When the Elder speaks, y'all better listen

And so, four weeks into our trip the sweaty trains of Mumbai have been exchanged for the fresh smelling serenity of Pune. Population 22 million exchanged for just 5 million (I know thats more people than in Scotland, but it feels like a peaceful retreat by comparison).

Things I miss about Mumbai:

working with some incredible people in the biggest slum in Asia, being able to get a rickshaw anywhere at anytime without even asking, being relatively mosquito easy, Kebab Corner and the great projects and friends made at all the projects I visited...

Things I don't miss:

overcrowded steel sweat-boxes- a poor excuse for public transport, the sheer number of what I will politely call 'starers', the humidity and rain which gets you wet and keeps you wet...

After arriving here on Tuesday night we have had a fairly relaxed introduction but here are a just a few of our recent activities...

The first thing to say is that the food here is incredible... we are staying in a bed and board Bible college and we have an excellent chef. Meals are now a treat rather than a chore and I can finally say that curry is acceptable at any time of day. The highlight for me is the home made peanut butter served with freshly made bread for breakfast - incredible!

Secondly, last night the team visited the O.M slum base to join half a dozen men our age for their daily worship and prayer meeting. It was incredible to pray and worship in two (or three) languages as we prayed for the area and the work O.M do there. Hopefully we can continue to get to know and encourage these guys as we work together for the next two weeks.

We have just started our work here in Pune, so have little to tell but lots to think about, upcoming events include working with a children's kindergarten, teaching English to those who have dropped out of formal education, leading prayer meetings and Bible study groups, youth work and daily prayer hours, as well as the opportunity to do some teaching and Church preaching as well. Should be a fantastic week and if you fancy it, why not throw some prayer our way for all of the above!

that is all, unless Mr Dean has anything funny and undermining to add to this particular entry!

Aaron

Jai Ho! A month on and we still believe.

I suffer from a lack of literary prowess. I can't avoid the temptation of starting each of these with either "Right" "so" or "ok", because I don't know any better. Confession time over.

Ok, right, so the boys have been here a month now. I'm a good way through my third week now, its flown by, and we've had such a positive time. We've now left Mumbai for Pune, and have been here a couple of days. It's a small city, only a mere 6 million odd people live here, and we've landed some sweet accommodation in a little retreat centre beside the military base.

We're here for two weeks with Operation Mobilisation. It's still early days yet, but we'll be spending a lot of time with the members of a small church, about 10 years old, that is totally committed to seeing transformation in their slum community. Its already been challenging just spending time with them. Yesterday 4 of us joined 7 boys in a tiny room they'd built with their hands to facilitate a school for 'drop outs' and a place to pray for the area and the world. I assure you, you have never heard anybody pray like these guys pray. I could spend years with a specialist vocal coach and not speak/shout as loudly, as passionately as fervently as these young men from about 14- 22. Every day, no matter what is going on, they meet for an hour to pray, how many of us show this sort of commitment at home? They've also memorised a fair bit of scripture and they're not ashamed to show it!

So we're going to be visiting and helping youth groups, schools, education centres, house groups and doing a bit of training and speaking/leading in the next 10 or so days, but a whole lot of learning too.

Meeting together this morning we had a chance to reflect on some of the things we've learnt and its pretty cool hearing from the other boys some invaluable lessons are being taught. Maybe I'll drop in some gems as I write now. If you're lucky.

Leaving Mumbai was sad. We really made some great friends in the classes at Blue Edge, in the staff at Oasis India and with people in the churches and families we spent time with. Last week was quite a bitty week. As I wrote last time, we went to speak to some pimps in the red light district of Mumbai. This is one of the weirdest things I've ever been asked to do, and I'm still figuring out what really happened. Myself and Aaron visited a couple of brothels to invite the young men to the project we would be speaking at, and I've never been in such a desperate place, ever. It was horrible. There was such a lack of hope in that place, a resignation that nothing good was going to happen today or any other day. The problem is, a lot of these 18, 19 year old men, who work bringing in punters to the brothel on the street, have never known anything else, and have been trained for this purpose since they were little kids. It's desperate. So we invited them in and talked with them for about an hour on what it meant to respect each other, with our own parables and examples. They were well up for dialogue through the translator and appeared to take quite a lot from the session, or so they said! One of the main things that I've been challenged on in this trip has been to value everybody we meet as a person made in the Image of God, and someone with value. It was tricky last week I must admit, especially when your mind tries to comprehend how the thousands of women in the red light district, some of them just girls, live their lives. It sucks. But there are lots of brilliant people working hard to end human trafficking, to show people in this work that there are other ways to live and there is a living God that actually loves them a lot.

After our long farewells at Blue Edge (where we were teaching) we visited a slum project in the biggest slum in Mumbai. Just under a million Indians live there, and conditions were pretty rubbish. There is no sanitation infrastructure so in the monsoon season everything gets flooded. Slowly they are trying to raise the height of the houses to protect them from flood water. But all the water and rubbish everywhere leads to quite a lot of disease. The place that we visited was a 'balwati', a nursery for 3-5 year olds, and it was great. The children were amazing and we had good fun with them. One story we heard though was that last week someone had visited and held a young 4 year old girl in her arms, and when she returned on Monday, the girl had died. She'd just caught some infection and through lack of education, or awareness by the time the doctor had reached that girl there was nothing they could do. India can seem quite similar sometimes and is, but its stories like that that hit home the huge gulf in quality of life sometimes, especially in the slums.

Finally , on Sunday we had a whale of a time playing football all day in the filthiest conditions you've ever seen. This was much needed and plenty enjoyed! We'd visited a new church on the Sunday morning and had been invited for the day to spend some time with them. The church was in Bandra West, one of the most affluent areas in Mumbai, where Bankers and Bollywood stars alike dwell in luxury apartments. We had been working for the last few weeks in Bandra East, just 10 minutes drive away. The same place you might think! The differences are scary. Different languages, different clothes, a different smell, different sewage systems. They feel like different worlds let alone different countries. Those of us who live in affluent areas have a huge responsibility to the poor that we have to take seriously. Of this I was truly reminded.

We had a great chat with one of the Oasis project leaders last week. He just reminded us how when he reads his bible in the morning, sometimes he struggles to see how it makes sense. But when he arrives to work in the slums, there is no doubt what he has been asked to do. Following Jesus is pretty simple sometimes!

²⁷Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

⁴⁴"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

⁴⁵"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

Oh yeah, the team are doing ok. Intermittent Diarrhea affects all apart from Aaron who has the most righteous excrement the history of Poona. He refuses to pass on his secret. Two weeks today I will be in Kent!