Day 118, Mumbia, India

The flight from Italy to Mumbai sandwiched me exactly in the middle of the aircraft. After we were in the air, our Italian stewardess walked down the aisle and asked me a difficult question. One I was not prepared to be asked. I prayed for divine inspiration. Proverbs 15:28 echoed in my ears, “The heart of the righteous studies how to answer”….

With slight hesitation I replied back, “I’ll take the fish”. Im not sure what kind of airlines that was, but they had two choices: fish or vegetarian. I couldn’t figure out which was more dangerous. Airline fish or airline vegetarian. Neither sounded very safe. I closed my eyes as I ate.

“Ding”

The seatbelt light clicked on and our captain’s voice crackled through the intercom, “We are beginning our descent into Mumbai, India. The local time is 11:24pm and the temperature is 1 million degrees Celsius. Please fasten your seatbelts and thank you for riding Horrible-Meals Airlines.” We parked our airplane pretty close to the airport, it just made sense. I grabbed my guitar and backpack and walked down the stairs. My skin pretty much melted off my body. Coming from Budapest, where there was one foot of snow on the runway, to India, where my sneakers melted to the pavement, was a big change. My hoodie and jeans became my least favorite clothes the second I left the plane. After we picked up our luggage we got a ride to our hostel. We are staying at the YMCA. No kidding…..seriously, we are staying at the YMCA. The real YMCA, not the gym everyone thinks of in the States. This one has a huge pool with no water, a basketball court, and some kind of open room for teaching karate or something. Then it has our “rooms”. Our room, I kid you not, is padlocked. There is no doorknob, just a padlock. We lucked out though…..tada! There is a ceiling fan in our room! So with the wind factored in, it stays pretty much under 999,980 degrees Celcius. Not too shabby.

I feel like I’m in some kind of Indiana Jones movie. We were informed about the monkeys in the streets and the cows. I will try to catch one of these monkeys at some point. Who knows what the girls will do when they wake and and try to take a shower and find a monkey tied up in their bathroom.

Me and Ruseball share a room again, because we are the only guys. This time we get to share a bed also…..yeah… Now, the bathroom. Let me tell you about our bathroom. There is a toilet….oooo…lemme tell you about the toilets in India and how you use them…This is wonderful. Okay, so you take off your clothes and squat over the squatty-potty, which is basically just a hole in the ground. After you do your business you reach for the toilet paper…..only to remember that they don’t use toilet paper in India. Surprise, welcome to India. You look to your right and notice a little thing sticking out of the wall with a knob on it, and under it is positioned a little bucket. You fill the bucket with water, and with the bucket in your right hand, you do this little awkward positioning dance and then trickle the water down your back and….”splash” it back up with your left hand…..very messy, pretty uncomfortable…basically you end up wiping with your left hand soaked with water. After twenty minutes of washing your hands and cursing the toilet and the little bucket that somehow managed to get your pants soaked by the little “waterfall” it made coming off your backside, you leave the bathroom. By this time you have to go back into the bathroom because your food has had enough time to digest and is ready to come back out.

Everything here has a price-tag on it. This is a nice change from Egypt where you have absolutely how much something should cost. The currency here is Rupees….Am I the only one who thinks of tiny red gems when they hear the word “Rupees”?

I feel like I get trapped in the old Nintendo game “Zelda”. You remember that game, the little guy with the green cap and sword who collected little red gems called rupees so he could buy more arrows or bombs. Every time I buy something I feel like I should pull out a little leather bag filled with these precious red gems…

I am writing on my laptop and will transfer all this to a card and take it to an internet café when I find one. Right now it is 3am and I’m jet-lagging real bad. Im supposed to get up in a few hours and I’m not even tired. I lay here on this bed, Ruseball fast asleep next to me. A ceiling fan oscillates above me, its hum drowns out the dripping sink in the bathroom. The warm air brushes down on me. A thin, rough, sack-like sheet is draped over my body….I cannot sleep!

I woke and skipped breakfast. Who is hungry at that time anyway? One of the girls said I missed an amazing Indian breakfast, they apparently really enjoyed it. I asked Anna what they had, she said, “Ohh, it was so good! It was this baked bread thing……”. I love these girls, Im so happy they are so descriptive. It sounds like toast to me. Whatever it was, it had a bread like appearance…and was baked….but wasn’t toast….hmmmm

We seem to have a neat little creature living in our room. I have tried to speak to him but he licks his eyeball and scurries away to another part of the room. I have seen him before but couldn't figure out where. Then it hit me! He is famous! He is the little gecko of the Gieco auto insurance commercials. He helps out with the bugs. I see a long term friendship blossoming here.

After breakfast we traveled to a lady’s house and had an “Introduction” to ministry in India. It is so interesting getting used to this culture….apparently everything offends them. You cant cross your legs, it is disrespectful. You must take your shoes off when entering a house (not that bad), you must eat anything a “host” gives you….no matter what it is, or you offend them. Guys hold hands…….I’m not going to say too much about this…other than…yeah, the Indian guys here walk down the street holding hands, fingers laced, full blown holding hands….with another guy…two guys…okay, Im done.

After our introduction we took an hour long train ride to another part of Mumbai where we visited a Mother Teresa Orphanage. As we entered we were greeted by many disabled kids. Through the past few months God has really been conditioning my heart to be thankful, genuinely thankful for things I see in life. I can tell you that I am so thankful for the work Mother Teresa has done in India. These women actually care for and love these kids. We made our way through the cribs filled with half-naked disabled children. One little girl came and clung to my side. I didn’t really know what to do other than love on her. After some time with the children we were taken to a room of adult women. All of these women are HIV/AIDS positive. We sat with them and prayed and sang songs. We live in a comfortable and completely different world, guys. You don’t even know what is out here, I cant even begin to describe it. We live so comfortably in our cozy homes and only see what’s around us and there is a whole ‘nother world out here that we only see on the commercials that bug us with the “For 33 cents a day you can save a child’s live and give them an education” speeches. Seeing that child on TV and holding her in your arms are completely different things. Its so easy to flip the channel….looking at the child in your arms, you want to give her the world she’s never imagined…the world you call “home”.

Im getting tired now, Im trying to beat this jet lag, so im gonna kick off to sleep. I’ll write another letter soon, but it will probably get posted the same time as this one. Hehe. Anyways, I love you guys and think of you often.

I am excited about India guys. I am learning so much. Today we are heading to a hospice for those who are HIV/AIDS positive. Our team is working on changing our programs to fit the schedules in India. Doing outreach in Egypt is completely different to India. We have to come up with a whole new program to fit this culture. We spent most of the morning working on new songs and ideas for the ministry here. Tomorrow we are going to be starting an amazing thing here. We are so stoked about it! We will join up with Joyce Meyers, Delirious, and Hillsong to do a four day outreach here! For four days we will work side-by-side with them to reach the Indians! What an opportunity!

Her family needed food and Prema’s father had few options. She was the eldest daughter, beautiful, and at eleven years old, more useful to the family away in the city of Mumbai. One less mouth to feed. One less body to clothe. Prema’s mother, with tears in her eyes, promised they would see her again. Promised they would buy her back wih the money Prema made every month – money her new guardian would send to the family. A promise made to Prema two and a half years ago.

In the city, Pema is not chained to a desk or forced to hunch over menial work for hours each day like thousands of other children throughout the developing world. Prema dances at a pole, bats her eyelashes at adults who have come from all over the world to watch her. She spreads her legs and moves her body to music, the way the other girls showed her. Girls kidnapped from their homes when they were younger or sold by their parents to the brothel.

As Prema waits to return to her family, other promised are kept. Her guardian makes good on the promise he made to her parents that she would be well looked after. Men, some older than her father, foreigners with unusual accents, take great delight in watching her dance on the stage. Then they pay to suffocate her under their heavy bodies. The guardian fulfills his promise that Prema would not be denied an education. He, along with his clients, tutor her in a whole new language with it’s own, intricate vocabulary. Along with the other girls in the brothel, Prema has learned to say once-foreign words: HIV, unwanted pregnancy, rape.

Prema dances at her pole, learning a new language. Day after day she tries to remember the sound of her mother’s voice, and waits to see if her parents will make good on their promise.

I closed the book I was reading, not believing that the story was true. This story comes from a book called “A Voice for the Voiceless”, a YWAM ministry. During our orientation we were taught about the child sex-slave industry here in Mumbai. Its not something that the world draws attention to, but it is a big problem here. There are so many poor families, so many who are hungry, so many who have little options. Selling their child into the sex industry is one that many families look into. Please pray that God will rise up and defend the little ones. Psalms 12:5 says, “Because of the oppression of the weak and the groaning of the needy, God will now arise”. Pray that God would raise up lawyers, moviemakers, and government rulers who will bring and end to this savage exploitation. Over 10 million children worldwide are engaged in some facet of the sex industry.