What I do, What I have, What people say about me...is not who I am

A little clarification, with some caveats.

What exactly have you been doing there?

Primarily, I've been trying to learn the local languages, learn how to live daily life in the slum and be a good example to others as I do so, and teach illiterate children how to read in Hindi.  I'm also supporting my wife in her programs with women in the basti and teenage victims of human trafficking.  Here and there I've been non-violently intervening in fights between men and beatings of women and children, helping an over-achieving slum resident get into college and succeed there, and trying to be a good example of a man by doing household work, speaking appropriately about women, and defending the weak. Outside of the slum I've been serving on the board of a city-wide (soon to be international) literacy program and trying to help them improve the program, teaching Christians in the city and beyond about the kingdom of God, and trying to help people like me live here in the city. Internationally I'm supporting other people in living this same kind of life among the poor, promoting a more sustainable relationship between people and the environment, and lending assistance to scientific research in India, Bangladesh, and America.

But I am not what I do.


How do you live? Like, what do you have?

My wife and I rent an upstairs room from a large family in the slum. It's a little 8ft by 9ft brick room with a tarp and bamboo roof. A little water gets in through the sides but the roof doesn't leak at all. Our appliances are a gas stove, a ceramic water filter, a light bulb and a fan. We sleep on a foam mattress on the ground under a mosquito net. Our latrine is outside in the shared space with the family, but we are the ones who primarily use it when the next-door room is unoccupied (there's another latrine downstairs). We carry our water upstairs in buckets that we fill at a downstairs tap. Most of our other possessions are quite simple, but I do have a mobile phone, a camera, and a laptop. My wife also has a bicycle.

But I am not what I have.


What do the people say about you?

Initially some people were saying that maybe I was working for the CIA, or that I was a criminal on the run. (They didn't tell me that directly, but I found out through the grapevine.) Generally most people seem to have come to know that we are here to live with and serve among normal people, and they are respectful of that.  They share it enough that people I've never met before sometimes know my name and what I'm doing here.  Our primary mode is “guest”, and we are treated extremely hospitably by many many people. Some people consider us saints, or infidels, or crazy for having left a place like America. Some people have said that I must be pretty stupid because I can't speak Hindi correctly or even know how to do basic household work the right way. I think some people think that I'm a little shy, and others might think I'm lazy because I don't have a “normal” job yet, but I haven't heard people actually share that. At least one person says that I'm their best friend.

Outside of the slum, some people say that I'm a role model, a heretic, idealistic, unrealistic, a jerk, a hero, inappropriate, too negative a person, too optimistic a person, a confused liberal, a brainwashed conservative, impatient, loud, aggressive.

But I am not what people say about me.

So what am I then? At the most important core, I identify as a child of God and a disciple of Christ.

I am a child of God before I am anything else.

My personality at the root is that of an idealist (a “1” on the Enneagram if you like that sort of thing). I am a person in process, with a lot of faults and a long way to go. But a child of God, and already loved by God just the way I am.

No matter what I do, what I have, or what people say about me.


This post inspired by Henri Nouwen's following talk, and the fact that those three questions are the exact three questions that people from the outside always ask me about my life here.

12:42am

At times I wonder

if I die tomorrow

Would it have mattered that I was here?

Two years of faltering

trying

Bearing witness

coming up short

I returned from India in 2004

Watched Hotel Rwanda

Cried for two hours

Why did we do nothing!!@!@

They were dying

Slaughtered

Suffering

And we sat here, doing nothing

That moment the roots entwined with the bedrock

God had planted a seed six years earlier

a Mark 8 bible study and a word just for me

He watered it with every year of faith

Fed it in Inglewood

Pruned it into a vision in India

but it was that moment, watching that movie, that the roots grabbed bedrock that they could never let go

I will not sit here while they die there

even if all I can do is stand in front of a machete and say NO!

become one more life cut down

I will do it

in the hope that my life given, my “No” voiced, would inspire one more crack in the dam

one more witness

one more NO!

Because Jesus didn't stand in the gap, refuse to strike, love the other, impale on a cross

so we could sit here in a backed-up reservoir of “God's provision”

while billions suffer in a dried out desert below

begging for the scraps that fall off of our table.

[Face contorted. Sob into my mat. Choking on it]

I want.

To crack.
This dam.

I would die for that.

And when I set my hand to that plow

I never, ever thought of turning back.

But an outcome I never considered

What if

[Sobs again. Mouth open. Shoulders wracked. Get my head under the mat. Dont wake them up. Don't let them hear.]

What if I got here

stood in front of the machete

and its wielder, the true enemy, just smiled and passed me by

What if I didn't die?

and they still did.

The father. The uncle. The teenager. The neighbor. The baby.

and I did nothing

nothing that made a difference

And they still died.

I know that if I am faithful for ten years, it will make a difference

in a life. or a thousand. or ten

but what if I die tomorrow?

what if I don't get ten years?

do I know how long I have to watch them die around me?

my little crack in the dam

dries up before the water can even reach the ground

and no one looks to make any more cracks

This is reality

we are here

We are here.

God is Faithful.

We are here.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.

I might die tomorrow

and I know that's not the worst thing that can happen

because I already see worse now

The text read “baby died”

And there was nothing I could have done

nothing I could do

so tonight I cry

Four news stories that make me sad

I was away for a few weeks, and am only slowly getting reintegrated back into life here.  So instead of talking about my community, I'm going to briefly mention four news articles that made me really sad this past few weeks:

Family-friendly tours of Bangkok's sex bars, with CNN doing their advertising for free

This article was written with a glibness that made me ill.

At another bar, both sons were lured on stage where two nude women spanked them with paddles made of harmless sponge, while the crowded bar's patrons roared with delight.
"My sons have absolutely come of age," marveled the 52-year-old father, Phil. "Because they're slightly reserved, the guys. Anything like this, they're not used to. They've grown up.

Leaked files show the Iraq War was even worse than we thought

There were already more than enough reasons to be against the Iraq War, including, of course, the lies that were told to lead us into it, the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed, the millions of people whose lives were traumatized, the enormous cost in broken lives to our own families, and the terrible state that the country was left in.  So it's just yet another depressing moment to find out that the US government was logging tens of thousands of civilian casualties while publicly claiming that they had no such logs.  The leaks also reveal that the government routinely ignored reports of rape, torture, abuse and murder, instead just passing the reports onto the very units responsible for the abuse.  In response to the report, the Pentagon only said that the leaks are terrible because they might give away US military tactics.  And then there's this:

The logs also illustrate the readiness of US forces to unleash lethal force. In one chilling incident they detail how an Apache helicopter gunship gunned down two men in February 2007.
The suspected insurgents had been trying to surrender but a lawyer back at base told the pilots: "You cannot surrender to an aircraft." The Apache, callsign Crazyhorse 18, was the same unit and helicopter based at Camp Taji outside Baghdad that later that year, in July, mistakenly killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children in the streets of Baghdad.

And another thing about that war

It looks like the mercenaries (I mean, "heavily armed civilian contractors who shoot people") we hired for that same war were more out of control than was ever let on to the public.

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

May God avenge their blood...but just case he doesn't, we already have

And, because the world constantly forgets how horribly war always goes for everyone involved, it looks quite possible that another one is about to start.  Three Jewish youths are tragically murdered, so a Muslim youth is gruesomely tortured and murdered in response, and the violence appears to continue to escalate.  Netanyahu, taking every opportunity to villainize and dehumanize the other side, claims:

"They sanctify death, we sanctify life.  They sanctify cruelty, and we mercy and compassion. That is the secret of our strength."

As he said that, hundreds of Palestinians were being arrested, 12 had been killed, Israeli soldiers had been filmed viciously beating Palestinian youth, and dozens of homes and businesses had been destroyed (this is in addition to the 25 Palestinians killed and hundreds injured in the partially related fighting in Gaza).  This is a repeat of the pattern that has existed since 2006, where 10-20 Palestinians are killed for every Israeli who is killed.  And, of course, Palestinian terror groups have been firing rockets as Israel in response.  Can neither side see that their violence only leads to more violence?  Or are they actually looking for violence, and are glad when their enemies respond just the way they want them too?


May the God of Peace turn our hearts to the peace that his son preached, and lead us to a different way of living in this world.

Don't hit

I looked outside to see my 13-year-old neighbor beating on his 9-year-old sister, hitting her as hard as he could. I got upset at him, saying, “Don't hit! Stop hitting her, ever!” with a stern expression on my face.

“Don't hit?” he repeating quizzically with a half-grin. He was completely confused. I might as well have been saying, “Don't eat.” I turned and saw his mother behind me, who I had not realized was there. She looked just as confused.

I understand why. The mother is always hitting the children. The oldest son is always hitting his other siblings. The other children are always hitting each other. Violence is ingrained into them. The oldest boy even seems to take joy in it. When he's hitting one of his little sisters I get so mad I want to smack him across the face.

Wait.

Violence is ingrained into us.

I don't have to study sociology to understand why there is so much violence here. I can view the roots within my own heart. I can read it in the Bible from Genesis 3:5-8 to James 4:1-2. In case we think we come from a more civilized time, remember that the last century saw more people die in war than all previous centuries combined. In America we re-elected a president who makes up a list each week of people he wants to kill and before that a president who seemed to be listing countries he wanted to eliminate. Look at General Sisi's purge and its tens of millions of fans, or Putin's saber-waving and his hundreds of millions of fans. Read the internet comments under every story about an execution, drone attack, police shooting, serious crime, or Trayvon Martin. We are a blood-lustful people. And most of you reading this can understand why, because somewhere in your own heart you feel a capacity for violence as well.

If only it were all so simple!  If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.  And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Jesus could not have been unaware of this the human tendency towards violent solutions. Judas handed him over to the executioner for 30 pieces of silver. Peter chopped the ear off of a man. James and John asked if they could destroy a village. The chief priests and elders spat in his face and beat him while sentencing him to die. The governor and his soldiers mocked him, lashed him, and nailed him to a cross. And the same crowds he spoke of love to shouted “crucify him!”

If Jesus was truly human, he may even have known the potential for this angry bloodlust in his own heart.

Yet he knew a way out.

The key was his recognition of the true enemy.

In Matthew 4:1-10, Jesus engages in an epic confrontation with the satan. Jesus defends himself not through violence, but through reliance on God. He rejects Satan's ways of false security, public glory, and worldly power (the ways of the world) in favor of meekness and trust in God. He exposed society's need to provide infinite goods for oneself (Matthew 4:3), the need to look amazing in the eyes of others (Matthew 4:5-6), and the need to wield control over others (Matthew 4:8-9). Jesus saw through these things and saw that the satan himself was the true enemy and defeated him. He released himself to fully love others and show them the way to God's kingdom. That way led to the cross, yet also to the resurrection. That way led to suffering, yet also to freedom. That way led away from the ways of the world and to true humanity.

Put aside the need to possess things.

Put aside the need to be praised by others.

Put aside the need to control others.

Love others with your full heart, knowing that the satan is the true enemy, not them.

Ask God to take your bloodlust and your violence away.

A bit at a time, let the Kingdom of God take possession in your heart.

In this, and only this, will we find victory.

And when you've glimpsed enough of this to begin to know what it means for yourself, personally, share what you've glimpsed with others, in love.

Only in this will the beatings ever stop.

Until then, pray for those who are beaten, raped, shot, injected, or bombed every day by those of us who are still learning to let God conquer our hearts. Messiah Jesus be with them.

Something Like Scales (Tom Wuest)

In our blindness, lead us down that road

In our ignorance, lead us down that road

In our violence, hate and indifference

We pray Lord you give us new sight

Let something like scales, fall from our eyes

Something like scales fall from our eyes

Jesus, lead us down that road

Lead us down that road

The Great Divide

I recently attended a talk in the fanciest-looking building in our city.

The speaker was someone I've recently been helping out with a project, and so she had me come up to share a bit. The audience consisted of a few dozen powerful businessmen. (Luckily, I had changed into the best clothes I own right before I came.) A videographer and three photographers rolled film while I spoke. The next day articles about the talk would appear in a dozen newspapers in three languages, with two or three of them mentioning “Mister John”.

After the talk I was pulled aside by half-a-dozen wealthy men in turn, all of whom wanted to ask me questions and exchange contact information. I finally got out of there almost three hours after the meeting began.

While others got into their chauffeured cars, I walked out of the building, crossed one street, ducked under the railroad tracks, and entered my slum, not 5 minutes from where I'd just hobnobbed with the rich and powerful. As I strolled through the alleys I felt like my clothes didn't attach to my body. There was a tangible electricity on my skin, as I thought, “Where was I? And now where am I? And what could all those who I was just talking to know about the lives that are lived right here?”  It felt like I had just escaped back into real life from something less than that.  Later that week I told my friends that it was the moment in the week that I felt the most alive.

America has used multinational corporations, the military, and remarkably unjust trade and aid laws in order to outsource its poverty to other countries where it doesn't have to look at it. But here, the incredibly rich and incredibly poor still live within sight of each other. And yet they feel almost as far apart.   

The most surreal movie experience of my life

A chai-wala delivers drinks to working men.

A teenager cracks jokes with his uncle in an auto shop.

A shirtless boy tries to sell flowers on the streets.

A kid focuses on the embroidery he sets into place.

A ragpicker gets chased away from pieces of trash too close to the VIPs.

The scenes crawled across the screen. The camera lingered on boys trying to help their families (or just themselves) survive in the richest city in India, as wealthy businessmen and private school kids zipped by in the background. The empathy with which the children were depicted was stunning.

Last night I saw “Hawaa Hawaai”, a Bollywood movie about a child laborer from an Indian slum who pursues his dreams while trying to deal with serious illness and his father's death. I went to the movie together with my friend Mohammed...who for most of his life has been a child laborer from an Indian slum pursuing his dreams while trying to deal with serious illness and his father's death.

Neither of us knew what the movie was going to be about when we went to watch it, and we sort of picked it on a whim. Mohammed was treating me to the movie and not only bought my ticket, but insisted on getting me a cold drink.

It was a comfortable, nice movie theater. As I was moved by the film's scene-setting, it took conscious effort to focus on the fact that Mohammed wasn't just any friend laughing at the jokes, but someone who had lived much of it. I don't know what it meant for my experience watching the movie. If the characters in the movie had been portrayed unnaturally or offensively, I'm sure it would have meant something. But considering the compassion and empathy with which the characters were depicted...I was happy to be there with Mohammed, and that was that.

I asked him the next day if he liked the movie, and he said that he did. I asked him what he liked most about the movie. The assumed answer was going to be “the jokes”, since Mohammed had laughed so hard at a number of them. But instead, he answered, “His hard work.”

There's a bit of Bollywood in the movie, but it is very much worth watching.

Those Hindus

My 21-year-old Muslim friend came up to me and told me that he had two interactions from this morning to tell me about. In his words:

“This morning my brother told me that Hindus are bad people. I asked him, 'Who made Hindus?' God did! We are all children of God, so we cannot say that they are bad.”

“Then an aunti told me today, 'Don't eat the poori from the Hindus because they drink alcohol.' [That day was a Hindu festival and some Hindus were distributing free food.] I told her, 'Many Muslims in our basti drink too! Have you ever eaten in my home?' She said, 'Yes, twice.' So I told her, 'Well, I have drunk alcohol twice!'”

Yeast spreads slowly, and the early steps don't look like much. But eventually it permeates the whole dough.

Incentive

This is a working motorized car, made entirely out of recycled materials.

I have an 11-year-old friend in the basti. He's had some incredibly difficult circumstances in his life, including losing his father among many other trials. Perhaps as a result, he has hardly attended school, and can't read at all. But he can put together pieces of trash he finds here and there and make a car that runs!

Okay, it didn't run all that well. But it really did motor itself down the alleyway in our slum!  I was a really smart kid, and I never would have even thought of doing this. He paid a junk dealer 10 rupees (20 cents) to get a toy motor attached to some wheels from a broken and discarded toy car...and proceeded on his own to collect batteries, wires, a switch, a second set of makeshift wheels, and a styrofoam block and then put in all together in a way that the car actually runs. It took him a few months to finally do it after he first got the little motor, but he did it.

If you have any ideas or resources to help Aftab continue to improve upon his cars, he would love to hear them. I started teaching him to read Hindi a few weeks ago, and he's recently been motivated by the promise that if he learned how to read then he'd be able to learn more about making cars. So any material you come up with would help in more than one way. (Don't worry about it being in English – one way or another I'll figure out how to translate the relevant points into Hindi).

Thoughts on Egypt, Part II

In 2011, I gave my thoughts on the crisis of government in Egypt, and how I felt the Coptic community could best respond. I predicted that there would not be a governmental solution, but that the key to everything for the Christian community lay in our own conduct towards others and our obedience to God's call for our lives, most specifically in the love of our enemies and our solidarity with those who suffer at the hands of others. I laid out a few ways in which I felt God's call to His people applied in this case.

Last year, in the midst of horrifying persecution of Muslim radicals by the military government and horrifying persecution of Coptic Christians by the Muslim radicals, I wrote a hypothetical news story detailing what I felt a Christian response would look like in such a bad situation. My fictional story assumed not only consistent brave and sacrificial Christ-like love in action, but a history of such behavior over the decades. That story became one of the most-read things I ever posted. Unfortunately, the fictional nature of the story was missed by some, and the article was posted on twitter and re-tweeted by a number of people as an actual news story. Sadly, the specific actions of love and solidarity, and especially the language used, was not taken up by the church at large, and to this day Egyptians in general still believe that the church stood behind the military during the transition, rather than standing alongside the victims of violence on both sides.

This year we are back to square one. Once again we have a military (some would say fascist) government in total control of all aspects of power, and looking to cement its authority by imprisoning and/or killing all elements of the opposition by the thousands and tens of thousands. (And, for what it's worth, by trampling on all rights to free speech, free press, free assembly, free elections, and fair trials.) Once again we have a large segment of the Muslim population who is violently angry. And once again we have a Coptic population that is largely viewed as siding with the dictator in charge because they believes that violent power, however unjustly wielded, is the only thing that can protect them. It's just like Mubarak was back again, only more so.

As I say, this cannot end well.

As long as this branch of fundamentalist Muslims believe that the solutions to their problems are found in violence, they will bring more violence upon themselves. They die in suicide bombings and riots. They kill others in these bombings and riots. And they ensure that the government response to their violence will be even greater violence; that members of their own community, including thousands that didn't even participate in violence themselves, will be killed or imprisoned by a government that is willing to use the same violent tactics. No matter their rights to elected office or their appeal to the unjust nature of the government rampage, it must be said that a great deal of blame lies within the violent elements of their own movement.

As long as the military/government believes that violence is the means of control, it will continue to ensure a violent response from the population it governs. This government has run over people with their tanks, shot them with their guns, and threatened execution by the hundreds. It is an open secret that Egyptian prisons are warehouses of torture, and that this torture is condoned at the highest levels of government. Not only Muslim radicals, but foreign journalists, democracy activists, and unfortunate young men just pulled off the street have been imprisoned and tortured by a military bent on bloodshed. If the military says, “We can do whatever we want because we have the most power and we use the greatest violence”, then aren't they encouraging their opposition to do all they can to match that violence? As long as the government says that violence is the appropriate tool, then the government will be to blame for all the violence it sees, both the violence it inflicts and the violence inflicted upon it in response.

As long as the Christians of Egypt believe that their salvation lies in those who inflict violence, then they bear responsibility for the violence and bloodshed alongside those who are inflicting it. We are told not to rely on the might of Pharaoh's army, but in the strength of God's promise. We are told that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. We are told to never seek vengeance, to feed and care for our enemies, to turn the other cheek, and to visit those who are in prison. That is our response to a violent world who does not know the saving love of the One who died rather than respond to violence in kind. We are to stand with Jesus, the one who stood against both the violent Roman government AND the violent tendencies of the population who wanted to rebel against that government. We are to love the least, both theirs and ours; to take care of widows and orphans, both theirs and ours; to speak out for those who are not being spoken for, both theirs and ours. As long as we're failing to do those practical acts of love, as long as we're responding to those who hate us with hate-filled words, and as long as we're supporting the violent enemies of our enemies out of fear of man, then we are to blame for the hate and the violence that comes back to us in turn.

I do not believe that this is easy. It goes against the ways of the world. It involves self-sacrifice, and potentially suffering. I only believe it is possible because of what I've seen Christ do in the hearts of those who follow Him.  But in the long run this narrow path will be easier on our souls, and better for our lives, than responding the way the world responds.

We do not know how long this government will stand. Perhaps General Sisi, like Mubarak, will hold the reigns of power for decades. Perhaps, like Morsi, he will fall in a year. But what we do know is that he will not stand forever. And what happens when he does fall, and in all the time before then, depends partially on us. How can we blame those who do not know our Messiah, when we know him and yet act as we do?

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who persecute you, and pray for those who spitefully use you.

If your enemy hungers, feed him; if he thirsts, give him a drink

Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress,and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Not returning evil for evil, or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary blessing.

When the people of Egypt choose their next government (whether that choice is made at a ballot box or at the point of a gun), will they know the Copts as those who love them? Will they know the Copts as those who stood with them in their time of suffering? Will they know the Coptic Church as the ones who fought for their fair trials in the courts, who supported their women and children when the men were killed or imprisoned or disappeared, who provided sanctuary for them when they were being unjustly hunted down, who loved them even when they were not being loved back? Will they know that we have been blessing them? Will they believe that we have been praying for them?

Will they?

Every day counts.  Worldview perceptions do not change overnight.  We need to plant more seeds, and water them abundantly.

Another day in the life

9am: Right before I take off for the day, the resident 5-year-old walks into our room.

“What are you?”, he asks in Hindi/Urdu.

We don't understand the question.

“Are you Muslim or are you Hindu?”, he clarifies.

Ah. We explain that we are Isai, followers of Jesus Messiah

He doesn't understand our attempts to explain. There's no frame of reference for this.

“What are you?”, I ask in reply.

“Hindu,” he states clearly. He's Muslim. He's also bratty. ;)

9:30am: I go to my language lesson. My language helper is in intense pain – today is a worse day than most for his chronic genetic condition. Life is hard enough for people living in the West with this condition. For a young man in the slum? There is little to be had in the way of relief.

10am: Our lesson is interrupted by a neighborhood argument between half-a-dozen households which nearly dissolves into a fistfight. The focus of the argument is the trash in the alleyway and the little gullies that carry wastewater down away from the homes. The argument spills over into domestic disputes in individual households we care a lot about. Rose comes over to talk to the wife and be an ear to listen to her. I work on the husband a little. The bad blood from this incident will spill over into following days among other families in the neighborhood.

11am: Rose heads home, but on the way sees a teenage girl crying on the side of the alley, clearly having been beaten. Rose doesn't know her, but decides to stop and sit and talk with and comfort her. It turns out that her father had passed away (true of so many families we know here), and her mother had done the beating.

While Rose is talking to the girl, a woman comes by and starts berating Rose, saying that she knows what we foreigners come to “really” do here, which in her mind seems to be to expose the problems in the basti, looking only at the negative and reporting it to the media, in order to make India look bad to the world. She goes off for a while about how she's does social work and does not stand by letting these negative things happen, but fights for abused children's rights, calls in the police, etc. Rose tries to thank her and praise her for the work that she does, but isn't able to get a word in. A young local mullah comes by and tries to calm the woman down and tells her that we're not like that at all. Rose thinks that the woman may be the mullah's mom.

11:15am: I start cooking “kerela”, or “bitter gourd” for lunch based off the recipe of a friend in the basti. I once saw someone get kicked off a cooking show for terribly messing up this veggie. My friend's recipe is fantastic.

11:30am: New neighbors move in! A couple from the village are moving into our home, right into the room next to ours, with their six children. We think that our 8' by 9' room is small, but manageable. Their room is the same size, except that they don't really have a window. This will certainly make our day-to-day lives a little more interesting. (Later we find that the kids have never been to school, and the next day we'll begin tutoring the 2 oldest children in literacy.  The daughter is the fastest learner we've ever seen.)

1:00pm: We go off to tutor more people in the literacy program. Rose has been focusing on women and teenage girls who never got to go to school, while I've been working with kids who are going to low-quality schools but haven't learned to read there. It can be a bit of a struggle – sometimes I'm not sure what makes it harder to learn: the complete lack of an education, or exposure to the extreme rote-memorization learning methods of the Indian school system.

2:30pm: Afterwards I head over to another home where I'm tutoring two children. The tutoring goes well, but afterwards there is a big fight among the children, which isn't dealt with well by the household. It's sad and frustrating.

4:00pm: I get multiple calls from the local NGO that provided us with the literacy program, asking for my feedback. They want to deliver the new version of the study materials to me ASAP.

5:00pm: My friend who is taking medication for psychological issues asks me if I will go to the hospital with him tomorrow. He wants a clear word from the doctor about his long-term prognosis. He feels that since the doctor was educated in English (the language of much higher education here), he can explain it to me better than he explains it to my friend in Hindi. I think the real problem is that this doctor sees 20 patients an hour on his consultation days, and doesn't feel like he has much time to explain anything to anyone. But I agree to go.

5:30pm: We finally get home to rest for a little bit. I work on my language study.

6:30pm: We get a call from our friends across town...who are at the entrance to our basti waiting for us to meet them! We totally forgot that we were supposed to host them for dinner tonight. We don't have enough leftovers, so the husband and I go out to pick up some street food, kababs, the local specialty.

7:15pm: Just as we're settling down, I get another call from the NGO. They have 50 copies of the literacy manuals ready for us, and the driver needs directions to find our place. I go out to meet him on the road and eventually get the materials from him.

9:00pm: We bid our friends farewell, and get ourselves ready for sleep. Yet again, it's been a loooong day.

Scenes from the city in threes

Today I'm just posting some images I like from our city, in thematic sets of three.

For starters, India has the most environmentally friendly schoolbuses in the world.  Dudes have to work really, really hard though.

Not that they're the only ones who have to work hard.  You should have seen the scene seconds before this picture when one of the guys crossed from one vertical beam to the next:

And she's amazing with the bricks:

It's not unusual to see security guards with ancient-looking guns.  But this is the only one I've seen with a bayonet attached!  Trying to imagine him using that against a burglar is pretty gross.

It doesn't really get that cold here, but people worry about their goats.  The ones wearing actual sweaters are the best, but this little guy just get a burlap sack.

Kids posing with a water buffalo that I had just made a little video with.

A peaceful end to a difficult life.

Beautiful sunset on the outskirts of the city.

Morning...somewhere.  I don't remember where I took this picture.

Dawn in our basti.

A Shia mosque.

A Hindu temple in the middle of the river.

Catholic cathedral right before Christmas.

Her enthusiasm with the beating stick is admirable, but her turning and reaction speed leave something to be desired..

When you only have one swing in your playground, you make the most of it.

The kid in the water just did a backflip off that water buffalo.

Finally, just a few of the many amazing wild animals I've seen here.

The Good News

In December, so many bad things were happening that it felt impossible for me to share.

Strangely, now that fewer "bad" things are happening, it seems equally hard to come up with much to share.  World events and social trends, of course, continue to concern me.  But as far as daily life goes, in the stage we're at right now most of life is learning Hindi, visiting people, trying to figure out how to live life to the fullest in a slum one day at a time.  When nothing bad is happening, there's not always a ton to talk about.

So instead, I want to try out a draft of what I see as the "Good News".

I'm not trying to repeat "what I think Jesus was saying in 30 A.D."  Jesus was the Messiah, speaking to the Jewish people, and said a lot of very specific things to a specific group of people at a specific time in history.  But I do believe that when Jesus announced the Good News of the coming of the Kingdom of God, that he made clear it was a Kingdom for everyone.  This is what I believe the Good News is to us:


1) God is our creator, who created us for this world and desires both the good of the world and our own good within it. Our lives are best lived when we're living in sync with God.

2) The primary concerns of society - wealth, power, security in things, revenge against enemies - are the opposite of what our hearts need. These desires will not bring us peace with ourselves, our neighbors, or with God. God's ways, not the ways of society, have the ultimate authority.

3) God has shown us His way subversively, not through domination or force but through Jesus, a Son who in bringing God to Earth chose service and humility rather than power and violence. In Jesus's life, death, and resurrection, he transformed the way to the Father and unveiled God's true character. This unveiling gives us the chance to choose what kind of life we're going to accept, the Way of the Christ-followers or the way of the society-followers. We believe that Christ's Way is open to everyone.

4) The center of this new Way is that we replace our self-seeking fears (which cause us to lust after wealth or power, to chase security or revenge, and then call it "normal" because everyone around us is doing it) with other-focused love. We are to "love God" and "love our neighbors as ourselves". There is a special emphasis on loving those who are most in need of love - the weak, the hated, the marginalized.

5) Being a part of the Kingdom of God, choosing his ways over the ways of the world, trying to embody a new community of love, means going counterculture. That is difficult. But Jesus has done it first. If we take up the cross and follow him, through the difficulty we will find a better way to live for us and the people around us. As we discover this new life, we have both a responsibility and a desire to share with others what we've found.

6) The primary manner in which God's ways and God's love are shared are via community. It is true that we are called to give even to those we don't know, to love and serve even those whom we may meet only once. But the most difficult and most rewarding expression of God's ultimate desire for our lives is expressed in the daily acts of reciprocal love and service that are found in a community of Christ-followers. In the place in which we plant ourselves, we are called to continuously grow in true humility and non-judgement, true simplicity, true service, and true unity. We are to holistically express God's love in every aspect of our lives, keeping nothing in the dark but opening up even our weaknesses and faults and shortcomings in vulnerability so that God can overcome them. And these communities, in their love and service and unity, are to be cities on a hill showing God's love to the rest of the world, and leading them to his Kingdom here in this age.

7) We live in hope of a future age to come, of a world of justice where all wrongs are righted, all pain is relieved, all truth is known, and all love is possible. We believe that Christ will bring this world, his Kingdom in full, and that we will live in it in glory. Every step we take to grow closer to Him and to others and to love more fully in this age lets us know that much more what we have to hope for in the age to come.



Obviously, this is the train of thought that is governing my life, but I just thought about putting it into words this morning.  Let me know what you think and whether there's anything here that might be out of line with what I really believe, or what I really should believe.