Orphanage in India Part 4 of 6

Mission Trip to Andhra Pradesh, India
Part 4: Building Churches and Celebrating

By Elizabeth Dewhurst

Well I think it would be fair to say that you haven’t been to a party until you’ve been to a function in India. The entire week here was spent preparing for Saturday’s enormous celebration. But party planning wasn’t the only thing on the agenda. They were more evangelism trips and the good news is that in Marripolasa, the village we visited last Wednesday, they are now eager for a church to be built.

This is something Samuel and Nicky are trying to do in as many places as possible in order to reach this area with the Gospel. But it is no mean feat when you’re surrounded by over 300, mainly Hindu, villages. The first step will be renting a room in the village where Christians will be able to meet. Eventually the plan is to buy some land there, build a church and send one of the Bible college students there to be the pastor.

Eating Birthday Cake

We also had a birthday party on the 14th August when Mary, one of the most outgoing little girls on the campus, turned nine. Birthday parties here are different from what I expected. For starters you never sing ‘Happy Birthday’ just once; I think we sung it seven times to Mary! But this time I was prepared for the birthday girl as she approached me armed with a huge piece of her super sweet cake. And cake is never handed to you with a napkin…you have to bend down so it can be thrust straight from someone’s grubby fist into your mouth. I’ve now mastered smiling whilst eating sickly sweet sponge that I’m not sure I can manage!

Luckily this week we’ve had a few short bursts of rain, although markedly less electricity than ever. The power was off for a day and a half. I expect there would be some fierce protests if anything like that ever happened in England. Samuel said that in some parts of India the villagers would storm the local power station (which at times I felt like doing also.) But here in the south of India, everyone’s pretty chilled out and it’s not uncommon for the power to be off for up to four days whilst a piece of equipment is fixed.

Pray for Rain

Despite the occasional rain, total rainfall so far during this monsoon season has been pitiful. Where we are, in rural Andhra Pradesh, it has been particularly dry and most experts are predicting that unless the monsoon comes soon, there will almost certainly be a famine here next year. If the rain doesn’t come the rice crops will not grow and rice is everyone’s staple diet. As some people have asked me what they can pray for, I think rain is top of the list right now. And the success of recent evangelism trips is very encouraging so it would also be good to pray for the Bible college students as they go out sharing the Gospel with people.

Saturday 15th August was not only the 63rd Indian Independence Day but also the day of Baggesri’s ‘maturation function,’ a peculiar custom which commemorates a girl’s transition to womanhood. Sadly for boys, there is no such celebration for them; but for a girl, the importance of this day will be eclipsed only by her wedding. Baggesri is only 12, and she looked quite bewildered last week amidst the pandemonium caused by her reaching this milestone. By the 15th August she had been sitting down in a room by herself for 11 days, eating nothing but sweets and doing very little of anything, as is the custom.

Making Sweets

The art of throwing a good party here is steeped in tradition and takes days of precise preparation. First on the list was the ceremonial baking of sweets. We had to make sweets to last everyone at the campus for the week and of course keep Baggesri alive for her 11 days of solitude. I stayed up until the wee hours helping Ganesh the cook, his wife and three others he’d roped in to make Indian sweets from scratch. It felt like going back in time as we lit the fire under a huge saucepan late in the evening. My first job was sieving flour, picking out the ants whenever I saw them. It was hard work cracking open coconuts with Ganesh’s machete to drain and chop them. But by 2am we had made hundreds of each of the three different types of sweet. As I find is always the case when baking, the mixture tasted better to me than the finished product and I would happily have drunk the treacle we poured in. But the night was filled with great banter and punctuated with numerous helpings of delicious Indian sweet tea to keep us going.

Ganesh the Cook

I admit I didn’t surface from bed until just before school started at 9am the next day but Ganesh had been up at 5am cooking breakfast for everyone. The man is a legend! He’s always smiling as he makes his countless daily trips to the village for ingredients, chops wood for the fire, keeps the children in order and protects us all from deadly snakes, amongst countless other responsibilities. And on top of all this he spends the majority of his time in a tiny kitchen where the fire is constantly lit for cooking. One minute in there and my eyes are stinging from the smoke. Not to mention that it’s always incredibly hot.

Shopping for the Ceremony

Preparations for the maturation function stepped up a gear every day. I headed out to do some shopping in Vizianagaram with a group of the teachers. I certainly prefer buses here to the auto-rickshaws. Although all 4 of us were crammed into 2 seats, it feels considerably safer. We bought just about every item of fake gold jewellery we could carry for Baggesri to wear at her ceremony. As is customary, I also bought her a new sari as a gift of congratulations. It was gratefully received, then added to the huge pile of gifts and sweets she had already amassed. Whilst waiting for the others, Baggia, the teacher with the best English, and I sampled a few of the delicious Indian street snacks. Then an hour and a half after they had agreed to meet us, the rest of the party turned up.

Time Keeping

In fact, time keeping is not anyone’s strong point, I’ve noticed. Sometimes it amazes me that anything gets done at all considering how laid back everyone is. If someone here says they will be somewhere at 8am, there’s not much point expecting them before midday. In fact it’s not uncommon for people to be days late! A couple of Bible college students who promised to arrive at the campus on Wednesday eventually turned up on Sunday evening. Here people just say things like, “We’ll adjust” or, “Maybe they will come tomorrow.” As someone who’s not exactly renowned for being on time I don’t mind this laid back approach but I can imagine that some people I know would find it infuriating not to have a clue when or even if people will appear!

Independence Celebration

The Bible college students spent all of Thursday erecting the big canopies where the function was to be held and the children had the whole of Friday off school to help prepare and make decorations for the event. There was such an air of excitement about the place which had reached fever pitch by Saturday morning. At 9am, we had the ceremonial hoisting of the Indian flag, which we saluted to commemorate independence from British colonial rule since 1947. Then the festivities began. The programme was a hectic mixture of singing, dancing, competitions, dramatic productions, prize giving and eating. There was a lot of eating. Ganesh excelled himself once again. The feast of curries, biryani, bhajis and sweets was overwhelming. Of course it felt as if I’d been boiled alive the entire day because such an occasion demands traditional Indian dress. And despite being hot, uncomfortable and incredibly impractical, traditional dress for women is a sari. The day was a great success and tremendous fun was had by all. My little class even managed to sing the 2 songs we had learned for the occasion pretty well, if a little out of tune. To my amazement almost all of them recited their verses from the Bible correctly too!

Aspiring to University

There was of course a lot of fuss surrounding Baggesri all day. At 9.30am, Nicky and I were asked to escort her from her room to a special chair beneath the canopy. This huge red throne was where she sat and observed events for most of the morning until the time came to sprinkle her with rice once again. She is now a woman and officially able to get married, even though she’s only 12. Thankfully this will not happen immediately because she is still at the UKG. The plan is that she will first finish her schooling at the campus. Then when she is ready she will hopefully have the opportunity to go to university and get a very good job. She told me she hopes to be a doctor. I truly hope that these children get the opportunity to become what they aspire to be. And it would be nothing short of a miracle when you consider that the circumstances they were born into would deny them basic nutrition, never mind an education or a career. Some may actually even become qualified doctors when all they would have had to look forward to previously would have been a life of manual labour. 

It’s almost impossible to convey the remarkable difference this place is making, not only to the lives of these children but to their local community and this entire district as well. The only way to really comprehend it is to come and see for yourself!