Off to Narsupor! (Oct. 27)

Well, it’s pretty late here, (12:40) and we leave for Narsupor bright and early for a volleyball tournament so I guess I’ll write more later! Things have been challenging here but also amazingly fun and exciting! We’re counting down the days until the dentist arrives so we can get involved with the dental clinic but until then we’ll hold down the pharmacy and out patient department like champs! God has really been blessing us and I’m sure that’s due to the many prayers from home. Thank you to everyone who’s been following our blog and praying for us, it means the world to us!

Blessings,

J and Z

DIWALI!!!! (Oct. 26)

So here in India the Hindus seem to have a festival every month or so and this month is no exception! We’ve had 3 major Hindu festivals since our arrival 7 weeks ago! The festival that fell on this day is the festival called Diwali. It’s the festival of lights as well as fireworks and firecrackers! This sounded great but experiencing it was what really made it absolutely incredible!

We were playing volleyball like we do every evening here and as the sun set the firecrackers could be heard all over town. Thirty minutes or so after sundown our tiny town of Nuzvid sounded like Baghdad on the night the US started the Iraqi war…

Needless to say Zach and I couldn’t resist the urge to head into town and see what all the firecrackers were about! We started walking into town and almost immediately we knew this was shaping up to be a crazy evening. What people do for Diwali is light candles and put up strings of lights and then the best part, they buy boxes of fireworks and shoot them off in the streets!

Now these fireworks aren’t anything like the pansy fireworks we have in the US… These things have 10 times the bang with a tenth of a fuse! Also, safety is not even thought of. People toss lit firecrackers out in the street regardless of who is walking, driving, or crawling by! We immediately saw it was our responsibility to make sure we didn’t catch a firecracker in the face by watching every side! The streets of Nuzvid were extremely hazy with smoke from all the firecrackers and you couldn’t walk 50 feet without having a firecracker blow up 15 feet away from you!

As we continued through the streets we finally found some shelter at our favorite street food vendor who sells some of the best samosas I’ve had for the price! They cost 5 rupees per samosas, which is about 10 cents. So Zach and I always get 2 or 3! As we sat there under the awning eating the frenzy of fireworks only increased.

We finished eating and heading down the main street. This is where things got a bit more nerve wracking. A guy threw a firecracker into the street not 5 feet in front of me and maybe 8 feet from Zach and it went off. You could feel the shockwave from the explosion and my left ear was immediately ringing! It was pretty crazy but we kept walking and finally decided to head down to one of the icecream shops in town to buy cookies for our trip to Narsupor in the morning.

The shop was closed, but as we turned around to head back to the hospital a family waved us over to their house and asked if we wanted to shoot off some “crackers” with them. Of course we did! They told us in broken English how to light the firecrackers and IMMEDIATELY throw them into the street. There was quite a bit of emphasis on ‘immediately’ so that’s what we did. It was soon apparent why immediately was so important; the firecrackers had the most deceptively short fuses I’ve ever seen! The fuse was over an inch long but burned for only 1 second at the most! It was amazing how loud these things were and sometimes they exploded no more than 5 feet from where you had thrown them! It was so much fun lighting and throwing these things because you really did feel like one little slip up could hurt really badly!

The mother of the house suddenly invited us into the courtyard of the house and made us sit down. She then proceeded to bring out sweet cakes and a sweet noodle and yogurt treat, which we ate with spoons out of metal cups. The cake was “burfi” and the noodle stuff was “simya”. It wasn’t half bad but I didn’t feel like I could have eaten more than she gave us. We chatted with them some more while one of her sons set off more firecrackers in the yard about 10 feet away, that was safe! We then headed back out to the street to intending to leave and head back to the hospital but they handed us more firecrackers to blow off so we stayed a bit longer.

Now several things happened while we were blowing these things off. I threw one into the street but it didn’t go off and we thought it was a dud. It wasn’t though, and about a minute after I threw it a lady was walking by it and it exploded right before she almost stepped on it! She jumped, turned around and began yelling at us. I’m assuming she was swearing at us but she kept walking. It was so funny but I did sympathize with her since almost the same thing had happened to us earlier. Also, whenever one didn’t go off immediately our gracious and crazy hosts would run over and check it and try and light it off by lighting a piece of newspaper on fire and putting it next to the wick. This seemed a bit dangerous to me but hey, like I said before, safety isn’t really thought of here in India.

Another thing that was really crazy was when one of the girls in the family lit a firecracker and didn’t through it fast enough. It ended up exploding 1 to 2 feet from her hand and Zach and I were standing right next to her so of course we felt the whole thing. Thankfully she was fine but we were pretty scared! Also, our ears were now ringing like gongs!

After setting off a few more we said goodbye to our new friends and headed back towards the hospital but we literally had to run from safe spot to safe spot until we got off on a quieter street and even then every once in awhile someone would be lighting off more firecrackers.

We finally made it safely back inside the hospital compound and the safety of our room! It was by far the craziest thing I’ve ever experience with firecrackers and I pretty sure this is my new favorite festival! I think we should celebrate it back in the US just for fun!

Prisons and more impromptu speaking (Oct. 22)

While eating lunch at Enjati’s house Uncle William Moses received a call from the prison ministries coordinator asking if anyone at his house wanted to go help with the prison outreach that afternoon. Since Zach and I were the only one’s under the age of 30 there we agreed to go.

We hopped in the tiny van that the coordinator drove around in and headed to the prison. I would tell you his name but when we asked him his name he told us we couldn’t pronounce it and so we should just call him “uncle”.

Upon arriving at the prison we headed in to see the prison director who we were told was the youngest the prison had ever had. I would say he wasn’t even 30… but the prison seemed to be doing it’s job with the barbed wire and 20 foot high rock walls so hey, no worries here!

We chatted with him for a few minutes before signing in on the register and heading into the prison yard. The walls were from the original prison built by the British back in the time of British control in India. We of course had been asking about the prisoners. We wanted to know what they were in for and how long most of them had been in, etc. We were told that all types of criminals were put in the same prison here. Everything from murder and rape to theft and cheating… I’ll admit that surprised and caught me off guard since that’s not necessarily how I envisioned it being but in we went. The prison was quite nice. The prisoners bathed in the yard in showers that were nicer than the one in our room at the hospital! The prison yard was a medium sized courtyard with the cells built into the outer walls of the courtyard. There were women with babies right in the mix of the rest of the prisoners. It was all organized in a very efficient way but not anything remotely close to the prison I had envisioned in my mind.

They put out chairs for us and all the prisoners sat down on mats in front of us. I counted somewhere around 60 prisoners in total and they all seemed to be eagerly waiting what we had to talk about. The coordinator got up and began leading song service in Telugu which neither Zach nor I am proficient at… About 10 minutes after we had left the hospital the coordinator had asked me to give another impromptu talk for the inmates. Fantastic! I’m getting pretty good at the whole “make something up on the spot” thing! I’m starting to wonder why Zach never gets asked though…

The song service lasted just long enough for me to get my thoughts together and then we had a solo song by one of the inmates. The coordinator told us later that he couldn’t read or write but he loved to sing but he had to sing by himself because he basically made up the words and song as he went since he didn’t know them by heart. He sounded quite good for apparently not knowing what he was doing with the words. It was all in Telugu so Zach and I couldn’t tell the difference.

I got up and gave my talk which was strangely close to the one I gave at midweek prayer and at the churches we visited a few weeks back… It’s nice having different crowds to preach to because you can keep the same sermon!

After the sermon the prisoners wanted Zach and I to pray with them so we prayed with each one individually. It was great so pray with them.

The prisoners had to eat then and then head back to their cells so we left the prison yard and went back to the prison director’s office to have a nice cold Sprite! The prison director wanted to know all about us and why we were in India and such. It’s funny how every person asks the same 3 or 4 questions when we first meet them. “What is your name? Where are you from? Why are you here? and For how long are you here?” Without fail, these questions are asked in rapid succession here in India by almost anyone you meet.

After our chat with the prison director we headed back to the hospital to eat dinner. Then we decided to get a jump-start on laundry! It was a good Sabbath full of surprises and good experiences!

White people after 7 weeks!!! (Oct. 22)

Now I mentioned in the last post that the best part of Sabbath was church… Now normally I wouldn’t be the one to say that but as we sat there between Sabbath School and church 6 Caucasian people walked by and up to the front of the church! Zach and I were both stunned! We didn’t know they were coming and it was definitely a shock after being the only white faces we’d seen since arriving!

It turns out that near here in Ibraham Patnam there was a group of pastors putting on some evangelistic meetings for two weeks. This Sabbath they had been invited to come and put on the church service here in Nuzvid!

It was amazing! The sermon flowed in an organized manner that we hadn’t heard since arriving here and one of the pastors was a very good soprano saxophone player who stayed on pitch the whole time he played!!! I had almost forgotten it was possible! The man who spoke was William Miller, which is ironic because he was speaking on Oct. 22 (Great disappointment thingy in 1844?) and also because as he began introducing himself and telling about his 3 children (2 boys and a girl) I realized that I had been in Argentina with his daughter! The Adventist world shrinks the more I meet people all over the world!

Anyway, it was great to talk to them after the service and make more connections. Pastor Miller’s sister was on the trip and she’s from Wenatchee so there are some more things to connect everything.

The Daily Grind (Oct. 12-25)

Well, not much has happened since we last added to this wonderful little blog we’ve got going here…We’ve really settled into the monotony that is everyday life here in Nuzvid. Don’t get me wrong, everyday has it’s new set of challenges but truthfully there isn’t much to do is this little town so we’re entertaining ourselves as best we can! Two weekends again, (Oct 14-16) we simply stayed in Nuzvid, went to church and enjoyed AY in the afternoon. (We still haven’t gotten used to being in meetings every weekend for a total of 8+ hours from Friday vespers to Sabbath late night prayer meeting) Anyway, we did laundry on Sunday and played some volleyball. It was a pretty dull weekend but a relaxing one at that.

Sunday night our good friend Raj Pitta came by with his wife and asked us if we wanted to go to Ranchi on Wednesday to preach on Sabbath and help with music. We were excited about the whole thing but skeptical since Raj is a planner and not a logistics kinda guy, if ya know what I’m talking about… I love Raj but he has great ideas that rarely seem to become reality. The waiting list for the train tickets was up in the 60’s so it was a slim chance that we would even be able to get tickets, but we tried. A couple days later we found out it wasn’t going to happen but no worries because we hadn’t really gotten our hopes up.

The rest of the week didn’t really have much going on with it. (Oct. 17-21) We did get invited over to the registrar’s, Robert Franklin’s, house for dinner on Wednesday. That was definitely something to look forward to! Wednesday afternoon I (Jeff) also had a great surprise from Dr. Prahbudas… He called around 4:30 and asked if I could give a talk at 7:00 (yup…2.5 hrs ahead of time) at the midweek prayer meeting. I initially told him yes but had forgotten about our dinner plans. I remembered Robert Franklin’s invite about 15 minutes after I told Dr. Prahbudas yes and immediately called him back to explain the situation. He answered and I began to explain that I couldn’t do it but he didn’t even let me finish… All he said was something to the effect of, “Don’t worry, no problem, you can go to Robert Franklin’s after giving your talk.” In dealing with Dr. P I’ve come to understand that to mean, “Don’t worry, what I want you to do is way more important than dinner at Robert Franklin’s…” Basically everything Dr. P does is the most important so this really wasn’t surprising. I ended up giving the same sermon I gave at the three churches we visited a few Sabbaths back so it was all right.

The talk went well and it was actually nice to give it without using a translator since midweek prayer meeting is really only for the nursing students and they all have class in English so I just gave my talk.

Right after the meeting Zach and I rushed over the Franklin’s house thinking we would be late…we weren’t. Mr. Franklin had gone out to get some last minute groceries so we sat and talked to his wife. It was really nice to sit on a couch again!

Mr. Franklin arrived and got right to work making his specialty, “parata”! It’s basically another form of naan or chapatti’s but so much better! He rolled out the dough on an oiled granite slab and then picked them up and slapped them down on the stone again. He oiled his hands between each parata by dipping his fingers in a bowl of oil. After slapping them down he bunched them into little balls by half folding, half rolling them. After that he rolled them back flat and put them on the flat, metal cooking plates on his stove until they were golden brown. The smell was amazing and the paratas came out light and crispy. Right after that Satir, the chaplain here at the hospital, came and so did the Franklin’s niece who is a nursing student and lives with them. She is from Maryland and speaks English with absolutely no Indian accent! It was really nice to speak English without having to listen carefully to what the other person is saying!

We sat down to eat and as expected it was phenomenal! We ate so much food and then sat in the living room and chatted for a bit. We then headed back to the hospital and headed off to bed. Eating at people’s houses here is where all the amazing Indian food is at!

The rest of the week went by without incident. We did however meet a man named George Kaligithi who is the brother-in-law of our good friend William Moses Enjati and also the grandfather of Anisha Sukrutham! He lives in Eugene, OR but is here visiting family. He also happened to be in the hospital due to his diabetes so once he found out Zach and Anisha had gone to UCA together and we had all been at UCA at the same for Anisha’s graduation we were instant family. He invited us over to William Moses’ house for Sabbath lunch so we headed over there after church. Lunch was great but the greatest thing about Sabbath was actually church this week…

New stuff!

There's a bunch of new stuff up now! Enjoy!

Blessings,

J & Z

Suicides and Snakebites (Oct. 12)

Things have moved back to normal this week now that Dussehra is over but you never know what you’re going to encounter in a hospital. We’ve become accustomed to snakebite cases coming into the ER but one thing I won’t get used to are the suicide attempts. This week we’ve had one every day this week with the most traumatic being today. Most of the time the people they bring in have taken some sort of poison ranging from pesticides to household cleaners but today they brought in a guy who tried to hang himself. I needed to get the pharmacy key from the ER so when I headed in there they had just finished in abating him and were using a bag to keep him breathing. Of course he had a neck brace on and looked to be in pretty bad shape. They worked on him until about 5 when they decided he was stable enough to be transported by ambulance to Vijayawada.

It’s really sad to see so many suicide attempts in a city that only has 50,000 people. I’m not sure why there are so many here but the reasons they give are dealing with problems at home, spouse abuse, or even as simple as they got into an argument with their husband or wife. We’ve talked to the doctors and staff about why there are so many here in Nuzvid and they don’t understand it either. Evidently the number of suicide attempts seen here is extremely high and abnormal for the rest of India.

I don’t understand and I don’t think I ever will. The only thing you can do is help them when they come in to the hospital and of course pray. It’s hard not being a doctor and going on rounds and seeing patients who have problems and all you can do is pray for them. That’s much better than nothing though…