INDIA'S CHILDREN

Years ago I had read that the apostle Thomas had made India his mission field. Remember Thomas? He was one of the twelve apostles who made it clear that he would not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead until he saw the scars on the nail pierced hands. Doubt nips hard at the heels of belief. That was Thomas’ problem. In John 14, Jesus was speaking of Heaven and said, “You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas, always confused, always doubtful said, “… we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?" We can’t be too hard on Thomas. Even the wisest among us doubt and question and scratch our heads.

Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." This is a crucial moment for Thomas…a choice has to be made…believe that what Christ says is true or that he’s either a diabolical liar or clinically insane.

Time marched on and doubt and unbelief still drummed away at Thomas’ mind and nerves. When Christ was crucified, then flung off his grave clothes three days later, the other apostles came to Thomas and said, “Great news! He’s alive!” Thomas shook his head. That’s the nature of doubt. It’s a head-shaking disease. His reunion with Christ is laid out in John 20. Jesus held out his hands like a magician proving there was nothing up his sleeves.  “Go ahead,” he said.  “Touch them.  They’re real.  Stop doubting and believe.”  And Thomas did.  The last time the apostles were with Jesus he gave them a simple directive—Go into all the world and spread the gospel.  “Go Thomas.  Be brave.  I am with you always.  Remember, I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”  According to ancient records, Thomas traveled farther than any other apostle.  His life reveals that he came to know Christ best through his missing him.  His desire grew stronger and his longing deeper.  He loved and fed the people of India as if feeding God himself and Thomas gave himself for that love, dying at the end of a spear.

I just returned from a 9-day trip to India.  My husband Troy and I went there with members of the group NewSong and representatives from Holt International, one of the oldest (established over 50 years ago) adoption agencies to tour a few of the orphanages they work with there.  In Bangalore we visited an orphanage run by a beautiful, saintly woman named Mary Paul.  She’s the type of person I hope to be like when I grow up.  One night at dinner, Eddie and Terri Carswell sat with Mary Paul and she told them that twenty generations ago her great, great, great (do this twenty times) grandfather met the apostle Thomas and Thomas shared the truth with him.  I doubt I will ever again meet anyone who can trace their faith journey directly back to one of the apostles!  Ancient documents do not describe Thomas as a dynamic orator like the apostle Paul but rather a quiet man who drew people to the gospel of peace through his saintly ways and the message of truth.  Twenty generations later, Mary Paul sees God dressed as abandoned children and shares hope and love with them.

You would expect me to write of the misery of the orphans but that’s impossible to do when writing about the orphanage Mary Paul runs.  The walls are bright, the staff is warm and the children are loved…very loved.  They smile and laugh easily and are quick to wrap their pencil thin arms around you.  A little boy walked up to Troy and I, grinning.  “My name’s Vanej,” he said.  “I’m nine-years-old.”  NewSong sang a couple of songs for the children and then the children sang for us, little Vanej holding one of the two microphones and singing loudly.  Eighteen months earlier Vanej was on an outing with his parents when he was somehow separated from them.  The orphanage has advertised in the papers and on TV and radio looking for his parents.  They have traveled where Vanej said he lived and have put up flyers and talked with people on the streets with no results.  In a country of 1.1 billion people, it’s much like finding a needle in a haystack.  Vanej talked of missing his mother and his sister and it was heartbreaking but he still smiled. 

Little Pria (her name means love) was four-years-old but the size of a pixie.  Her black eyes were saucer wide as we walked toward her bed and her face lit up the room.  I picked her up and realized I’ve purchased a sack of potatoes that weighed more than she did.  Her tiny arm felt disjointed and it was explained that she had brittle bone disease.  Her arm was one of the bones she had broken that hadn’t healed correctly.  But still…she smiled.

We weren’t prepared to see baby Arjun, a 12-month-old infant.  A dog mauled Arjun (it is unclear if that was the reason for his abandonment or if he was mauled at the time of abandonment), leaving him with one eye.  The rest of his face is gone.  He snuggled onto the shoulder of his caregiver and clapped for us, making gurgling sounds…and smiling.  Unbelievable!  He was smiling.   I can only trace that smile back to Mary Paul, believing fully in the trickle down effect.  “These children are the face of God,” her life echoes.  “Take care of them.  Love them.  Bless them.”

In an orphanage in Pune, an eight-year-old with withered legs lay in his crib, his eyes moving from face to face.  He couldn’t speak.  He couldn’t walk.  And although the staff rolls him over throughout the day, the back of his head is flat.  Two days earlier, a boy around nine or ten was delivered to the orphanage.  He sat in the corner of the playground, feeling the ground beneath him.  “He’s blind,” a caregiver told me.  “And he can’t speak.”  They can only assume that his needs were too great for his parents, who were no doubt very poor.  The orphanage took in this little nameless boy and cleaned him up.  They fed him and gave him a bed to sleep in.  Both of these boys are cared for by Roxanna, the orphanage director and her staff whose lives say, “I see you.”

I have visited other foreign countries (our own children are from China and Guatemala) but India is uniquely different.  Two-lane roads are really six-lane roads, chaotic with cars, rickshaws, animals, scooters and motorcycles with three-to-five people riding on them (women sit sidesaddle holding children in their arms). We held our breath a lot and never took our eyes off the windows.  On our one-day of sightseeing, we traveled a distance of 124 miles (but a six-hour drive!) to see the Taj Mahal.  It began to rain as we traveled and the dusty roads turned to thick, muddy soup.  Clusters of people huddled together under tarp roofs, one woman tucked herself beneath a truck while others went about their day getting soaked to the bone.  We saw the poorest of the poor in those 124 miles, passing “shopping areas” that looked like the charred rubble from a bomb explosion and streets piled with garbage…not litter…garbage.

We live next to an 85-acre cattle farm and have never taken one picture but we came away with over 20 pictures of cows walking the streets.  Monkeys ran along the sidewalks and rooftops, pigs rooted through garbage and rats skittered about at night.  It has been estimated that rats eat enough grain to fill boxcars from California to New York each year.  Dogs were everywhere:  running on the sidewalks, napping on the roads, even sleeping in the parking lot and front lawn of the palace where Ghandi was under house arrest.  As we drove to our first slum area, Mary Lee, whose husband Russ is a member of NewSong said, “I read in the on-line material that we were supposed to bring a whistle in case of attack by a rabid dog.”

I said, “Really?  Did you bring a whistle?”

“I did,” Mary said.  “But I can’t find it.”  We howled with laughter.

As we pulled up to the slum a group of three dogs barked outside our vehicle.  Terri looked at the dogs and said, “Should we get out?”

“Don’t worry,” I said.   “We’ve got Mary’s whistle she can’t find.”

We stepped out of the cars and were greeted by several bare-footed children who happily led us through the slum and pointed to their homes with pride. “This is where I live,” they seemed to say, smiling. “Won’t you come in?” There’s really no way to describe the slums. They are not the projects.  We can describe those. The slums are different; a mass of rubble held together by scraps of metal, wood or plastic with dogs, goats, pigs, chickens and donkeys roaming the streets and alleyways.A little boy smiled up at us as he took his bath out of a bucket, another little girl brought a newborn kitten out of her home and held it up to us, beaming, while an old man stood at a corner and held out his hand.We ducked our heads to enter a “home,” asix-by-eight room that housed four people and nothing else…no table, refrigerator, chairs, beds, TV or sofa.But their clothes were clean, their home was organized and their faces were bright. If they needed anything else they weren’t aware of it.The children in that home and several others in that slum area benefited from the educational and nutrition services provided by the nearby orphanage through the sponsorships donations of Holt International. What would happen to those children without those donations?

We follow our desires so easily in this country (if we want a new TV we get one. Who cares if it takes five years to pay it off?) But when our hearts nudge us to be kind or giving or brave we don’t follow at all because surely someone else will step up to the plate. We are a noisy people and that’s part of our problem because God comes to us in such quiet ways that it’s easy to miss him. The homeless man seeking food at a downtown shelter doesn’t cause much of a ruckus and the widow who keeps herself tucked away in her home has never registered on our radar and that orphan across the sea whose name we can’t pronounce isn’t on the news or in the pages of the weekly tabloid so how can we feel responsible for not knowing his plight?

We like to spin things here. We didn’t like the fact that The Little Mermaid didn’t get the prince but rather returned to the sea and dissolved so we spun it so she gets her man and lives happily ever after. We’ll do whatever it takes to deal with the harsh reality of our existence. But the words of Christ still bang away at our hearts—“whatever you do for the least of these, you do unto me” and we realize that not doing anything is doing something and that’s a hard truth to swallow. We can’t spin that, no matter how hard we try. God is here. Among us. Disguised as an 8-year-old orphan with withered legs and a head flat as stone, a year-old infant with half a face and a weathered old man with scarecrow clothes standing in the middle of a slum with outstretched hand. He doesn’t speak but we know what he is saying. “Will you help me? Will you offer me any bread?”

We are here to clothe, to feed, to love, to serve. It took the death of his beloved friend for Thomas to realize that it is through these doors that truth enters. May we all be an open door. For the sake of the least of these.

(Won’t you consider sponsoring an orphan or providing a tax-deductible financial gift today to Holt International as they care for orphans around the world? Visit their website at www.holtinternational.org)