I have often thought about what to share from these travels. I realize that most of what we do would not appeal to people back home.  Much of it is not adventurous or interesting. We spend a lot of time doing what we call “hurry up and wait.” This old army phrase perfectly describes most of our travel time. There are entire days spent in airports, or on planes, or in bone-jarring jeeps, which quickly causes one to re-evaluate the allure of international travel. We have traveled some of the roughest roads you could ever imagine. Our drivers seem to take delight in showing us just how close they can get to everything before they dodge. This routine takes up about ninety percent of our time.

    Another part of this “ninety percent” is spent in a tug-of-war with those who want our money, whether it is a driver, a porter, a customs agent, or a false brother who is trying to take advantage of us. Hindus stop us along the road and demand money to help build or repair a small shrine or temple. (And I thought the way some Christians take up offerings was bad.) To us, a rupee (about 30 cents) does not go very far, but it is surprising how they can prevent a small riot or a long delay by a zealous mob.  It's best just to pay it and go. Once we were stopped by a group of excited Indian men who were shouting, "Dead body, dead body." They pointed to the corpse of an old woman alongside the road. They were not promoting another tourist attraction, but were demanding money to help bury her, or at least that is what they claimed.

   A lot of our time is spent in the struggle to communicate. Even when English is spoken it often needs to be interpreted and, even then, it is wise to go over it from another angle to be sure everything is understood. By now our team could probably beat anybody at games like charades and Pictionary. It takes time to try to discern what is really going on inside of people or in the circumstances that you are forced to work with. Nothing is as it seems. In the Ukraine, they may be speaking loudly, with aggressive outbursts and gestures for a few minutes. You find out later they were saying nice things to each other. In India, you may be threatened by a man who does it with the nicest smile.

    Most of the time you are ministering to someone's need, whether it is through teaching, praying for the sick, or bandaging a finger that has just been split with an ax. Once a man walked some distance to our house to ask if we had any eyeglass frames that might fit his lenses. (Interestingly enough, he had lenses with no frames, and we had a spare set of frames with no lenses that had been given to us.)  

THE LAST TEN PERCENT 

     What makes up the last ten percent? This is the part that you can never forget, the part that you think about while recovering from jet lag.  It is the part that makes you want to go back again and again. It may be the smallest part, but without question it is the best part. It is found in the level of fellowship you find with your brethren, which can only be reached by going through much of the other ninety percent together. The team of brothers God assembles in these countries in order to accomplish His purposes is the best part. You may be complete strangers when you begin working together, but a bond soon forms that becomes amazingly strong.

    There are `ten percent moments’ that are wonderful. You cannot make them happen and they occur on simple occasions. One might occur while you are sitting on a grass mat in someone’s garden, under a harvest moon, eating curried rice and drinking spicy tea.  As you look across the mat, you see everyone eating and laughing, or re-telling the highlights of the meeting you just had at church. Suddenly, you find yourself sitting back with a rare sense of delight warming your breast as you realize that this is a moment is what makes it all worthwhile. You reach a level of fellowship that transcends all the language barriers, one that doesn't need to be interpreted because it is the language of the brotherhood of Christ.

    This last ten percent is what makes the first ninety percent worthwhile. On this trip, I was reminded of what Jesus said about our being  “seasoning in the world” -- Christians are the only thing that makes this world tolerable. I have found this to be true wherever I have been. It is only our brethren, and our fellowship with them, that makes it worthwhile going anywhere.   

THE WHITE HOUSE

     Just before leaving India on our previous trip, Pastor Gabriel asked if he could add a couple of rooms onto his house for our team to stay in the next time we came. This would be more comfortable for everyone and would ensure that we would be centrally located in the jungle. He said that it would not cost much and that he had some material already on hand. Their small houses are made of brick and mud, covered with orange clay. Most of the roofs are either covered with curved clay tiles or bamboo thatch that forces you to bow to enter a small door in the wall. Once you straighten up inside, your head is almost touching the bamboo ceiling. There is a noticeable absence of furniture and the dark concrete floors are smoothed by hand.  Usually, there would be no windows or maybe just a small port hole without glass. The rooms are very dark and are only lit at night, with coal-oil lamps.  This is what I expected to be staying in and told my team to expect the same.

    For this trip, I took two pastors from New York with me. One was Pastor Ron, who had been to the Southern part of India many years before. The other was Pastor Gene, who was an avid camper and hiker and was excited about being in India for the first time. We had spent almost two weeks in the Ukraine before coming to India, so it was a lot of travel to get to our new base called Manga Panga.

    When we arrived in Manga Panga, we were greeted with the most excitement I had ever seen from the natives. They were so delighted to see us. Soon we were engulfed by an enthusiastic crowd who were singing and shouting, drums and flutes were being played, children were dancing, and fresh garlands of forest flowers suddenly appeared. Some of the brothers took our bags and we started moving towards the village. After such a long trip, I was looking forward to resting in our hut that Gabriel had built. I noticed a large white house standing among a row of smaller orange ones, which I had not noticed before. Its white roof gleamed in the sunlight, surrounded by tall mango trees. To my surprise, the line of people ahead of me entered the fenced yard of this house. I then watched our luggage, that was being carried on peoples heads, turn into the same yard. "Could this be our house?" I wondered.  As I got closer, everyone was studying my face to see if I was surprised by what they had waiting for me. I did not disappoint them. I was really shocked!  I would never have expected our own house, much less one so beautiful. They had all worked on it during the past year and now the moment came for us to see it for the first time.

    A ribbon had been tacked across the door. Someone handed me a pair of rusty scissors to cut it, while another brother snapped a picture the moment it was cut. We entered the long porch that faced the street, and then slowly entered each room. They were spacious, with high ceilings and perfectly straight walls, which had been freshly painted.  It had large window openings with wrought-iron bars made into fancy designs. It had hand-hewn wooden doors with gleaming new locks. There were three large bedrooms, a storage room, a dining room, and an Indian-style kitchen with a small clay stove molded on the floor.  Outside in the back yard, we toured a new latrine and a place to bathe, which are unheard-of luxuries in this neck of the woods.  Each room had a large bed, with a thin straw mattress to soften the boards. We each had a chair and a coal-oil lamp. It was wonderful!!

    After a brief tour of our new home, we all went to the church for the formal greetings and to express our gratitude to God for bringing us together again. It was such a moving occasion.  The love we experienced was so refreshing that it washed away all the weariness of the past eight hours of rigorous travel. I felt like we had been adopted into a wonderful family. Later, we learned how Gabriel had decided to build a separate house rather than add on to his. As he started to lay the foundation, another brother came by to visit.  "Why are you building it so small?", he asked, "Build big, because our God is big, and able to provide!" With this, the borders of the foundation were enlarged and so were the borders of his faith.

     They formed each brick by hand, made from the clay that covers the ground everywhere. After each brick is sun-hardened, they are stacked into the shape of a furnace and burned from within. Gabriel had never built this kind of house before, but he said the Lord helped him.  To get the money to hire the carpenter to build the heavy wooden doors and windows, and to pay for the corrugated fiberglass roof, he got permission from his wife and his father-in-law to sell her dowry jewels.  Others came by to help and soon the house was painted, cleaned, and a ribbon was tacked across the door. We noticed a child had written in chalk across the side wall, in barely legible English, "A missionary house."

     The money our team was able to leave Gabriel was sufficient to cover his expenses and re-purchase the dowry if he wants to. We gave the building to the Lord, and Gabriel and his family will live in the house during the year. Our teams will stay there whenever we visit in the future.  

DRUMS ACROSS THE RIVER

      The title of this piece sounds like something from an old Tarzan movie, but for me it was one of the scariest moments I have had in India. We were just returning from visiting a church in a remote jungle village, which was located on the other side of a wide, shallow river. It was a great visit, with many people coming to Christ and God’s power in evidence. After the ministry time, we had a meal and time of fellowship as we watched peacocks wander around the village and picked fresh oranges from the trees for our dessert.

    After we said a lengthy good-bye, we walked back to the river. As we began rolling up our pant legs we heard the beating of drums near our jeep. As our native brethren listened intently, concerned looks on their faces told us we were in some kind of trouble. They told us that pagans were coming to the river to throw in their idols after offering a sacrifice to it. They thought it best to wait until they finished.

    After a short time, the drums stopped and, after much discussion in their tribal tongue, they indicated that we could now cross over, thinking that the idol-worshipers must have decided to leave. As we neared the other side of the river, the drums began again and we could see a large group dancing beside our jeep.  Our Indian brethren were concerned that there might be a confrontation. We were told that the idol worshippers would be very drunk.

    As we stepped up onto the other shore, we saw two men coming towards us covered from head to foot with brightly colored powdered paint. They had tried to pass by and they were included in this ritual the worshippers were involved in. Everyone was covered with paint, dancing to the drums. We were told that they would likely try to cover us with paint, too. I saw the priest with a red bandanna on his head, waving a machete around as he shimmied and shook to the music. A goat was tethered nearby waiting to be sacrificed. You could feel the evil in the air. We began to pray aloud as we walked up towards our jeep, which had also been smeared with paint.

     Our Hindu jeep driver made no attempt to get the vehicle started or to move further away from the idolaters. I began to wonder if we had been set up because he had treated us with much contempt since the day we hired him. He refused to move, pointing to the path, indicating that he was not sure that it was safe to drive on. We kept walking toward the road surrounded by our brethren, who placed themselves between the idol-worshippers, and us who were dancing more wildly as the drums increased in tempo.  

    Finally, the jeep was started and slowly came to pick us up and take us away from the scene. None of us had been painted, except one of the Indian pastors had allowed some paint to be put in his hand, in order to prevent them from covering him completely. For the next few hours, I found it was hard to settle my thoughts. Pastor Ron said that what concerned him the most was what might have happened if the crowd had rushed us. He thought our brothers would be forced to protect us. This had alarming implications, which I did not want to think about. We praised the Lord that we came through it without such a confrontation.   

     In all my previous visits to India, I had not been there during the height of the festival time, which happens each October near the time of the full moon.  We had other encounters with idol worshippers, such as being stopped at night as we made our way back to the airport. A dancing mob of painted worshippers stopped us and demanded money. Our driver was not going to stop, which really made them angry, yet even this did not make me as afraid as the moment when we crossed the river.

    I thought of firing our driver, but by the time we had returned to our base, I began to feel compassion for him. I invited him to join us for tea and gave him my baseball hat. He sat with us and began to tell us how much he had hated us. He resented being assigned by the company whose jeeps we had rented to be our driver. I asked him why. He explained how his older brother had become a believer, and how much he resented it. He said he hated all Christians but did not know much about them until this week when he had been with us. I did not feel the liberty to pray with him at that moment, but I noticed that he treated us better from that time on. On the last day, when we parted company at the airport, he allowed us to pray for him and told us that he wanted to be our driver again when we returned to India. 

 FOOD POISONING 

   A major portion of our time is spent in the homes of strangers, eating (or trying to avoid eating) their food. Our hosts always go to great lengths to feed us their best, but each country thinks of hospitality in terms of abundance. This is hard on our digestive systems. It is funny how your interests and priorities change overseas. We greet each other in the morning asking how each other slept and about the condition of each other’s bowels.

    For me, there is always a tension between a desire to eat something I have never had before, and wanting to stay with what is safe. What is safe usually wins out. This time we learned the hard way that not all the food is safe. One brother was assigned to travel with us into the jungle to be our cook. He did a great job making sure things were prepared in a way that wouldn’t hurt us. In the last village we were in, he ran out of cooking oil and asked if he could borrow some from a nearby home. He smelled it and thought it might be off, but reluctantly used some to cook our chicken. It was tainted and we immediately felt sick.

     Gabriel was the first to reject the meal alongside the road. By nightfall all those who had traveled with us that day had a headache, fever, and those dreaded waves of nausea that well up within you. I had delayed throwing-up until about 2:00 a.m. Then it became inevitable.  If I had known how good and immediate the results would be, I would have done it sooner. Both Ron and Gene were really sick for a couple of days. Although we have eaten some questionable things before, this food poisoning was the first I had experienced on any trip.                     

JESUS CAME ALL THE WAY FROM HEAVEN 

     We agreed to walk in to these remote villages, because a jeep could not get there. We would have to walk about five or six miles each way, which created some concern initially because we are not used to walking that far, especially in the heat. We could tell that everyone else was concerned for us. We did not realize to what extent until we arrived back home on the first day. Our neighbors, even our un-saved neighbors, came out to greet us with joy, admitting that they never thought we would make it. I’m not sure what they expected, but it was clear that they were surprised to see us when we returned each evening.

    In the jungle villages we visited, our message of love had an impact on them even before we opened our mouths. Apparently, they also found it hard to believe that we would be willing to walk to where they were.  No one had ever done that before.  We told them that we only walked a few miles through the jungle, yet Jesus loved us so much that He came all the way from Heaven to earth to walk among us. This was received with an understanding smile and a group of people saying "Hummmm!"

     As we drew close to a village, we were asked to wait in the shade so they could prepare a traditional greeting for us. The drums would start and they would slowly move towards us singing, dancing, and playing a variety of strange instruments. Then, once we were surrounded, there would be an enthusiastic shout.  Timid ladies would step forward to put garlands of beautiful wild flowers around our necks. Once this was done, everyone surged forward with their hands extended, eagerly wanting them to be shaken. The babies would begin to cry when they saw our white skin. This, along with the various homemade noise-makers, would add to the confusion.

     In one village, there was a sudden burst of gunpowder, set off by men whose child-like expressions of surprise always exceeded ours. Another time we were greeted with the blast from a home-made shotgun, which looked like something out of Robinson Crusoe. After the welcome was over, we would settle in for a few hours of singing, teaching, and a time of prayer for the sick. Then we would have a feast together, and an opportunity to take photos. Leaving each village was always difficult for everyone. They would walk together as far down the trail with us as they could before turning back to the regular routine of jungle life.