reflected on our experience. Despite not knowing where to go or what to do, we were inspired to do a ministry. People appreciated it. We had no supplies, but the people took care of all our needs.
Oh, the incense thing. Later, we were told the meaning of what had happened. We were told that the man in the distinctive garb was a Hindu priest.
We were told that the plate of incense was a sacrifice.
We were told that, on behalf of the village, he had offered sacrifice to us as gods!
We had no idea.
RESOURCES
My faith journeys:
Sweet Victory at a Remote Village in India
At Wikipedia
Biryani (rice dish in India)
Tatami (Japanese flooring)
ADVENTURES IN FAITH
NOTE. Names, dates, and locations may have been changed.
Unless otherwise noted, all Bible quotations on this page are from the World English Bible and the World Messianic Edition. These translations have no copyright restrictions. They are in the Public Domain.