My Adoptive Mom

Reporting from the Delhi airport, on route to home.

I didn’t imagine myself crying as I left Kolkata.

Although it has been a privilege to experience India, I must admit that I have been counting down the days to returning to a world in which I can fully express myself and more easily control certain aspects of my life. I’m not saying such control is a good thing…or even that it truthfully ever exists for any of us, but when I had no control over what I ate, rarely knew where I was going if a taxi driver veered off a main road, and had a lot of trouble telling him that I knew that he was meandering to get more money out of me, the idea of getting up in the morning, making a cup of coffee then wandering through my beautiful little Bloomington (at night!) and hanging with my community sounded awfully, awfully enticing. Plus, I’ve been missing all of you fine people and I longed to sit in Colleen and Will’s living room and shoot the shit with my community about life and God and Will’s hatred of certain soccer teams.

But its not as if I didn’t have a community, or at least a little family in Kolkata. Aside from my beautiful friends Sryia and Laura who opened their lives (and in Sriya’s case, her family) to me, I had a mother in Kolkata who I fell in love with and who took care of me with so much more joy and concern than I could imagine someone giving to someone they’ve only known for a couple of months. Sandhya is my Indian mother. She adopted me from the first week of my trip, making me tea and bringing it to me in the afternoons, preparing me delicious food, and patiently trying to decipher what I meant with my broken Bangla so that we could develop a connection with one another.

She is who I picture sitting in the airport and the reason I find myself crying, despite how excited I am to return to the States, its comforts (yes, I’ll admit I’m excited about the comfort of clean running water and opening my mouth in the shower) and my family and friends.  I can’t help but think about our nearly daily tea time. At some point in the summer, maybe three weeks in, Sandhya started bringing her own tea in the afternoons when she brought mine. She would sit in my room and we would talk over tea about all kinds of things: husbands, her work, her daughter, her fights with her daughter, the importance of education, the best Bengali foods, the festivities during Durga Puja…and then the really personal, really-real stuff. One day, she told me she had previously lost two children in childbirth and that she still thinks about them on their birthdays. I shared Jack’s life with her.

What a gift to bear sorrow with another. What a gift to have learned Bangla so we could share in grief and understanding that night.

This week tea time each day with Sandhya was particularly long. We were trying to get the most out of our time together. As I do with my mama back home, we grew closer over caffeinated beverages and we spent the week talking about how much we were going to miss one another and made plans for future visits so we didn’t have to be sad today.

And like my mama back home, she was always worried about how I was feeling and was excellent at treating her sick kids. When Travis visited, he had some tummy troubles in the middle of the night one evening. His mom always gives him ginger tea when he is feeling ill, but I don’t have access in the house to the kitchen, so I knew I would have to wake up Sandhya at 2am to get some boiled water. I felt terrible waking her up, but all I had to say was that Travis was sick and needed hot water and she shot into action. Then she spent the next few days making him rice and tea and bringing home mishit doyie (sweet yogurt…it sounds like it would make a stomach worse, but somehow it makes it better), and then bossing him around and telling him how to take care of himself…you know, like any good mom.  Just this morning as Travis and I had a final skype session before I left, Sandhya was hanging out in my room.  TJ mentioned that his lungs had been bothering him, and she immediately issued a stream of warnings and commands: go to the doctor and get medicine, you’ve been changing environments and it can make you very sick and if your chest is congested you can get very ill, so go to the doctor today! He tried to explain that he didn’t need to go and she just said, “No! You’ll go”.

Although the house owners I stayed with were astoundingly good to me, and very, very generous, and although they both had purposely hired Sandhya and her older brother so that they could all stay together in the house and not be separated—a more generous consideration than many homeowners might have--Sandhya was markedly different around them. Its entirely possible that they were all just playing out cultural roles and power dynamics that I couldn’t understand, and that they were all totally comfortable with, as an outsider looking in, it seemed like Sandhya sort-of shut down around them. She stood at attention during dinner time when they were there, but with me, she would sit at the table and talk.

But of course, she would never eat with me. She and her family members ate separately upstairs.  I thought that perhaps this practice of seperation is no different from two families in America eating separately, but I don’t think that’s all that is going on. I believe there are some pretty deeply engrained class divisions being played out in the separation of dinner tables. When Travis was visiting we decided it would be fun to eat a meal with Sandhya and her family, and nice to give Sandhya a night off from cooking for us and her family. So we planned to bring some food from a restaurant on an evening when her homeowners were gone.  I bought Sandhya’s favorites: chow mein, chili chicken and prawns from a really tasty Chinese joint.

Sandhya seemed excited about the “secret” dinner at first, but as the day neared, she started to act very nervous about it. Then, when the homeowners changed plans and were still there when Travis and I arrived with lunch, she was very nervous, almost jittery, when we showed up with the food. We whispered in the kitchen and she begged me to bring the food into our room and eat it separately and then bring the food up to them when we were done. In the end, I realized that we were actually asking a lot of Sandhya and her family, and in some ways we were disrespecting lots of cultural norms. For one thing, hospitality is an extremely big deal. There is a lot of shame wrapped up in being inhospitable. If the homeowners had learned that we had a dinner separately from them, they would have thought that we thought they were inhospitable—either to us or to the people that worked for them—and it would have caused conflict between us and the homeowners. I wasn’t too worried about that, although I was nervous too when I saw that they were home. But more importantly, we were asking Sandhya to disrespect her bosses, which could have had really dire consequences for her.  While I don’t at all agree with the class seperations functioning throughout Indian society (or my own), I had irresponsibly put Sandhya in danger, and I realized we just couldn’t shared that meal together if there was any chance at all of the homeowners seeing us.  What might be fun, even self-indulgent, stint in generousity for Travis and I, what a danger to Sandhya and her family’s terms with the homeowners and possibly a threat to her job.  As Travis observed, sharing a table is just to revolutionary of an act.  When you share a meal with someone, you let them into your social world, into your family; and when you eat with them you might even let a little of them (their spit and dirt ) into you. The open table is a revolutionary idea. I, of course, couldn’t help but think of the Eucharist.

So the only food Sandhya and I ever shared together was tea.  But she gave me a lot of food, and not just all the delicious chicken curry, payeesh, dal, okra, chicken stew, or “Italian” chicken she made me. She told me that when a stomach is happy a heart or soul is happy, which is why she likes to cook. Everyday she would ask if my stomach and heart were happy and I would tell her that she made them so. The item I am bringing home with me that I will cherish more than any other is a bag of the tea leaves that Sandhya uses to make tea. There is a very sweet story accompanying her giving it to me.

Over our last tea time, Sandhya was pointing out everything in my room that wasn’t packed yet so that I was sure not to forget it. She pointed out a 10 rupee note that was sitting on the window ceil. I had left it because it was torn and I have learned that most stores or drivers won’t accept torn notes. So I told Sandhya this and she asked if she could have it to try to use it in the market. I felt like a little shit watching her smooth out the note. For me, that note had become garbage but for her 10 rupees (that is a sixth of a dollar) was worth saving and trying out. A few moments later, I gave Sandhya a small gift, hardly enough to repay what our relationship has given me, and in all honesty I should have probably just given her an envelope full of money to help her with the costs associated with her daughter’s education (the only reason I didn’t was that I totally forgot to stop by the ATM on my way home and missed the banks before they closed).  I bought her some nice fabric to make a shalowar kameez top and bottom set. It was pink- her favorite color- and had some nice stitch work, but I could have given her so much more.  I bought Rakesh, her nephew, a new shirt, and I tried to hand it to him, but he wouldn’t take it. He said thank you, but made his mom take it; it struck me that a little 9 year kid, when offered a present, wouldn’t eagerly grab for it. It was almost as if he didn’t think it was right to take it.

When I gave Sandhya her present, she looked at and touched the fabric with such an expression of love. She told me I had paid too much and then she just stared at the fabric and stroked it and then patted my knee.  An hour later she was back from the bazaar bearing gifts of food—the language of love that she speaks in best (because I don’t need any translating maybe?). She had purchased a 100 rupee bag of tea leaves, dried beans and all the spices to make Travis’ favorite bean dish and then she told me the recipe for both.  I know she spent at least 150 rupees on the gift, which is a lot, and I wonder if she used the rupee note she saved from my carelessness. I told her I would make the tea as soon as I got home and think about her all the while.

This morning, the homeowners slept in, but Sandhya got up early and made me an extra big breakfast to fill my tummy up for my long two days of journeying. (I forgot to mention that last night she made me my favorite meal of chicken stew, mangos and ice cream that she purchased from the ice cream vendor across the street from the house—the Kwality Walls, Travis!).  Rakesh and Pinkey also woke up, even though it was their day off from school. Then the whole family, including Sandhya’s brother who carried my very heavy bag full of un-necessities down three flights of stairs, walked me to the car downstairs. I gave Sandhya a big hug and she held me for a long time. Then she walked me to my car, opening the door and then sticking her fingers through the open window so we could touch one more time. Pinkey and Rakesh stood outside the other window waving. This is exactly the scene when a family member leaves their family. It felt like that much love.

I didn’t improve my Bangla enough to do my dissertation research without a translator, which was my goal for going this summer. But as the program went forward, I realized that as long as I could speak and understand enough Bangla to connect with Sandhya, that’s all I really cared about.  But at the same time, Sandhya taught me more than anyone the rarity and privilege of the kind of education I have received. I have had years and years of school at some of the best places, and traveled to India and Bangladesh, and I haven’t really paid for any of it. My parents and various institutions and governmental grants have given me that privileged.  Sandhya didn’t ever get to go to school. She had 6 brothers and sisters and her parents simply couldn’t afford to feed her, so at the age of 7 she left her home and traveled 6 hours away to live and work in Kolkata in middle class homes. She told me that the greatest sorrow in her life (and she has had plenty) is the fact that she didn’t get to go to school and, as a result, cannot do much better than work in the house she is working at. So what do I do with my, basically, unearned privilege? I can’t be drowned in self-indulgent guilt but do something that turns my blessings into blessings for others. I don’t know what that looks like, but I am called to remain open to God’s call to do something with what I’ve been given. That is the knowledge I return home with. Sandhya didn’t get what I have. She doesn’t get to go home to all of the opportunities and freedoms and luxuries I will go home to. And that had lit a fire under me. How do I live to do something good with the things Sandhya should have been given to.

On the flight from Kolkata to Delhi, I cracked open my copy of The Irresistible Revolution to the section in which Shane Claiborne discusses his time in Kolkata at the Sisters of Mercy Mission and the leper community founded by Mother Teresa. He talks about his own adoptive family.  He talks about the love of Christ being available to everyone and about seeing Christ in his adoptive family and them seeing Christ in him, and he says that this happens when we simply love another with God’s love. Sandhya shared Christ with me and I think I shared Christ with her with every cup of tea and every pat on the leg and every head nod.  I hope I can share the love Sandhya has given me with my community, my family, my friends and those I encounter.

And that’s why I’m crying in the Delhi airport.

Postscript:

Thank you all for all of your prayers, support and positive thoughts. I am home safe and healthy and feeling incomparably blessed--thank you, thank you, thank you!

also, I can't stop paying with my right hand, nodding my head and saying "Ha" instead of yes.

I love you,

ashlee

India: A Intensive Course in Love and Marital Counseling

Not every husband will take his longest vacation (since starting work four years ago) in India because his wife has left him to study a language there.  Kolkata is not really designed for the slow pace and relaxation that many may imagine when they hear the word "vacation". Luckily, my husband doesn't really like relaxing, and gets much more life out of intense and chaotic moments than from leisurely and restful days.  Its been ten days since Travis got here and he has already learned a good amount of Bangla, probably seen more of the city than me, has already gotten sick and healed from an illness, and made friends with a good portion of the population of Kolkata.  His energy and enthusiasm for the everyday here are quite astounding, humbling really, and an incredible inspiration. As I fumble around trying to figure out where I am going and worrying about getting sick or lost or hurt or whatever random worry pops into my head, Travis is diving in head-first, and inspiring me to let go of all the junk I try to control...or at least to start to let go.

I will let him tell his own stories (you can find them on his blog travisjeffords.com), but I will share that on Trav's very first full day here, he made friends at an Indian train station, got stuck in a monsoon rainstorm, figured out his way around Gariahat (equivalent to Times Square), and sat and chatted with two Kolkata Police officers who let him take pictures of them (quite a feat since the KP are known for being, well to put it nicely, stand-offish). And that was all before 1PM. Of course he also totally wore himself out and caught a cold, but, man, did he jump in without any hesitation--puttin me to shame. Since he has recovered from his cold, we have been having little excursions everyday, and it has allowed me to see the city in new ways.

Proof that Travis befriended the KP

Its always a gift to see a place or an event through another's eyes and to share the experience of new places with another.  Sometimes it feels like if I can't share something with another, either through photos or with them by my side, that it didn't really happen. There is something about the process of sharing experiences that makes them more real, more deeply felt. This is especially true of sharing life with Travis, who sees all of the little things I had never noticed before and more easily sees beauty than myself: the handiwork of the brick sidewalks, the organized chaos of the metro, the incredible way in which bus helpers manage not to fall as they take people's money, the way moss grows on the side of buildings. It has been such a joy to show him around Kolkata and to see his reaction to the everyday, which at first is totally insane and mind-bogglingly different, but, after some time becomes normal.

Travis-eye-view of the morning commute

And for a lot of reasons, it has been extremely important for our marriage to share this together. First of all, it has offered some brand new challenges that we have had to work through together when we are tired, dehydrated, hungry, and, sometimes, a little sick.  Probably one of the greatest challenges we had to negotiate when TJ got here was, basically, that Travis has taken on an incredibly difficult scenario: to go to a country where he doesn't speak the language, find sometime to do with himself in said country without said language while I am in class every morning, and do it all when you are the kind of person who finds incredible power in connecting with others but can only say "yes" or "no".  Moreover, there was this interesting challenge that I had not foreseen: I know the language. So we would go places and I would just jump in and take over in Bangla and make all the decisions, basically, because I could. There was no negotiating. I had just made a decision in an interaction in Bangla with another person and all Travis could do was hear my explanation of what occurred and what I had decided after the fact. And I would often lose my temper when he asked what the hell was going on because it was such tiring work to translate for him and speak in Bangla. On top of all of that he had to indulge all of my germaphobe neuroses. The first night he was here, I literally told him how to take shower and then bossed him around for the next few days asking him to wash his hands like an annoying mom. So, in brief he was utterly without control. That is alot to ask of someone and its not how marriage is supposed to work. I had to learn to back off, trust him and share with him the process of learning Bangla and translation. Of course because Travis is wonderful he assisted in the process of working through these challenges by learning some Bangla. He knows enough now to  get around ok and luckily for him, people just love chatting him up about how tall he is or how he looks like he is from Germany (?) or how they'd like to go to his country.

I have been really dumbstruck by Travis' courage and enthusiasm, but especially by the way in which his coming here and his approach to life here are a living out of his wedding vows. I mean, the dude got dropped in the middle of a giant Indian city  filled with strangers who cannot speak to him, and he did it, in large part, for me. That's love, y'all.  I was particularly struck by this when we were at a wedding last week.  Our friend Sriya (a fellow student in my Bangla program with her entire extended family living in Kolkata) invited us to her cousin's wedding. So we went to the far south of the city after buying a fancy Indian Punjabi for Travis, and went with Sriya's wonderful family to a stranger's wedding. Bengali weddings are totally insane. There are a billion people (none of whom we know) in a giant hall blasting with music and filled with food.  I can't really describe the chaos of the event, but at one point Travis got "kidnapped" by some Bengalis who were really excited to meet an American, and was taken to get sweets down the street. As he came back into the wedding hall, speaking his broken Bengali, sweating from the heat in the overcrowded hall and smiling ear to ear as a man dragged him around to introduce him to every stranger in the room, I was struck by the realization that Travis is the kind of partner we are all supposed to have and somehow I tricked him into putting up with me for a long time.

Aside from learning how to face challenges together as a team, our time here together has been good for our marriage because it has challenged us to consider what it means for us to live out our wedding vows. When Trav and I got married, the final words of our vows included vowing to strengthen one another to better be the hands and feet of Christ in the world.  The kind of disparity between rich and poor, and the totally visible poverty that you see the second you step foot outside your room here means that you have to face the call of the Gospel at every step.  When I read Matthew 9 the other day, in which Jesus is running around on his last puffs of energy healing people who are sick or have broken bodies or are even at death's doorstep, I couldn't help but picture Jesus on the streets I walk everyday. There is certainly the kind of need here that the Bible describes. Most certainly TJ and I have learned that we need very little, and that we are astoundingly privileged to have education and medical care and communities that love us and clean water and food and shelter and loving families. The number of people on our Earth with all of these is incredibly small.

For anyone at Travis' pre-India party, that hat should look familiar
That's Rakesh,  Travis' new friend

But the thing is that Jesus doesn't call us to give and to serve out of guilt--out of the guilt of having or the guilt of privilege, which so often hangs over me--but to move past that guilt to love. You give because you love, really love, another person. Its the loving that's hard, not the giving. I personally haven't been able to move past the guilt to the love. But recognizing my failure to love here has helped me to realize that I need to change how I think about service and the Gospel in my everyday--not just here but in my everyday back in the States.

 I was schooled in care-free love in a brief encounter with the Sikh tailor next to my house. This gentleman works all hours, everyday, and has been for years, so much so that he cannot sit up properly any longer because he has been leaning over his sewing for so many years. I had gone by yesterday to find out if he could make me a sari blouse. When he explained that he couldn't, as I stood to leave, he handed me a small piece of fish wrapped in newspaper. I couldn't understand the gesture at first. I thought that maybe he was showing me how little he eats as a way of asking for money. But I quickly realized that he was just offering me his dinner. I couldn't comprehend such care-free and automatic charity. When I see need on the street I calculate so many things: how many people are watching? is it safe to reach into my bag here? did i give enough?... But this man just automatically offered me his food.  I thanked him and told him I wanted him to eat it.  Today as I passed his shop both he and his son greeted me with the warmest smiles and nomoskars (greetings of respect and love). They both acted like I had done something for them, but I hadn't. Quite the opposite.  That little encounter proved not only that giving can be quite easy but that I can be changed and given the sustenance of love by those that, according to economic conditions, have very little.

It has been such a gift and an important, perhaps heart-changing, and marriage-shifting challenge to process all of this with Travis. I hope that everyday we can better see God  and live out love better here and at home because of what we have seen and experienced and because of the people we have met, that we have loved and that have loved us. I feel like I am inconceivably blessed, not only to have what I have, to have experienced what I have experienced, but also to be partnered with someone who loves me so much and who challenges me to love others the same way.

Tomorrow night we are going to hang out with Sriya's cousins, and then Friday we plan to have a secret dinner with Sandhya and the other staff family members in the house. So stay tuned for our next adventures.

Please continue the prayers for health and safety. We miss you and love you and can't wait to love you better!

During a good Saturday walking around old Kolkata

Travis in high spirits at the end of his first day (at the local cafe we eat fried fish and tea at)

Humiliation in Every (Good) Way Possible

Its been a long while since I last updated everyone.

I have settled into life in Kolkata and the frantic attempt to try to fit an entire language into my head in 8 weeks. So for the past three (wow! times flies) weeks I haven't felt like I've had much to share. My days have consisted of waking up, Skyping, furiously drinking tea, catching the bus to school, being shamed at school for the shear number of grammar rules and words I can't remember, stuffing my face with rice and lentils, catching the bus back home, studying for 6 hours, furiously drinking tea, Skyping, sleeping, and then repeating it all over again.  My focus on studying has meant that I haven't made much time to just "be" in the city or truly "see" it.

Of course, the truth is that there is plenty to share about this place--about its beauty and complexity, its demands and the frustration it can cause, about the way it is changing me in big and little ways. I've just neglected to truly stop and notice them. I've been too busy trying to feel comfortable and trying to communicate--two things that go hand in hand.

Here are few things I have seen and experienced but failed to share:
-Long talks over tea with Sandhyadi, my "Indian mom"(not the home-owner but the head "worker" in the home), who cooks the grandest food and gives you sugary tea and hugs when you have a bad headache, and is super good at correcting my Bangla.

She shares with me little bits of her life and I try to speak enough Bangla to tell her about mine.  She left her village and her husband to have her daughter, Pinkey in Kolkata so that she could make better money for her family and so Pinkey could go to better schools growing up. As a consequence, she never sees her husband and she literally works from morning to night.  The other day I was joking around with Pinkey and Rakesh in my bedroom. They were telling me that my floor was much cooler than my bed and I should sleep on the floor with the cat. I jokingly said, "Sleep on the floor! I'm not a cat!" I had never seen Sandhyadi's room that she shares with her daughter. I thought it was upstairs. But as it turns out, it is the empty room just down my hall. I didn't think anyone lived in there because there was literally nothing in it. But I had to wake her up early one morning to open the gate to the house and she and Pinkey were sleeping on the floor with a pillow and a sheet.  I had no idea. The person I care about the most in this house, who literally feeds and clothes me, watches me flit in and out of the house with my bed and my air conditioning and my bottled water and my new little things I buy at stores, literally has nothing but the clothes she washes and dries on the roof. Sometimes I don't know how she looks at me without anger, but she doesn't. She just loves on me and tells me that if I'm happy, she is happy. There's alot to unpack in all of that socially and politically, but basically, our inequality is just not fair.  The fact that I know enough Bangla to speak with her and form a relationship with her will probably be the most important part of this entire trip.  I have no solution to the inequality between us.

-Bus culture: it is chaotic and cramped and you'd better know what you're doing when you get on or off (because the bus doesn't really stop), but in general, the bus culture in Kolkata is pretty wonderful--at least from what I've seen and experienced. If you are a lady and you hop on and there is a man sitting in the "ladies" section, the other riders, and especially the other ladies, will sternly tell the man to get up and insist that you sit there--this doesn't just apply to white folks like myself.  If you are a scared and lost looking foreigner, the bus helpers will take pity on you and come and poke you when your stop is coming up. If you are a scared and lost looking foreigner and you can't seem to find the right bus, a billion different people will go out of their way to tell you which bus to take and then tell the bus helper where you are going. If you are a super cute and super old Indian woman, the bus will actually stop for you to get on or off--the only time an Indian bus really slows down. Oh, and, if there are two dogs having sex in the middle of the road, buses will move out of the way until they have, um, well, finished.  Its the only thing buses move out of the way for, but, its a nice gesture all the same.

-Indian haircuts: I went to a nicer place to get my haircut, because I had seen Tim Felton's video and wasn't ready for such an intense massage experience. I got this really wonderful guy named Raza. He took alot of time cutting each piece and seemed to have a really good time. In the end, he basically chopped off all my hair, and then smothered my head in hair gel and hairspray until it looked alot like a spikey ball. Then he took alot of pictures and everyone in the salon looked on.  I don't think women regularly get my haircut. I couldn't exactly tell if they thought what he was doing was really cool or if they just thought I looked ridiculous, but, maybe it was a bit of both.  Before the haircut I got a pretty sweet head massage while I was getting shampooed. Aside from a few painfully intense moments during the massage, it was totally delightful.

Then....

amidst my own little enjoyable moments on buses and in markets and hair salons, trotting about and feeling enlightened and like I'm "roughing it" to experience the world, there is this moment all around me: a mom and her kids sleeping in the mid-day heat on the street. She gently fans her kids to ensure they don't over heat. A dad and his little boy sleep in the middle of one of the biggest intersections in the city. He has found or purchased some earbud headphones that he shares with his son to help block out some of the sound so they can sleep. I catch a short moment in which he gently strokes his son's forehead. I walk on to school worried about whether I'll get there on time.

India and the people that live here are not for my enjoyment or contemplation or enlightenment or consumption, much like is often depicted in books and movies of foreigners like myself "experiencing India". Everyone living here is a child of God. Some with more money than I will ever have, some with generous hearts, some who have greater need than I'm likely to ever know. But they don't stop existing the moment I stop noticing them or experiencing some great new thing because of them (I think this is how many films and books about India tend to depict it). And in truth, sometimes my mind thinks otherwise. It is easy to make yourself the center of the universe, in large part because it means you don't have to think about what happens to that mom or dad when you walk away and do nothing.

Everyday, I try to maintain that feeling of comfort that I need to feel like I'm not about to totally lose it, and still at the same time, maintain legitimate care and concern for the people all around me. The two seem unbalanceable.  To really recognize the humanity and need of everyone is to be really uncomfortable, to recognize that you don't need the comfort, and that the comfort is what stands in the way of you being with others and being in the world. I am fully conditioned to need comfort so its very hard to let go of the stuff that makes me feel safe-especially when I am here.  The words of Christ to leave behind our stuff and follow are particularly powerful and seem particularly impossible when I'm here.  I feel like all I can do sometimes is recognize how far I have to go before I can be ready to serve...I just ethically rev up and stall out alot here.

But, I'm not doing it alone. Not just because The Holy Spirit walks with me, but, because I got a very important package in the air mail on Thursday:

 He looks pretty good for having traveled for like 4 days to get to me!

I feel so incredibly blessed to have a husband that is willing to fly across the world to be with me.  Already, just three days since his arrival, we have experienced so much together, and have realized so much about our lives and our marriage and our privilege and the difficulty of living the Kingdom.  I will share some of those stories in the next post. But for now, I can say that I hope that with Travis we can better figure out together what to do with what we've been given and have the courage to share it, because we've been given alot, and its not meant for hoarding. So far we have learned that our time here is likely to be full of humiliation--learning humility by recognizing your own foolishness--in language, in culture, in consumption. Its positive humiliation.

On the note of Travis' arrival, I will leave now to spend some time with him. Your prayers for my continued health and for his health and safety while we travel are much appreciated. I also want to share that Pinkey came down with a high fever on Friday. She is going in to the doctor on Monday to check for malaria. Will you hold her and her mom, Sandhya up in your prayers? I will update you on what they find out at the doctor.

We hope you are all doing wonderfully and love you!

All You Can Do is Laugh (and Pray)

Its time for some real, potentially offensive, honesty, and some confessions.

If you are my immediate family or my husband you already know what I am about to confess.  You will have seen me apply hand sanitizer an exorbitant amount of times in day; you will have seen me worry that the slightly red cut on my finger is absolutely an infection in need of antibiotics; you will have heard me tell you to wash off the tops of your coke cans because one time I read this one article about this one person somewhere who got sick from the bacteria on their coke can; you would have seen me wash the kitchen counter with bleach more than once if any raw meat came within two feet of it; you will have seen me refuse to touch anything in a hospital; and you certainly would have heard me nag you to wash your hands and take your vitamins and get that spot checked out at the doctor because it is most certainly a life-threatening paper cut.

I am a germ-aphobe with a healthy dose of OCD and hypochondria, and a pretty stellar imagination. Now, I don't mean to minimize the seriousness of struggling against OCD or anxiety-related conditions; they can most certainly be crippling. I have my crippling moments. But I won't pretend to understand what it is like to struggle with serious OCD or other anxieties.  All I can know is my own experience. 

Now, I couldn't call my anxiety about germs and sickness crippling, but it does certainly shape how I experience the world, like, for example, a trip to India. I do not have the flexibility, sense of humor and carefree nature that make journeys to new places so fun and so much easier.  I am the kind of person who needs structure, control, and, well, alot of hand sanitizer.  This makes India a challenge. It makes any new place a challenge, really.

A brief interlude in my confession: I want to be careful here. I don't want to paint India, or my experience here, as purely one of contending with the "dirtiness" of the place.   In fact, for this very reason, I would normally hide today's story from most people because I don't want to reinforce denigrating stereotypes of India as dirty or backwards.  The thing is that India, and much of the Global South, has alot more figured out than places like America. They have to not only because of the amount of people living there but also the sheer lack of resources and infrastructure, which go hand in hand with competing with the Global North for those resources and with histories of geo-political oppression.  So, for example, my family is very conscious of the amount of electricity they use and are very careful to turn off things if they leave a room or aren't using it, and they produce much less trash than my American household because they buy most of their things in bulk at the market and have little need for packaging. At the mall they have motion-sensitive escalators that stop if no one is using them, as it saves electricity, and they don't waste a bazillion gallons (or however much I use each year) of perfectly good drinking water for their bath water (it now seems strange that we do this in the States when water is so precious...but that's just my self-righteous rant).  So, when I talk about the challenges of India, I don't mean to say that India is "backwards", I just mean that its  outside of my comfort zone, and full of stuff I can't control and thats the real problem.  That being said, Kolkata does have flooding problems. It also has people with no home and no bathroom but the streets themselves. Moreover, the city struggles to stay on top of waste and sewage disposal.  So, yeah, you're gonna run across some germs.

With my interlude in mind, I will still confess to you that even as I know, as a scholar critical of neo-colonial discourses, that I'm not supposed to be afraid of India or buy into the discourses that paint it as backwards and dirty, in my heart of hearts, if I am being totally honest, India freaks my shit out. I totally love it, and am thankful everyday for this opportunity, but it is WAY outside my comfort zone. Thus, I have totally bought into all those warnings that I roll my eyes at when someone else says them: "India is dirty", "You'll get sick", "Someone I knew knew someone who died there".  Even as I roll my eyes at the things I have been taught not to say, there is always a part of me that feels the same way-- that just wants my sanitized and comfortable and privileged American bedroom, set far away from mosquitoes and monsoon floods. I'm not supposed to say such things as a scholar of South Asia. But I'm not speaking as a scholar. I'm speaking as a broken, foolish, weak and anxious human. 

So as I prepared for my trip, I packed all kinds of products to keep my everyday in India as sanitized as possible: rubbing alcohol, neosporin, aloe vera, hand sanitizer, vitamins, probiotics, and countless antibiotics, tissues, soaps etc. Moreover, my everyday routine involves an admittedly exhausting process of sanitizing my world so I feel like it is "clean" enough to be safe for my existence.

Of course, for me, all of this is about control and faith.

Any time we leave our normal surroundings, we lose the control (or at least the facade of control) that we so carefully construct in our everyday. And for me, India offers plenty of challenges to the way I try to control and sanitize my world.  I will admit that some days it feels overwhelming, and just plain scary.

But here's the thing: I'm not really ever in control. I mean, yes, I can wash my hands and drink bottled water. But the fact is that the world (not just new worlds or "third worlds") offers a whole slew of things I cannot control.  If I, like the AA motto reminds me, recognize that which I can't control and stop trying to control those things, life could be alot more enjoyable. 

Life is always a gift, and one we, for the most, part lack control in.

We are fragile and broken beings and every day we wake up it is a miracle. Beautiful baby Jack reminds me everyday that simply being born is a miracle and not one to take for granted. Every breath is a miracle. Every thing seen, every touch felt, every taste tasted, every person met, every place visited, is an event that some have never enjoyed on this Earth.

But, regrettably, my everyday is filled with my own forgetting to enjoy each moment. Instead, I worry and fret and hurry around trying to keep my life controlled and sanitized, and miss so much beauty in the process.

Kolkata sent me a reminder of this today.  It is monsoon season and today it flooded. Nothing dangerous or tragic like North India is facing. Just a nuisance. But to my germaphobe, control freak self, I looked at that water and all I could see was "skin infection".


But as I watched people travel through the water, I saw a few different approaches to the flood: school children held hands and laughed at the chaos of knee deep water; women in saris piled high on a rickshaw and laughed hysterically as they tried not to fall out; Kolkata police and the neighborhood elders crowd around a tea stall and enjoy a snack as they stand in the water and direct traffic; kids (with absolutely absurdly strong immune systems) swim in the water.  Now I'm not saying everybody was having a great time or that Kolkata loves the floods. On the contrary its a pain in the ass. It takes longer to get home, your clothes and shoes get soaked, and pretty much everyone knows that if you are lucky enough to have a bathroom and soap, you ought to take a bath after your walk home because, yes, you really can get a skin infection.  But there was still so much laughter.

I understood this for myself as I prepared to walk in the water.  We were given a ride home (we are SO pampered at AIIS), but in order to get into the car in the drive way, you had to wade through the water in the courtyard. I will never forget that moment: my feet dry, my legs clean, my world sanitized so carefully, staring at the black water, about to wash away all my work of controlling and sanitizing.  In that moment, you hold back. You stop yourself. You just can't take that first step.  But at some point, there's just no other choice. There's only one way to get home, and that's to get into the water. So you do it. And you do it with everyone else, realizing that there is a whole city of people around you for whom this is just the everyday, and that your little inner crisis is not worth the attention you are giving to it. And in that moment, you are free because there ain't nothing you can do but get into the water. You're gonna get shit on you (literally....there was a diaper floating in the water), but if you have no choice, there is a kind of freedom. You don't have to control anything anymore.

The spaceman in the helmet is the Kolkata Police enjoying a snack at the stall

All you can do is laugh.

Well, laugh, and pray.

This is the other piece of the puzzle.  Its not just giving up control that is hard. Its giving control up to God, in faith.  Its being ok with the fact that God (and not you) is in control. Its having faith in God's faithfulness to you.  That's the really hard part, especially for a worrier like me.

In one of my favorite bible verses (Matthew 6:25-34--the inspirational verse for this blog's name) Jesus reminds his followers that they need not worry about even the basics of life not only because God's got it covered, but also because worrying doesn't do a damn thing except take the fun out of life and distract you.  This is a beautiful and important reminder for me. Its also one more easily said than believed and followed. It is difficult to have faith that God is in control, especially when we are scared; we like to think we are better at controlling it, or at least more immediately at work at doing so.

Although today's little experience was enlightening and, for a moment, freeing,  I still sit in my bedroom with the worry in the back of my mind that I will get sick or hurt or worse while I am far from home; that today's adventure means a skin infection tomorrow.  But if it does, worrying about it won't change a thing, except give me an anxiety attack, and blockade my enjoyment of the world around me and the adventure God is taking me on. 

I don't close this blog with any suggestion that I am somehow "over" being the worrying, anxious control freak (I am rubbing neosporin on my legs as we speak...). I will still pray each day for God's protection. Those fears are deep within me and hard to root out. But for a second today I learned a little about the joy and love that comes with giving up control to God long enough to laugh along with him.

I hope I can better learn to laugh like those school kids wading in the water today. May God's peace and joy be with you and may you believe that "God sends his love and his faithfulness" (Psalm 57:3).

Keep the prayers a comin' y'all. I feel you with me every day and in every step of water.

love and blessings

Retreating to Comfort, Taking off the Kid Gloves, and Seeing God

Note: The next two paragraphs contain a self-righteous diatribe. For the basic "How's she doing" stuff, you can just skip to the third paragraph.

I'm sitting in the only air conditioned room in my house, just after a refreshing shower, drinking a delicious cup of tea and a cold bottle of water, with a meal of my choosing being prepared for me. I am living privilege in India. That's most certainly not to say that I'm not enjoying every gift of privilege--especially the air conditioning and the internet that lets me Skype with Travis and my family. In fact, I must admit that my soft, first-world, pampered self might be finding it quite hard to "deal" if I didn't have these comforts to come home to each day.  Leaving comfort behind is extra hard when you are in a new place (and missing friends and family).  You want to find a rhythm and feel safe and at home. But its funny how much more I need in order to feel safe, at home, and balanced than an average Bengali. And as I, with great thanks, retreat to my air conditioned room and my shower and my cha (tea) and my Skype session with Travis every day, I wonder how do any of you servants, you who leave behind comfort to serve with love, do it?  I can barely go to a fully paid and very cushy language program.  When I am here, I can't help but think about the world's extraordinary servants, and how far I am from their level of love and courage,  not only because Cal is the home of Mother Teresa but also because poverty is less easily hidden here than it is in Bloomington (although it most certainly exists there as well).

Wonderful, wonderful afternoon tea with sweets

I am trying to walk a middle ground in this post because on the one hand I don't want to paint India, as far too many colonialists and missionaries have done, as a dirty, undesirable, backwards place of great need.  Aside from being incredibly culturally rich and filled with some of the nicest people I have ever met, Cal is vibrant, dynamic, often beautiful, and rich with God's presence (I'll return to this). Yet, on the other hand, there is no denying the fact that there is incredible need here, that you can see the results of systemic economic inequality, and that with every step outside, I am reminded of my privilege and challenged to consider what it means to be a Christ follower in Cal--especially when I am here on a cushy language program scholarship. I have been re-reading Shane Claiborne's  Irresistible Revolution, along with the book of Matthew, to keep this challenge alive and well within me--to let it mess me up every day--because the last thing I want is to let the Children of God sleeping on the street fade into the background in my effort to feel better about my surroundings. That's not to say that I am doing anything different as a Christ follower...I'm still stalled out there (see paragraph above and note addiction to comfort). For now I am just toiling with my own inner (possibly self-righteous) metaphysical crisis. And while I worry about getting sick from drinking water or mosquito bites and hand a 10 rupee piece to a woman on the street, someone else is washing someone's wounds and living love instead of theorizing it from the air conditioning. I can't wait for Travis to get here so we can let this screw us up together (from the air conditioning).

A family celebrating jamay shosti outside my home

A week ago it seemed impossible that I would ever feel comfortable in Cal because it is just so, so massive and new. After orientation on the first day of class, I learned that I needed to figure out the bus system to get to and from class each day. I'm the kind of girl who will avoid public transport as long as possible because I am so afraid of getting lost in a city riding on a bus full of people who know I am lost. But it was really the best possible scenario for me--a challenge to just jump into the city from the get go. My first two days of riding the bus were pretty hilarious. I rode the wrong bus, got off at the wrong place, got lost in the city (at night), got lost in the neighborhood on the way to class in the morning, got on the wrong bus again, oh, and got on the wrong bus again.  But with every wrong bus and every wrong stop I am slowly figuring out South Cal. 

My bus stop

Moreover, with every misstep, when I have asked a Bengali for help, they all have been extremely helpful. Sometimes on the bus, someone will overhear me tell the bus helper my stop, and they will tell me that they know the stop and will tell me when to get off. I've made alot of hand-drawn maps, and wandered down some main streets and have eventually become much more comfortable with my neighborhood and more appreciative of the kindness of strangers. Slowly, I am becoming able to look and enjoy, instead of searching frantically for street signs, and it feels liberating. If I hadn't been placed in a home so far from school, I know I would have spent the past week simply going from home to school, with no other adventures in between (note earlier stated addiction to comfort).

The street below my home (that's a Hanuman temple in the center of the street)

So Cal is forcing its adventures onto me. In the first few moments of each unexpected event or challenge, I have this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach--the "Oh Shit"--moment, and then in the next breath I am just figuring it out,  mostly because there is no other option, but also because I know God is with me (I feel your prayers for those of you praying--there's no other way to explain the goodness of the past week in the midst of my mini adventures).  And at the end of each adventure, as I return home sweaty, enlightened, humbled and mumbling prayers of thanksgiving for protection and the goodness of helpful strangers under my breath, I have learned a new way of getting around the city, found a new, lovely place to explore, and realized that you really do have to get lost sometimes to figure out where the hell you are.  I have also realized that despite my love-hate relationship with my privilege, when I am lost and scared, I will quickly utilize my American middle-class status and walk into the fancy stores to ask for directions because I know they will help me. Oh Cal! You teach me so much!

Birla Mandir

Ladies outside of the Birla Temple

Park Street Cemetery

After just a week, I have discovered the Park Street cemetery (a creepy but beautiful monument to British colonialism), worshiped at a contemporary Christian church service (with a white hipster worship leader with a haircut that's just as cool as Travis'), discovered the metro, enjoyed time at the famous College Street Coffee House, discovered the best place to get doi phucka (delicious street food), visited a handful of temples, and figured out some important basics like where to buy coffee, water  and toilet paper by my house (its the simple things). I've also figured out how to utilize a Taxi and the Metro (hint: always stare at a map for a long time before the journey, so you know when your Bangla has been mispronounced and you are going in the wrong direction).  I can't say that I did much of any of that on my own in Dhaka (don't worry, mom, I'm being safe), so I am thankful that the kid gloves were removed on the first day.  Of course, I am also keenly aware that I've got some guardian angels looking down on me. 

THE Indian Coffee House

I live in extraordinarily lovely home with a very, very kind, and very relaxed family. Sohag and Abhinandan are just a year older than myself and live in Abhinandan's parent's home (he unfortunately lost his parents already, so they live here alone) with their 19 month old son, Adhi, who is an adorable kid with a real skill for breaking electronic things.  Gayatri works in the home . She cleans and takes care of Adhi. Sandhya is the cook who also lives here with her two kids and cooks incredible food for the family each day.  Although there is obvious inequality between my house parents and Sandhya and Gayatri,  I get the sense that this is Sandhya and Gayatri's home as well--they certainly have control of alot around here. Sohag and Abhinanadan are generous, kind and lovely people. They have given me so much and are constantly checking to make sure I am comfortable. They are even allowing Travis to stay here with me, which is very special, and quite unique. But I don't see them much as I see Gayatri, Sandhya and the kids, so I am definitely becoming closer with them than with my host couple. I get to practice my Bangla with them and they are incredibly patient with me. Because they are "serving" me, it feels really strange not to be able to talk to them to any deep degree, so I have an added reason to learn Bangla. It seems to get better every day, and I hope we can develop a real relationship before the end of the summer. It will be fun and challenging to be Travis' translator for them!

Sandhya, Gayatri, Adhi and Sandhya's son

Sandhya's daughter Pinkey

As a researcher, I am overwhelmed by the richness of the religious landscape around me.  It seems as if there are temples and shrines at every step. There is even a thakurghor (shrine room) in my home, in which food is offered to embodiments of divinity and then returned as prosad (the subject of my dissertation). I've even been offered the home's prosad.  As a researcher, I am overwhelmed by everything there is to learn from this place. For Hindus in Cal, God is all around--on street corners, in little shrine stalls, and in massive temples.  For me, God show's God's face in the warmth and generosity of people around me and in the communities that I see on the streets and in homes, and in the answered prayers as I return safely each day. God is alive here for me as a Christian, and as a scholar it is an incredible thing to see how God is alive for others (and to hold those in a mind-bending tension ).  Cal offers so much to think about, so much to challenge me, so much to teach me, so much to fill me.

At the entrance to the thakurghor

And that's just the first week.  I am so thankful to have experienced and learned all I have so far, and to have seen God in answered prayers, kind strangers, and challenges to love and serve.

Dear friends, I miss you so. Please keep the prayers for safety and health going--as you can tell, they are in need daily for this directionally challenged and worrying gal--and any messages of greeting by email. I will post another update in the next week. I love you and am so thankful for the love you have given to me. I hope one day I will have the courage to share your love--which is God's love--with those around me here.