I took a little trip to India.

Well, where to start. I am going to try to cover all 6 weeks.

My Team
There was originally 8 of us from Biola who were on the team. 3 guys and 5 girls. But in the month before the trip one of our guys had to drop out because he felt God leading him elsewhere. So our team was down to 7, but then we got connected to a girl from North Carolina that was planning on going to India at the same time, through the same organization, but alone. We ended up inviting her to join our team. So we had 8 again but it was strange to be on a team with a 3 to 1 girl to guy ratio. By the end of the trip I was more sick of the people on my team than I was of India but that was because we spent every waking moment together for 6 weeks. I think learning to live with the same group of people (mostly girls) for a long period of time was one of the most difficult parts of the trip, but it showed me a huge area in which I need to grow that I didn't fully recognize before.

Journey to India

I had to take a total of 4 flights in order to get to our first ministry location in India. The first flight was from Phoenix to Los Angeles where I had to wait at the LA airport all morning for my next flight and for my team. Our flight was in the afternoon and my team (minus 1) met up at LAX around noon. We boarded a flight from LA to London. This was about a 10 hour flight but somehow we got into London an hour and a half late. This was a problem because we originally had only 2 hours between our connecting flight and so we go into London 30 minutes before our next international flight. We also were suppose to meet up with our final team member (the one from North Carolina) before we got on our flight to London. Well we did our best but we ended up missing the next flight, which was to Mumbai, India. Our other team member got off the flight before it took off because she found out that we didn't make it. However we didn't end up finally meeting up with her until just before our rescheduled flight to Mumbai. This flight was about 10 hours later than the one we missed. My team decided that since we were "stuck" in London we might as well head into the city. So we got train tickets and took the subway into downtown London. We walked around for a few hours and saw some of the famous sights such as Big Ben. We were pretty tired from our 10 hour flight already at this point so we didn't spend as much time in the city as we could have. When we got back to the airport we still had a few hours before our flight so we ended up eating food in the airport and some of us (including me) slept on the floor. Well we eventually got on our flight and met up with our 8th team member (none of us had ever seen her before this point) and spent another 10 hours in an airplane going to Mumbai. We landed in Mumbai and didn't really know what to do next. We had to take another flight to Nagpur, India (in the center of the country). The problem was that we were now in India where English is only a second or third language for everyone. We somehow found out that there was another part of the airport that was for domestic flights but the terminals were a few miles away. We were told we could rent a taxi (apparently there was a free shuttle that we could have taken and did not know about until our trip back home). The taxi between airports turned into one of the biggest nightmares of the trip. The taxis were small and we had all our luggage so we had to take 3 to transport all 8 of us. The problem was that we could not communicate well with the taxi drivers because they knew very little English. All 3 taxis ran into some problems, mine ended up in the wrong terminal and so I had to take another taxi and that taxi driver ripped me off for money because I didn't understand the currency in India yet. Then we had about a 5 hour layover in the domestic airport. We were all exhausted but we made it on to our last flight. This flight was suppose to be about an hour and 15 mins. However when we were scheduled to take off the pilot announced that the airport was experiencing delays and we could not take off, we would have to wait. Luckily this plane had TVs so we watched this Indian comedy that had subtitles. When we were finally allowed to take off we taxied to the runway but once we got there the pilot announced that there was a technical problem with the plane and it was not safe to take off. So we had to taxi back to the terminal and get the plane repaired. Our movie had finished and we got to watch it a second time. After the plane got repaired the pilot announced that the plane was fixed but we had to wait for refueling. So we waited some more. We finally did get to take off about 2 hours or more later than was scheduled. We got to Nagpur much later than we told our hosts but they waited for us nonetheless. They were their with traditional Indian flower leis to give us when we arrived. They packed us and our luggage into a large van and took us to our first location, our organizations main location which was a bible seminary. We pretty much got our luggage to our rooms and went right to sleep because we had gone 2-3 days without much real sleep. We were relieved to finally be at our destination after all the hang-ups of our travel.

The First Week

The adjustments began. Something we began to notice the first few days was that one of our major expectations was not there. We were not busy all the time. I was expecting this trip to be 5 weeks of non-stop busyness like other short(shorter) term trips I had been on to other countries. But Eastern/Indian culture has many differences from the West. One of those being their treatment of guests. We were guests in India. Something we didn't understand until near the end of our trip was the Indians never want to put ANY burden on their guests, that means that they also didn't want us to work very hard. However we learned to work with this and still had some awesome opportunity to serve. But overall the trip did feel much slower and less packed than we expected it to be, though based on how tired we all were by the last week we apparently did more than we thought. That first week we had a great time seeing the seminary campus and meeting students and professors. We would attend their campus chapel service every morning. We even once sat in on a seminary class and talked to the students afterwards. They had a descent sized library and almost every day we would spend our morning and afternoon there helping out with whatever they need (replacing books, etc.). Before dinner we would spend time at the campus Mercy Home. This was a home for children who were either orphans or had parents but their parents could not afford to care for their needs. We had happened to come on a week when all the Mercy Home children who had parents or relatives were off visited them. However there were still a group of about 10-15 girls there and a boy, the son of the warden of the home. This boy, named Jeffin, loved my phone which I was using as my camera with the phone functions turn off. He took a a lot of my pictures on my phone from the first week in India. Every friday night the whole seminary campus fasts and has a special night chapel. At that chapel John, the other guy on our team, was asked to preach. Apparently they liked it because then they asked both John and I to preach on Sunday. I preached at the campus church service on Sunday morning and John went to a small church in the nearby city to preach. It was quite an experience to give my first real sermon to a group of Bible students with a Hindi translator. But I did get to dress like an Indian preacher! A few days before that we got to go into the city and go shopping. All the girls got some traditional Indian female clothing (sarees and salvars) and John and I got Kurtas which are the long shirts that Indians wear and especially Indian preachers tend to wear white ones, which is what I got. I wore this on Sunday morning and every Sunday morning after while in India. After a week, when we were finally starting to get used to living on the campus we packed up everything and got ready to leave for a new destination. We went to the train station and had our first encounter with the crowdedness and dirtiness of India. This time we had an Indian man from the organization who traveled with us. He spoke and understood in English quite well because he had spent 11 years in America. We got on our first train. This train, unlike all the others we would take while in India, was an experience in the "Real" India. This was a bed train. Because the trip was 16 hours long and we began at night it was expected that we sleep. The beds we sat/slept on were stacked 3 high. There were no sheets or pillows just this bed that smelled, was sticky, and obviously had not been cleaned in some time. The train was packed with people and not all of them had tickets, they simply were along for the ride. There was only enough tickets for all the seats/beds so many people would share beds because the train car was overfilled. I ended up talking to this Indian man who was my age for like an hour or more. It was a difficult conversation because he knew very little english but we still managed with patience to get to know each other. He ended up sleeping in my bed with me. Like I said, there was not enough beds for everyone. The other thing about this train was that it did not have A/C and so once that second half of the trip came and the sun came into view it got very hot, and there wasn't much we go do. We just learned to cope with sweating in this nasty, smelly, and hot train. The train was going to New Dehli and it got in late. We had to catch a train from New Delhi to Haldwani which was our next home in India. At the New Dehli train station we met up with the warden of the mercy home at the campus we were heading to. It was a relief to have more than one man with us who was from our organization and knew English. It was difficult with only one with us because if he had to leave to check on something or find something out for us, we were left alone surrounded by crowds of Indian people who we could not communicate with if something happened. Plus it was just hard to be the only white people in a sea of only one race. We had to take taxis between train stations but we they were bigger than the ones in Mumbai and so we only had to take two and we had an Indian native in each taxi with us to tell the driver where to go. We made it to the station for our next train just in time to get on train. This train just had seats and was air conditioned. It was a much more "normal" train experience for us. This train ride was about 6 hours and most of us slept half the way because we were tired from the previous 16 hour hot train adventure. We got into Haldwani that night. This is a city in northern India near the western border of Nepal. We would spend the next 3 weeks at a bible school campus owned by our organization. The owner of this campus picked us up at the train station and we were amazed when we got to the campus. The whole campus was housed in one building. But it was one of the most amazing buildings I have ever seen. The owner named the building the “Dream Palace” and it definitely looked kinda like a palace.

The Second Week

The seminary campus we stayed at during the first week had air conditioning in the rooms. It was a nice escape from the heat of Indian summer, but this second place that we stayed at did not have any A/C. We had to adjust to this and although there were many fans we could use, it was especially hard to sleep because we were not used to sleeping in very hot rooms. After the first week we got used to it, it was only difficult once we adjusted when the power went out. The electricity in India goes out at least once a day for a wide range of time periods. One night the power was out for most of the night and most of the campus put mattresses on the roof at we slept up there because it was much cooler up there without our fans running in the bedrooms.

We woke up our first morning in Haldwani to learn that a VBS had begun at the campus we were staying at. All the children from the Mercy Home as well as many children from the surrounding areas were attending. They had anywhere between 50 and 80 children depending on the day. We didn't know that we would be there during VBS but we quickly scrambled to come up with ideas to help out. We thought of some songs with hand/body motions to teach to the kids (they called them "action songs"). We made up some short skits to tell some bible stories. So this first week was mostly adjusting to living in Haldwani, helping out with the VBS, and getting to know the Mercy Home children by playing with them all afternoon. We really felt the language barrier when we got to Haldwani. At the seminary, most of the Indians we met know English well enough to be understood but in Haldwani the children didn't really know English and even the adults who knew English were difficult to understand. We were both speaking the same language but our communication with everyone in Haldwani was full of misunderstandings and confusion. It was amazing to play for hours with the children even though we could not communicate with words, but it was also really amazing to see how well we connected with the them even though we never really spoke. The children did begin to teach us some Hindi words and we taught them a few english words. I remember that I learned the word for water (pani) early on and then the kids taught me to count to 10 in Hindi. In the afternoons when we would play with the kids we taught them games like red-light/green-light and had fun putting them on our shoulders, etc. That Sunday we attended the Church meeting that was held in the building we were staying at. It was a Pentecostal influenced service and so it took about 3 hours. John preached during the service, with translation of course.

The Third Week

*WARNING this part is slightly graphic

VBS continued through the beginning of the next week, and the second to last day of VBS is when I started to get sick. I have no idea what got me sick but it changed the whole trip for me. That afternoon I began to notice that I felt like I had a slight fever. I spent some time laying down but the fever started to get worse, I heard that one of the girls on my team was sick and throwing up and I assumed I might have gotten whatever she had but I didn't feel nauseous. Then I was sitting with some teammates I started to feel nauseous all of a sudden and I ran to the bathroom to begin the never ending vomiting cycle I experienced that night. That night I puked 12 times, It was quite the experience. I found that if I would lie facing up on my back I would just feel very nauseous but I would not throw up but if I sat up or rolled onto my side it would make me puke. So all night i didn't sleep and went through the cycle of lying on my back till i could not stand feeling nauseous anymore so I would move so that I could puke and get a few minutes of relief even though puking became very painful after my stomach was completely empty. Relief finally came about 4 A.M. when on a whim I decided to drink a glass of Pepsi. As soon as I did this much of my nausea when away and I could be in any position and not puke. I did not throw up once after that glass. I still had a strong fever and still felt a little nauseous if I walked around. But I finally got get a little bit of sleep. The next morning I had some re-hydration drinks that helped and I took some fever medicine which broke my fever. I spend the next couple days mostly in bed resting trying to recover but for the rest of the trip, I still dealt with nausea. It would come on at random times or would show up to make my normal car sickness much worse. It very slowly started to become less frequent. What also happened was that I completely lost my appetite. It wasn't until after I was back in the U.S. for a week that I got it back. It made it the rest of the trip difficult because I couldn't each much (though they fed us well and with amazing food) so I felt really weak. However I was feeling much better by that Saturday so I was asked to preach at a small village church on Sunday. We went to this small Methodist church in the middle of this village. The girls sang some songs and I preached. And that was the end of the third week.

The Forth Week

Starting the next week we began to teach and visit the local location of the Sisters of Charity (the order of Mother Teresa). We split up into groups of 2 and one group each day would stay back at the campus to teach the 1 year program beginning bible students while the rest of the group would go visit the Sisters of Charity. We split up the book of John and each group covered a few chapters in it with the students in three sessions (each session was one hour). I taught on the second day. At the Sisters of Charity we spent time talking to people who lived in the leaper colony that the Sisters ran. All of these people had leprosy at one point and have now been cured but because the deformities are not fixable, they have been cast of out society and this is why they have to live in these colonies. We got to meet and chat with these people. It was an eye-opening experience to say the least. Later in the week we got to visit a home the Sisters also ran that was for mentally ill men. We bought a beach ball and they thought it was the funnest thing that could exist on this earth. Then at lunch time we would feed them because many of them could not even hold a spoon to feed themselves. I fed this little boy a few times who did not have proper control over his arms or legs. On Saturday we went to a city up in the mountains above Haldwani called Nanital. This was a city around a large lake and was very much catered toward tourists. The girls shopped all day and I got annoyed because I hate shopping. But it was sweet to see this city, the temperature was cool up there and it was refreshing. We also got to take boats out onto the lake. That Sunday I was asked to preach again because John was going to go to a tiny village church to preach but the rest of us were going to a large methodist church in the city. I preached in front of a church of over 100 people and definitely felt very nervous but it was fun.

The Fifth Week

On Monday the girls and John went back to Nanital to do some more shopping but I decided to stay back and teach the bible students some more. I taught all three sessions by myself Monday and then Tuesday I taught all three but John helped me with the first one before getting sick himself. The first day I taught an overview of the whole Old Testament, then on Tuesday we taught the students about how to interpret the bible and gave them basic tools how to do this. Then came our last couple days in Haldwani in which we simply had fun with the staff and children with a bitter-sweet attitude knowing we would be leaving soon. The last day we had a special afternoon farewell chapel and all the Mercy Home children were crying, we saw how strongly we had connected with these kids. That night we had a final meal in Haldwani and got to serve food to all the children and eat with them. That night I had the biggest meal I had had since I got sick, it was garlic chicken curry and rice and it was delicious. We packed up our stuff and headed to the train station. Our host and the owner of the Haldwani campus, David, came with us on our journey back to Nagpur. We took an overnight A/C train to New Dehli and arrived in the early morning. From there we got into a large rented van and drove the 4 hours to Agra which is where the Taj Mahal is located. We spent the afternoon at the Taj Mahal. It was surreal to see this world famous building in front of us. After we were done we drove back to New Dehli where we got some hotel rooms. The next day we took a car tour of some parts of Dehli, we visit many of the famous landmarks in the capital of India. That night we took our final train ride back to Nagpur. This was about 14 hours long but we had air conditioning so it was luxurious to us.

Back in Nagpur we met with some other Americans who had arrived in Nagpur while we were in Haldwani. One was a lady who I believe was a school teacher in the States and had come to teach English at the Seminary. She ended up leaving to another part of India soon after we arrived. The other Americans was a lady and three girls who were from Chicago and attended the church of the leader of the organization (our organization's main office was in Chicago). They had come to see the ministry and some of them had Indian backgrounds. It was refreshing to meet and talk to some Americans other than my team for the first time in a 5 weeks. On Sunday neither John nor I preached for once but we got to attend a local church in Nagpur and our host who had traveled with us (David) preached. We got to share a little about our trip with that church's congregation.

The Final Week

The first half of this week we were in Nagpur and then the second half was our trip back to America. The last few days were difficult because we were all so worn out and wanting to go home. Knowing that we would be back to the comforts of home in a few days made it difficult to do anything but daydream. We did some more serving in the campus library and spent some time at the Mercy Home. Our first time in Nagpur most of the children were gone but when we got back they were all there so we got to meet some new kids. They had a farewell chapel for us as well on our last day and we got to meet with a man from our organization who did some debrief with us. We were the first team over the size of 4 members to visit this organization so they wanted feedback from us on how to better accommodate future teams. Finally we went to the airport and boarded our first flight on our journey home. On the way home we had little hang-ups with flights and getting to flights. It was a great feeling to arrive at customs in LAX knowing that we were finally on American soil. But at least for me I immediately began to miss India. It had been home for so long. Haldwani especially felt like home after spending 3 weeks there. I got on my flight later on Friday to Phoenix and finally got home that night. It was strange to experience culture-shock when I got to my home city and my house. But I was glad to be back in an air-conditioned room with consistent electricity.

I hope I didn't leave out anything important but this is my trip in the smallest nutshell I can make it.