my journal

 

Our adventures in india 1974               You will find pictures at the end

To my Indian friends who might read this journal entry. I pray that you are not offended by the things I write. It is not intended to offend. I love you and I like the Indian culture. I am not making fun of the Indian culture. I am only making note of the things that are very different from my own American culture. One is not better than the other. They are only different. I have spoken with Indians who have visited America and found much of what we do as very strange to them. So, please, do not take offense. Becky and I were just kids at the ages of 25 and 23. We had been married less than a year. I was a student at the Sunset School of Preaching. That’s where I met Becky and married July 13th (Friday), 1973. Sunset was taking responsibility of the school of preaching in Madras, India, and wanted students who were willing to travel there for an evaluation of the Indian preachers who had been trained by the Madras school. So, we went. It was summer and it was very hot. I can remember getting off of the airplane and having my senses assailed by the terrible smell in the air. It was a smell we soon grew accustom to because you couldn’t escape it. We first landed in New Deli (Northern India). We went to the YMCA and stayed the day there. We were exhausted from the trip. We slept hard and fast. The next day we boarded an airplane for Madras (Southern India). When we arrived at the city of Madras, it was a true culture shock. Thousands of people milling around. We had to be careful where we stepped because of the feces on the sidewalks. Not so much from animals, but from people! When a child needed to relieve himself, he simply dropped his drawers and squatted down and did so, right on the sidewalk! That explained the smell. We didn’t see any public bathrooms except in hotels and restaurants. When we went into the rural areas, we saw the adults simply step off the side of the road and do the same as we had seen the children do in the city—men and women would do their duty publicly! We had to remind ourselves not to notice. In their culture that was private. This became clear to me when we were waiting to board a train at the station in Madras. There were thousands of people milling around. We sat on our suitcases and watched the people. I noticed a group of about six, or seven women walking together. I noticed them because they all had shaved heads and a splash of yellow paint on their foreheads—they were Hindus and had offered their hair to their god. I watched as they all were visiting with each other and walking toward a large water fountain in the middle of the station. When they arrived to the fountain, they all lowered the top portion of their saris and began to bathe in the fountain. I couldn’t believe all of them were bare breasted right in the middle of a train station with thousands of people walking by them. I looked around to see how others were reacting to it—they weren’t! No one noticed them at all! Then one of the ladies saw me looking at them. She said something to the other women and they all quickly covered themselves. I was amazed. I was the only person in thousands who had noticed them. I remembered reading, in my Cultural Anthropology class at Sunset, that in cultures where real privacy is not possible because of over-crowding, certain things WERE private in spite of the fact that it was done in the open. NO ONE NOTICED! No one noticed the bare breasted women bathing in the train station fountain, and no one noticed when someone needed to relieve themselves in public. No one but us Americans, of course. Over time we learned to allow them their privacy. Becky and I went with a team of people from Sunset. We were all scattered about in various parts of India. Becky and I teamed up with another couple about our age named Jene and Marilyn Buckaloo. We were assigned a village about 100 miles from Madras, called Arkonam. It was a town with unpaved streets to which the village was attached. We acquired a hotel room in town. The village was a village of untouchables just across the train tracks. What that means is it was a mud-hut village. They were on the lowest rung of the ladder in their caste system. The caste system of India was so strange to me. It was based, some-what, on their religious ideas of re-incarnation. A person would come back based upon their deeds of their previous life. If a person was born into a family of untouchables, it was because he deserved it from his past life. Thus, one could never move up the ladder. He was doomed to remain in poverty until he died. Hopefully his next life would be better—so they thought. Many of the people we met in this mud-hut village had college degrees. Some had Masters and some even had PhDs. That didn’t matter. They could never go above a certain pay scale. We traveled across the train tracks every day to teach classes in the village. Sunset had arranged to have about fifty preachers (who had been trained in the Madras School of Preaching) to travel to Arconam for training. We were to be there for two months. The heat was almost unbearable for us Americans who are used to air-conditioning and ice in our drinks. You couldn’t find anything cold to drink. Even in restaurants, they didn’t serve drinks with ice. That was more than we Americans could handle, so we rented a refrigerator from Madras and had it delivered to our hotel room in Arconam. What an extravagant thing to do. But, I have to admit, it was such a lifesaver. Becky had even brought Kool-Aid with her and was able to make popsicles. What a treat! We would come in from working all day in the heat (in the upper 90’s and even into the 100’s), no air-conditioning anywhere, nothing cold to drink, and have an ice cold popsicle. Our hotel room was simply a bare room with concrete walls and floor. It was about a 40 foot by 20 foot room. It had two wooden cots with thin pads for mattresses. There were bars on the windows and no glass. If we wanted privacy we could close the shutters. There was a small room with a hole in the floor for the toilet. They didn’t use toilet paper so we brought our own—which was constantly stopping up their sewer. The room had a ceiling fan which was our only relief from the heat. Nights were especially difficult. We would have the fan going full blast. Then, in the middle of the night, the electricity would shut off for about two hours. Becky and I would wake up as soon as the fan stopped. We would lay there sweating in the dark until they turned the electricity back on. There was no running water in the room. They provided a bucket of water each day for us to bathe with, drink from, and flush the toilet with. Becky had to boil our water before we could drink it. We brought a Bunsen burning with us for that purpose. We carried Visine eye droppers full of Clorox Bleach for times when we didn’t have access to our boiled water. A drop of bleach would purify a glass of water. It worked well, but you began to smell like a washing machine. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that our rooms had guests waiting for us when we arrived. They were lizards running around on the walls of our room. They were varied in size—from small to two feet long. Needless to say, this was quite unsettling to Becky. But, she got used to them. We even welcomed them since they were good for eating mosquitoes and flies. When we saw the large number of people in the village with Elephantitus (which is spread by mosquitoes) and heard of many dying from sleeping sickness which was spread by a fly, we welcomed our guests. We even gave them names and tried to see them as pets. I have to say, at this point, something about Becky. She has to be the strongest woman I’ve ever known. In India, we lived in very primitive circumstances (compared to American). She had to do a lot of work--boiling water, washing our clothes by hand. She had to live with lizards, bugs, and unbearable heat, just to mention a few things. She faced everything without complaining and with a smile. I saw grown men get off the airplane one day and leave on the plane just a few day later because they couldn’t handle what they saw and experienced. Becky faced it and thrived, even if it was on hot Coca-colas and packages of cookies every day. She purchased a sari and dressed like they dress. She taught a ladies’ class each day. She got close to the women. I saw her love on them. I learned what my wife was really made of during that trip to India. She was this gentle woman who was tougher than most men I know. Just stepping outside our hotel room was an adventure. We were well off the tourist tack, and our light skin made us stand out. When we walked down the street you would have thought a parade had come to town. There was always a group of kids mobbing around us with their hands out, seeking a handout. We would also encounter beggars who were truly destitute and in need of help. We would see every kind of disease you usually read about but never see—Elephantitus (which is a particularly horrible looking disease), Leprosy, and deformities of all sorts. I will never forget my first time to touch a leper. I was enjoying a break from class with some of the men of the village. We were sitting by a fire. I don’t know why since it had to have been close to 100 degrees out. I looked up and a man with his family was approaching us. He was with his wife and a couple of kids. They were wearing rags. He was wearing a cloak with a hood and had a staff in his hand. As they walked toward us, he had his hand out and saying something in his native language. I reached in my pocket and found some coins and placed them in his outstretched hand. After they were gone, the men looked concerned, and I asked them what was up. They told me the man I had touched, when I placed the coins in his hand, was a leper. I had touched a leper! My impulse was to stick my hand in the fire for a moment—just enough to burn off the germs. Then I thought better of it. I decided that God is greater than leprosy and the outcome of my act of mercy would be up to Him. It wasn’t until later I learned that leprosy is harder to catch than simply touching someone with the disease, much like aids. When we left our hotel room, the sights, sounds, and smells were, in themselves, an adventure. We might see a man sitting in front of a basket playing a hand-made flute with a cobra raised up rocking back and forth to the music. (this was always frightening to me. Sometimes a cobra would slither out of it’s basket and off into the crowd. The charmer would simply reach out and grab it by its tail and put it back into the basket.) Or some guy with a box of scorpions allowing them to crawl all over him. Maybe the strangest sight I saw was when I was standing on the balcony of our hotel, watching the people down below, when a man came by with his wife and young daughter. His wife was playing a drum. His daughter danced. She had bells around her ankles which made music when she danced. He had a short whip, with which he would whip himself. He had no shirt on and his back was bleeding. They would go from store to store. His wife played the drum, his daughter danced, and he whipped himself. They would stand in front of each store until the owner came out and gave them some money to move on. What a way to earn a living. I guess it could be considered a family-run business. I did come to enjoy walking by restaurants and grocery stores. The smell of the rich Indian spices gave a welcome relief to some of the other smells, which I’ve already alluded to. Before we went to India, I wasn’t particularly fond of the smell of curry. That has changed. I love the smell of curry and all the Indian spices. I also love Indian food. It’s one of my favorite cuisines. Becky and I saw one of the elderly sisters (Lidia, in a picture below), one day, sitting in front of her hut and grinding something on a rock. We asked her what it was. She said he was grinding chili powder. I asked her if she could make some for me. When we left to return to the U.S. she gave us a coffee can full of hand-ground chili powder. When we got home, we tried it. It was almost too hot to use. A very little went a long way. It was hotter than any I have ever had. I like hot stuff. I can usually eat hot peppers straight. I sometimes like to show off by doing so. But the Indian food was too hot. I couldn’t eat it! I have never had such hot spices. I learned to eat with a serving of yogurt. Yogurt would relieve the fire. Becky and I would tell the waiters to put NO spices in our food. It would still be hotter than we liked. We did finally find something we could eat. They had something for breakfast that we liked. It was scrambled eggs and some kind of hamburger meat. It had a nice spice to it. We liked it so much we ate it every day until we left. The day we left we asked what it was, thinking we might like to reproduce it in the States. They finally found someone to tell us in English that it was pig brains and eggs! Needless to say, Becky decided we would NOT reproduce it at home. 

Our hotel in Arkonam

View of the street from our hotel

View of the street from our hotel

View of the street from our hotel

Across the train tracks of the town is The village of Arkonam where we worked

Women at the village well

The Church we worked with in Arkonam

The Bukaloos with Becky and me in front

Becky worked with the ladies of the church.

She was only 23. Aint she perdy.

The ladies of the congregation

Lydia, one of the older members of the congregation

Nagaia, the preacher of the church there.

The women and children at church. The men and women sat separate from one another.

Us, as we are ready to leave for the States. I’m about 20 lbs. lighter.

These children are now grown. I wonder if the church is still there, and if any of these are members of that church.