ali's african adventures

(Xi'an International Airport, China)

Where to start with China?

This place is so incredibly foreign, yet there are little snatches of familiarity. I cannot read any of the road signs (can't even begin to guess, really), but we're driving on the right-hand side of the road for the first time in a month and a half. Virtually no one speaks English (not an exaggeration), but the temperature feels like home in late summer. Everyone here seems to dress up when they leave the house; I am woefully out of place in my 'sunday pants' and traveling sandals, but the stares I garner are merely curous, holding none of the malice I felt in India. I'm not sure what I expected from a communist country, but it certainly wasn't this friendliness and openness, pure delight when we parrot our two words of Chinese.

Here in China, unlike India, I feel the weight of the population. Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by a crush of people. Getting off trains feels like an exercise in bovine empathy as we are herded together down ramps and up flights of stairs to finally be ejected into grey, smoggy air, searching for white faces in the inevitable crowd.

The first of those white faces we saw belonged to Abby. She's an engineer doing energy research here in China, and she's been reading this here blog for a while now. When I posted that we'd be coming to China, she e-mailed me with an offer of assistance that I more than gratefully accepted. We probably exchanged close to fifty e-mails over the last couple of months, getting to know each other and sorting out an itinerary for the two weeks we'll be here.

I can't even explain how cool it was to see her smiling face when we came through those doors and know that it's because of this corner of the internet that she was there. She's the first of you I've ever met, and now I want to sit down with every single one of you because it's just that much fun. She took us to her apartment where we dumped our excess baggage and then guided us out to the student quarter of the city for Peking duck and lots of other Chinese treats. We walked through a street market, all neon and streetlights and grey buildings reaching up into the night over the press of people thronging the sidewalks. Markets are the common thread that seem to make me feel more at ease in a new country than almost anything else.

Abby guided us to our train, and we boarded a night train bound for Luoyang. We were in hard sleeper beds, the equivalent to the class we travelled in India, but the trains here are a world away. They're clean and carpeted and they give you a fluffy pillow and a duvet. Almost immediately, there was a small crowd near our compartment, curious friends who wanted to take a peek at the white people. The family occupying one of the two other bunks in our area lined up in a row and started to chat. We were given small sachets of 'very famous tea' and offers of assistance in Luoyang, although I can't imagine what help our new friends could really have been, since our Chinese is limited to thank you and hello, and they ran out of words shortly after determining that we were from 'Chanadah.'

The white faces meeting us in the crowd at the end of this trip were Mikey and Mariah. They work with an organization based out of Beijing called New Hope. In essence, New Hope provides a place for medically fragile orphaned babies and children up to about age five to be cared for. They arrange surgeries for those who need them (lots of cleft lips and palates, heart defects and other things that are so familiar to me as a paeds nurse), and they provide comfort care to the ones for whom there is nothing that can be done. The centre in Luoyang is the biggest and can hold around 130 little ones in large rooms full of windows and sunlight and brightly painted murals. Each room has twelve little cribs, each with a quilt handmade by the doctor in Beijing who started all of this. For every three babies there is an ayi, a wonderful, smiling, gentle Chinese woman who loves on these little ones like they were here own.

Our task for the day was simple; leave your shoes outside the door of any room you want to visit, remember to use hand sanitizer, and snuggle as many babies as your arms can hold.

It's hard to understand how those little ones could heal my heart just as they were breaking it. On the ship, we look for the outcasts. for the ones society has pushed aside, and these are the ones we want most to reach. At New Hope, every one of the kids is, literally an outcast. In a country where you're only allowed to have one child, when babies are born broken they're tossed aside to allow for a second chance at a 'worthwhile' one. They're had babies found on the steps of police stations, on sidewalks and in garbage cans because they weren't good enough to keep. Almost none of then were actually orphans.

And I got the spend the day there, babies snuggling close and smiling up at me with the broken smile of a cleft lip kid that gets me every single time. They're young enough, most of them, that they don't know that they're 'not good enough,' and so they accepted my love unconditionally, basking in it and falling asleep with complete trust that my arms are a safe haven. When it came time for one to be fed, the ayi would replace it with another, and so my arms were never empty, and more often than not there were several of the older ones draped across my lap, too.

I've canoed down the Zambezi and seen the Taj Mahal and the Terracotta Warriors and I've stood under the spray of Victoria Falls, but I think this might have been my favourite place in the world so far.


Up next: Xi'an, the Terracotta Warriors and the incredible beauty of Yangshuo.

(Show Hope Center, Luoyang, China)

Just a quick note... We arrived safely in China last night and were met at the airport by a friend who took us on a whirlwind tour of the student quarter and fed us some peking duck before bundling us onto a night train headed to Luoyang.

We spent the day today in a place that's pretty close to my idea of heaven. I'm not going to tell you about it just yet, because one of the nurses who works in my heaven is feeding us cheesecake in a minute, and I want to make sure I'm there.

I just wanted to let you know that posting might be more sporadic than usual, since I'm not sure how much internet access we'll have here. Also, I'm unable to get into my e-mail here, so if you've e-mailed me anything I won't be able to see it until we hit Thailand in two weeks. I'll still be able to moderate comments (whichever ones you're able to get through my intense secutiry wall), so feel free to drop a line.

More soon. Right now, it's cheesecake and then another night train to Xi'an where we'll see the Terracotta Warriors tomorrow. Is this really my life?

One of my favourite things about this trip is that I'm constantly and utterly overwhelmed by what I'm seeing. Now that I'm feeling better (although last night was rough again, for no good reason), this assault on my senses is something I'm coming to welcome. Yesterday, it was the Taj Mahal's turn to enthrall me.

There's an odd system of ticket-buying in place here; you have to go back down the road past our hotel about a half kilometer, buy the ticket at an office there and then take the free shuttle back up to the North Gate. We did not know this until we got to said gate, although an insistent man had apparently been trying to tell us the whole time. Once he turned out to be right, we accepted his offer to act as our guide for the morning (it was hard to say no when we'd be paying him about a dollar each) and headed back to buy our tickets. This is where the fact that the HoJ is of Indian descent comes in handy.

It costs non-Indian tourists 750 Rupees to see the Taj Mahal. Considering that it's one of the wonders of the world, this price does not seem too steep, and I got in my line willingly. Phil, however, tucked in his shirt, combed over his hair (the preferred style) and claimed that he was from Kerala, smoothly talking the man in the Indian line into giving him a ticket for the local proce: twenty Rupees. Not even fifty cents.

I could repeat all the little tidbits our guide shared with us, but if you want to know facts about the Taj Mahal, you can just look them up on the internet; I'm fairly sure you're not here for a dissertation on the subject.

What I will tell you is that it took my breath away, and not just for its beauty; there's something so tragic about it. Built as a tomb for a much-loved third wife who managed to bear fourteen children, only six of whom lived, it's an immense, marble mausoleum. Fourteen chapters of the Qur'an are inlaid in black onyx into the white marble, one for each of the children, and lotus flowers made from glowing orange and green stones encircle the marble screen around the queen's tomb. It's indescribably beautiful and strangely sad, twenty-two years of crafstmanship to honor a dead woman who never got to see how much she was loved while she lived.

Early this morning, as I sat on the roof of the hotel again, waiting to see if the clouds would part enough that I could see the pink, early morning glow on the white stone, I heard the Muslim call to prayer echo somewhere over the city. Somewhere in the streets below drums beat and bells jingled as a procession carrying a statue of Ganesh walked slowly past, red dust filling the air, and I felt for a moment like I was suffocating, lost along with all of these.

I think God's heart must ache when He looks at India. I know mine does.

(Taj Plaza Hotel, Agra, India)

We drove to the train station in Mumbai yesterday morning at dawn. Around us, the city yawned and stretched, people spilling from darkened doorways into the slowly filling streets. As the day gathered strength, the coloured lights still blinking from the night's Ganeshi festivities shone less and less brightly. Our driver stopped and we got out, alone for the first time in an Indian train station and unsure of how to find our platform in the teeming throng. It seems, however, that there will always be someone to help; an older man in spotless white approached us and asked us which train we needed. Without asking for money (an anomaly here, we're coming to realize), he smiled and pointed us to Track Four, where we found an officious little man pasting passenger lists to the outside of dingy coaches. Our names were all there, and when the doors opened we climbed into our home for the next twenty-four hours: a 3AC coach on the Bareilly Express.

3AC denotes a sleeper car with air conditioning and beds stacked three tiers high. I had assumed it would be six of us, three on each side, but there were a bonus two bunks across the tiny aisle, running along the side wall of the train. The top bunks were fixed in place, and the middle ones flipped down to serve as the backrest while we all lined up on the bottom ones, waiting to see who our traveling companions would be. Through the window, we saw an old couple pushing an even older woman in a rickety wheelchair and were momentarily thankful that we'd not ticked the box when they asked if any of us were medical.

Three guesses on who ended up in our compartment.

Granny (as we immediately christened her) was even frailer in person, with hugely thick glasses that made her look like a wizened old bug with dentures that she constantly rotated around in her shrunken mouth. Her son and daughter-in-law (or vice versa; it was hard to be sure) toted in about seventeen bags, stuffing them under the seats and building a small fort around dear Granny. Most of them, it turned out, were filled with food in varying sizes of plastic containters, doled out at intervals by the woman to her husband or Granny, who took turns sitting across from her to be fed. A man in a yellow shirt and shiny grey pants made eight, and promptly creeped us out by very obviously taking photos of us as he reclined on his bunk. He contined to be mildly creepy for the duration of the ride, but we got used to it.

At seven minutes after eight, we jerked into motion and the adventure began. It was fairly anticlimactic for the first half hour or so as we rolled slowly through Mumbai, but once we were clear of the garbage and the slums and the people pressed together on platforms, we started to pick up speed. Soon we were rolling through lush, green countryside.

For most of the trip, we were passing fields and farms, corn and rice and tea and sugar cane alternating like patchwork, cut through with temple spires and rivers where women washed their clothes on the banks. It's hard to figure out where 1.2 billion people live in India; so much of it is this wide-open green, and I realize that I have seen nothing when it comes to crowded cities.

We settled into an easy rhythm, one born of monotony, really, since there's not much to do on a train. We moved around like the pieces of a sliding puzzle, sitting and sleeping and playing cards, changing places as we flipped bunks up and down, always making sure Granny was well tucked in and her chewing tobacco was close at hand. (No joke, that.) When the train stopped at a station, we knew that soon after we'd hear the droning tones of chiki wallas and cold drink wallas and, of course, chai wallas, offering ginger-spiced tea in tiny plastic cups for just five Rupees. We availed ourselves regularly of the latter.

Night fell, and we set up all the bunks. The creeper in the shiny pants took one last photo and then gave the command. Fan on. Light off. No argument possible. Our little compartment was plunged into darkness and we settled in for the night, rocked to sleep by the movement of the cars.

It was perfect, really; just as we were starting to get tired of the whole thing, we went to sleep, and when we woke up again, we were very nearly there. On the way back, we'll be awake during the time we had been sleeping, so the scenery will be new, and I have to admit I'm kind of looking forward to it

And so here I am, in one of the more surreal moments of the trip so far, sitting on the roof of my hotel, looking at the domes of the Taj Mahal, gleaming white in the morning light, not even a kilometer away. I can not wait to see it up close.

I'm in Mumbai right now, staying with another Mercy Ships friend, Vish. His parents have opened their home to us and fed us more than any self-respecting human should eat in just over twenty-four hours. I will never get enough of Indian food.

This city is so much more of what I expected India to be. It's the only one I knew anything about (thanks, in large part, to my brother Pete, who introduced me to incredible writers like Rohinton Mistry), and I've been surprised to find it, in some ways, exactly as I pictured it. This is not necessarily a good thing.

I thought the poverty in the areas around Lonavala was heart-wrenching, but it's nothing like here, and I haven't even set foot in an area that could be called a slum. Everywhere we go, there are beggars. They all look similar to me, unwashed and sharp-featured, dark eyes holding a life of hurt. We went to a market today and as we walked through an underpass, I was smacked in the face by the sour smell of urine and garbage. A whole little clan was living there on the concrete, and as we passed by, a little girl started to run towards us with hopeful eyes. She was called sharply back by her mother; perhaps there is some unwritten rule governing Sunday mornings and outstretched hands here.

I can't get used to it. Walking past the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel and then looking down to see the bare bum of a little, filty baby curled up next to his mama on the pavement. Meandering down streets lined with mansions sheltered under the overhanging branches of trees while two old women carry impossibly large loads on their backs, stopping every so often to rest. Breathing deep to smell the spice and incense and catching the stench of human feces mingled in. It's hard to find my balance.

I want to share photos with you, but I can't get them to upload from here. You'll just have to trust me when I say that this city is filled with colour, markets pulsing with life as vendors hold out fruit and shampoo and jars of tea and even little fluffy puppies, all for a very cheap price, I am assured. I'm glad I'm feeling better, more like myself, or this would be all too overwhelming. As it is, I'm drinking it in, eyes wide and heart a little more shattered than it was a few days ago. This, I am coming to realize, is a very good thing. When this stops happening, it may be time to stop traveling.

---

On an only loosely-related note, do you remember how I was going to try and e-mail the director of the Joy Centre Preschool, but I wasn't sure how it was going to work out? Imagine my surprise (or lack thereof; I'm getting kind of used to God working like this) when there was a new face at chai time on our last day in Lonavala. We sat down and she introduced herself to us as Rose, the wife of Joy, the man who just so happens to run the school. I told her about all of you and how you want to help and she almost started crying. She called you a miracle and handed me her phone and I was able to talk directly to Joy. Here's the scoop.

The cost for one child to go to school for a year, including admission fees, uniform, books and a school bag and monthly tuition fees is 7,000 rupees. This works out to approximately 160USD per child per year. (It's more than what I originally told you because I hadn't factored in the admission fees, uniforms etc.) If anyone wants to sponsor a child and is able to send extra money on top of that, it will go into savings to be used for the same child in the next year, unless the child is no longer at the school, at which point it will be used for someone else.

There are several ways to give, and you can do so either in a lump sum as you're led, or monthly. I think the easiest way is to give through PayPal. The PayPal ID is joyisaac2001@yahoo.com, and when it asks if the money is for goods or services, you check goods. It's also possible to give by wiring money directly to a bank account in Hawaii or through Western Union, so if anyone wants to do that, please just e-mail me and I'll send along that information. For my Canadian friends, if PayPal isn't a good option for you, they have a relationship with a funding agency in Canada who you can go through. E-mail Rita at donorservices@shaw.ca for details.

Additional food for thought? Joy told me that it costs about 32,000 rupees yearly to run the schools (there's another one in another area of Lonavala) and that the income from kids paying for their own tuition is only about 6,000. That's a deficit of about 550USD yearly that they depend on donations to cover.

He said the following in his e-mail, and I couldn't help smiling, knowing that God was working to answer prayers long before they were even spoken, as Phil and I planned out our trip and picked Lonavala as one of our destinations.

We had got some money from a Church in Austalia for six months. That money is till November. After November, if money does not come, it will be hard to run the schools. That is why we have been praying earnestly for the donors for our schoools. As you guys are going to send money, we will be very transparent to you and accountable to you. We will update you from time to time. Please say to them how much we are thankful to God and them. We blieve that it is from God and that all your / their support and prayers for the little children of India will bring them to the love of God.

So there you have it. Any other questions, don't hesitate to ask and I'll find out answers from Joy. I asked if it was possible to get specific information for you guys on the kids you sponsor, and he said it would be no problem to send photos and a little about the family situation. Just e-mail him and let him know how many kids you want to sponsor, and I'm sure he'll be happy to give you the info! joyisaac2001@yahoo.com

I'm so encouraged to see how God is working in all this. To think that He had it all planned out beforehand for us to be at that little school to bring this need to you just a couple of months before their funding was going to end just blows my mind. It puts any struggle I might have had over the last few weeks into such a sweet perspective, and I'm so glad to have been in India for this time.

Tomorrow we board a train bound for Agra, a journey of twenty-four hours to see the Taj Mahal. This should be interesting...

For those of you who want to help out at the Joy Center, thank you so much. As always, I'm floored by your generosity and your hearts for people a world away who you'll probably never meet. It turns out that the head of the school is traveling right now, so I can't talk directly with him about what the best way to go about sponsoring kids is, so I'm going to e-mail him though and get it all figured out. Just be patient, because it could take a while (I'm finding that This Is Africa and This Is India could probably be used interchangeably), and we're leaving here on Saturday to travel around the country by train for a week, so there probably won't be much in the way of internet access in my life.

In other news, I'm happy to report that today was a good day, probably the first I've had since arriving in India where I didn't dread the hours stretching out in front of me. I want to share something from my journal that I wrote last night, though, because I can't stop thinking about it.

---

One thing I cling to is that I have not doubted God in all this. And even so, He provides me with undeniable proof of His love when I haven't even asked.

I hadn't told anyone on the base what I'm going through, not wanting to be an added burden. And yet, on Monday at worship, Amogla, the MC, shared Psalm 34.

Verse 4: I prayed to the Lord, and He answered me. He freed me from all my fears.
Verses 6-7: In my desperation, I prayed and the Lord listened; He saved me from all my troubles. The Angel of the Lord is a guard; He surrounds and defends all who fear Him.
Verses 18-19: The Lord is close to the broken-hearted; He rescues those who are crushed in spirit. The righteous person faces many troubles, but the Lord comes to the rescue each time.

It would have been enough that she chose to share that; it would have proven to me that He is near. But tonight, as we sat in her room after sharing dinner, I was prompted to tell her what I've been dealing with.

Her response stunned me.

For three days I prayed, because I wanted to share what God had for me to share. There were two different scriptures I was thinking about at first, so I prayed. Friday, Saturday, Sunday I prayed and the Lord told me that Psalm 34 would be a blessing.

Friday.
Saturday.
Sunday.

They were the three darkest days so far, darker than any I can remember, and throughout that time, Amogla was being led to pray so that she would share the Psalm that would start to bring healing to my soul.

I would have been content to know that God is near. Instead, He has become the heart pounding in my chest, the breath catching in my throat, and since He is both these things, I find that I can leave the work to Him. That everything is starting to feel easier again.

This base is called Asha Seva Kendra, The Place Where Hope Heals. Maybe tonight, for the first time, I'm starting to believe it'll be that for me.

---

Tonight, we had dinner with another family from the base, and I held their little newborn baby, Sam. He snuggled into my chest, in that spot reserved for the smallest ones, and I felt almost entirely like myself again.

I'm so grateful that I'm being given some good memories of India, that I'll be able to look back on this time and see not just darkness, but also the light, breaking through the rain when I least expected it.

Today was maybe the best I've had since coming to India, and it had a lot to do with the company in which I spent my morning.

To reach the Joy Center Preschool we travelled by autorickshaw, the newer, more humane version of the old human-drawn carriage. When we were dropped off, we walked a hundred yards or so, dodging the ubiquitous cow patties in the road, down a little alley in an area I would probably call a slum. The school's entire property is a rented house in this tiny street, two little concrete rooms lit by the half light from a window high up in one of the walls. We arrived before the children, and sat down on the mat on the floor as they started to arrive.

Only one cried, but every single one of them stared at us, wide-eyed and fearful, before muttering their hello's to Teacher and running off to the other side of the room to play. Nisha, one of the four year-olds with looped braids and a bindi on her forehead, was one of the first to arrive, and when she had taken a toy off the shelf, she busied herself with it, refusing to lift her head for a full ten minutes. I guess she figured that if she couldn't see us, we weren't really there.

Once all the kids, ranging from two to five years old, had come in and deposited their backpacks (bigger than they were, in some cases), school began. Except for the pile of shoes left at the door and the little tiffin boxes on the table, it was so much like my sister's school in New Jersey that I felt that strange, now-familiar ache of homesickness all over again. They chanted the days of the week, sang a song about the weather and sat in a circle for a Bible story.

Phil and I sat with the four year-olds while they worked on their writing in little notebooks. Nisha, the one who had been so afraid when we first came in, was clearly one of the stars of her class. While the others were laboriously (and, more often than not, backwards-ly) copying single letters over and over, the teacher just told Nisha, Write from one to ten, and she set to work, her tiny voice muttering each letter as she wrote out the words. When she finished, she poked me shyly with her pencil and I looked down into huge black eyes, desperate for my approval. I went over each word with her, telling her what a good job she did, and she chattered back to me in Hindi. We understood each other well.

Nisha was my best friend from then on. She sat in my lap and would tap me gently when she wanted to tell me another story, always in Hindi. Phil would listen in and translate, although she was invariably just sharing random facts. They mix sugar and water in the chai. There's a fruit I like to eat that grows on a tree. I think she just liked having someone to tell things to.

By the time the mamas came to collect their little ones, we had plenty of new friends. Raj was one of them, a little guy whose mama was the last to come pick him up. We walked out after him, heading home ourselves, and every few seconds he would turn back around, waving and chirping, Bye! Bye! We waved and called back, and then we turned up a different street and figured that was the last we'd see of little Raj. A minute or so later, way off in the distance, we heard his little voice one more time. We looked back to see him, waving to us from between two tin-roofed houses, and we laughed and said bye one last time.

Binsey, the teacher from the base here who took us with her this morning, explained to us as we headed home that Raj is one of five kids at the school whose parents cannot afford tuition. They're being sponsored by people who've come and gone from the base, and when we asked her how much it would cost, I was stunned by the answer. We used to charge three hundred rupees per month, but so many families couldn't afford that, so now we just charge two hundred.

If you do the math, two hundred rupees works out to just over four dollars a month.

She went on to explain that the kids who can't afford those two hundreed rupees are often the ones that come to school without tiffin boxes for snack, the ones who can't afford uniforms and who come to school dirty because they don't have water to bathe in. Binsey told us that the teachers at the school find money for clothes, provide food for the children and even make sure they get a bath. All for two hundred rupees a month. I spend more than that on a single cup of chai at Starbucks, and as I'm learning here, it's not even the real stuff.

We set out on this trip around the world hoping that our eyes would be opened to new areas of ministry, that our hearts would be broken for people we'd never met before, and in a little concrete room in an Indian slum, that happened today. When Nisha curled up against my side and Raj pulled yet another silly face, I discovered that it's not just African kids who can hold my heart.

It's just that the need is so much bigger than I'd ever really realized, even though there are these little pockets of light scattered throughout the darkness, fighting to bring hope where it seems so hard to see.

If you want to sponsor a kid at the Joy Center, let me know in a comment or an e-mail, and I'll talk to Binsey and find out how we can go about doing that. I promise I'm not going to turn this blog into a series of pleas for your time and money. It's just that, after being with these kids and knowing how little it takes to make sure they can go to school, I find I can't be silent.

You understand, right?

I wish I could sit here and write to you that things are better, that the sun came out and it solved all my problems. But I've never been anything less than honest, and so I have to admit that things are still hard. As I type, I can't stop looking at the top of one of the fingers where the skin is broken all to pieces, the reminder that I couldn't hold it together on Saturday morning. I hadn't slept at all the night before, lying awake in bed scared to death of the dark, and the thought of leaving the room to get on a train was enough to send me spiraling into panic. The only way I could keep from screaming out loud was to dig my nails into my finger because if it hurt badly enough, I wouldn't cry and as I type this I know how crazy it sounds.

The truth is, I am kind of crazy right now. I know that it's all because of the medication that needs to work its way out of my body, but until that happens, I am petrified to think of what my days will be like. I'm not normally afraid of dogs, but I hear them bark at night and am convinced they're going to come into my room and attack me. I hear the sound of distant trains and am surprised when they don't run straight through my window. I cannot stop crying over anything and nothing. This is not like me, and thankfully there's enough of me left that I know this, that I know to hold on until it passes and I feel human again.

It's such a strange way to experience this country, through this fog and haze. The area we're staying in is absolutely beautiful, all green valleys and winding rivers, and we even got to ride a camel on Sunday. (A dollar each for a little jaunt around a parking lot, but at least we can say we've done it.) The markets look like the ones in West Africa, with little stalls packed tightly together selling fake name-brand clothing at ridiculously low prices, but here they don't smell like body odor and dirt. Here, it's incense and spice and when you walk back onto the street there are people building a shrine to a Hindu god they'll be worshiping later on that night.

In Pune on Saturday, we had lunch at a local restaurant. Less than six dollars each for more food than we could possibly have eaten, and so we packed it up to give to someone on the street. The first person to approach us was a woman with a little baby tied to her with a scrap of cloth, and we parted willingly with our paper bag, feeling like we'd done something right until we came across another little family just a few yards down the road. Another mama and two little children, half naked and sleeping on the hard pavement. A few steps further an old man and then another little girl and finally I had to stop looking down because I would have torn out my heart just to have something to give to them.

I know from my time in Africa that this is not the way, that coming in as a white person and giving handouts to beggars on the street is not the way to affect change in a country. But it's much easier to type that than to keep the money in my pockets when they are too weak even to hold out their hands for it.

This is jumbled, I know, but so are my thoughts right now. I'm having a hard time sorting through all this, when all I want to do is sleep until I feel better. I will write again when I can find the words. Right now, I'm going to walk into town with my husband and eat a samosa and maybe tomorrow will be better.

India is everything and nothing like I expected.

We are at a YWAM base in Lonavala, tucked into a fold of the mountains about a fifteen minute walk from the town. This base is the main one for all of India, and staff are returning from all around the country and the world to prepare for the upcoming quarter which starts a couple days after we fly to China. Before the students get here, there is an entire rainy season's worth of mold to be scrubbed from every surface imaginable. We are the ones to whom this task has fallen, and it seems that we're going about it with far more vigor than is customary. We're constantly being stopped and told not to work so hard, that we don't need to lift up mattresses to scrape the mold from the bottoms, that we need to take a break for chai. Except for the one about chai, we ignore the directives, mostly, choosing to leave the rooms we're in cleaner than they've maybe ever been.

This is satisfying, but I'll be honest when I say that this week has not been an easy one. We don't seem to have a place here where we fit. The staff, for the most part, has been here for years already; they fall easily into groups born of long familiarity, and we are the four foreigners who will only be here for two weeks. There is no common ground. I sit at meals, unable to come up with a question past, So what do you do here, and they stop talking after asking me whether this is my first time in India and whether the food is too spicy. Yes and no, respectively, answers that don't take up much time and leave long, yawning pauses that none of us seem able to fill.

It’s disconcerting, this feeling of not belonging. There is literally nothing to do on this base other than work and eat and hang out with people, but we haven’t found anyone willing to do the latter with us. I wander through days wondering how I will fill the time and knowing that going to bed won't help because I will just lie awake, listening to the trains pass on the nearby tracks, hearing the base staff talking and laughing as they play cards in a room with a window so close to ours that it seems they must be sitting in the corner.

None of this would be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I've been on a malaria medication that I think has gotten to a toxic level in my body. I've stopped taking it, but it could be days, even weeks before this feeling leaves me, this feeling that I'm in a strange, threatening dream that I can't seem to wake up from. (The only way I know it's not a dream is that I haven't slept through the night in at least two weeks and I'm so incredibly tired that I can't possibly be asleep.) I find myself fixating on silly things, unable to care about anything else; there was a smell in my bathroom that bothered me and I spent over an hour scrubbing every surface, convinced that if I got rid of it, I would feel better. Only I did and then I didn't, and so I'm just waiting for this feeling to pass.

And in between it all, threading through this strangeness, there is India. I walk into town and am surrounded by it, by fragrance and spice and garbage and a mother with sad eyes holding a baby so thin I can see each rib, sharp under skin like brown paper. I pass under a statue of a Hindu god, twenty feet tall, at least, and painted in bright colours that stand out against the grey sky. Women in saris of every colour slip through the crowds, holding up their skirts from the rivers of dirty water carried along by the rain. We buy washing powder for our clothes, less than fifty cents for a bag that will last until I'm home again, and delicious samosas, piping hot, straight from the bowl of oil they've been frying in.

I want to love this place, but I don't know how, yet; I don't know where I can slot myself into this reality. In Africa, I knew where I fit; I knew how to act and how to talk and what to expect (as much as one can ever know what to expect in the third world.) But here I am lost, foreign in every sense of that word, only anchored to my days by the man at my side who speaks for me when I have no words.

I have never been more proud to be my husband's wife, and he carries me on strong shoulders through all this. He starts conversations with the people who sit silently across from us at mealtimes, translates in the market when I don't know how to say that I want honey groundnut chikki, and puts his arms around me when he finds me sitting on the floor, crying.

So don't worry about me. I'm in good hands here; the sky was blue for the first time today, and I'm taking it as a sign of better things to come. I'm determined to enjoy this time as much as I possibly can, to have something more than just rain and tears to look back on when I think of India.

We're going exploring in a town about an hour and a half's train ride from here tomorrow. Tomorrow should be a good day.

We were picked up by a taxi service; our driver's name was Raju, and when I asked about traffic lights and whether or not anyone pays attention to them, he grinned at me. No English, he said, and then sped through an intersection, swerving slightly to avoid the truck crossing our path who had the right of way.

Thankfully, I slept for about half an hour of the two hour ride to Lonavala, because Raju's driving did not improve. It would seem that there is some sort of unwritten code here that involves a lot of horn honking and light flashing. Judging by the fact that we spent most of our time on the right side of the road in stead of the left, regardless of whether or not we were passing anyone, extra points were being awarded for driving on the wrong side.

The day dawned slowly under a heavy, grey sky, mountains shrouded in layers of mist silhouetted against the pale light. We reached the base just as it began to rain in earnest.

This is the fourth month of the rains; it has been raining non-stop for two weeks now, and only breaks when the air hangs heavy and wet, waiting for the next downpour. Breathing, it feels like there's a damp cloth held over your nose and mouth. This much water has lent an amazing fecundity to this place. The stone pathways are slick with moss and impossibly green grass grows thickly out of concrete walls and on tin roofs. Everywhere is the sound of birds and crickets and frogs and always there is the sound of water.

We have been welcomed warmly , introduced to too many people with names I despair of remembering. The work we will be doing remains a mystery; the rains have put a stop to much of what we might have done. But there is chai three times a day, drunk carefully from handle-less metal cups. There is rice at every meal, fragrant with cinnamon and bursting with flavours I have no name for.

And always there is rain.

(Mumbai, airport)

Sitting on the ground in the arrivals hall in Mumbai, i am waiting for the promised car from the base. All around me the hot, thick air is filled with the sounds of car horns blaring, undercut with a constant, fluid hum of Hindi. Flies land on my arms and I twitch them off, feeling more than ever like an animal in some strange zoo. People line the rails, waiting for their own to come out the doors into the enveloping humidity, but until that happens, I am enough to hold their interest.

I am acutely aware of myself, of the way I look and the way I sit and the way I move. For the first time, I feel like I don't belong. In Africa, surrounded by a sea of colour, I could forget my own whiteness. Here, it seems, I will not have the chance.

This is probably a good thing.

The car is here.

We're already at the end of our South African adventure and I've barely shared any of it with you. I get the feeling this might be something of a pattern; it's not terribly exciting to sit on a computer when there's a world to be explored outside my windows.

Also, I have a disclaimer that I'd like to make right now and then I'll try not to moan about it after this. Somehow, my camera has managed to pick up numerous little spots somewhere on its inner working, somewhere I'm not able to get to to clean without really messing things up. These spots will eventually be taken out by me during many painful hours of photo editing sometime after we get home. However, any photos I post from along the way will be untouched and thus rather ... spotty. It pains me to no end to let you see the diseased ones, but if I'm going to let you see anything that's going on, that's the way it'll have to be. Please forgive me.

That being said, we've fully enjoyed our time here in Cape Town. The weather hasn't been spectacularly cooperative; it seems Table Mountain truly is a fog and rain magnet, and since our hotel is right at the foot of it, the area has almost always been totally shrouded in clouds. We did manage to squeeze out two absolutely perfect days with blue skies and warm weather, and on the first of those, when we saw the clouds blowing away from the mountain, we threw on our shoes, jumped in the car and raced off to climb it.

It was breathtaking, in more ways than one. The route we took was basically a giant stairmaster, high stone steps going straight up for a hard hour and a half. But the view from the top was well worth it, the city spread out below us like a blanket over the ground. HoJ and I took off on a ramble across the top in search of other views, through the clouds that blew across our path in wisps and curls. We were rewarded with just a glimpse of the view down the other side of the mountain before heading back to convince our weary legs not to give out on the way back down.

Yesterday, our Mercy Ships friend Murray (whose parents we stayed with the first night in South Africa) had arrived back home for a vacation, so we met up with him and he toured us around the Cape Peninsula. It came as no surprise to us that he, one of the most intensely patriotic people we know, was a fabulous tour guide, providing us with all kinds of tidbits of information about the speck in the distance that turned out to be a shipwreck or spotting whales and zebras and springboks in the distance. There is so much beauty in this corner of the world, the soaring cliffs towering over aqua waters, and I'm afraid I'll somehow get filled up when there is so much of the world left to see.

Tonight we meet up with Murray's family one last time for a braai at his house, and then we'll return our car to the airport and spend a few hours there before flying out early tomorrow morning for India where our next adventure awaits. It feels like this is really the beginning of our travels, leaving Africa. This continent is so familiar in so many ways, and even South Africa, as alien as it is to the west, has felt comfortable, somehow.

I don't think I'll be able to say the same about India.

It's getting hard to know what to write, because it's been so long since I have.

The travels have taken on a less frenetic pace and we're holed up in Capetown, making the best of some very rainy weather and looking forward to India in less than a week.

When we arrived to Capetown on Wednesday (I think it was Wednesday; just a few weeks into this adventure and I've absolutely lost all sense of time), we were met by Murray's mum, proudly holding a Mercy Ships flag. We drove through the dark to his house and spent a night feeling like family with the family of one of our long-time Mercy Ships friends. I'm coming to realize more and more just what an incredible network we're building living on the ship, so much so that I can just walk into a strange house in Cape Town and feel perfectly comfortable poking through cupboards to find myself some tea, just because the house belongs to the parents of a ship friend.

Early the next morning Murray's dad led us to the highway and we headed up towards George on the Garden Route, an absolutely beautiful stretch of road here on the cape of South Africa.

We wound through mountain passes and past patchwork fields, the crops undulating like waves in the wind and sun. My eyes drank in the colours in long, greedy gulps; greens in every shade interlaced with grey and blue mountains and the flourescent yellow and deep purple of flowers growing in fields and along the roadside. This, I kept thinking, is why the South Africans on the ship differentiate between South Africa and the rest of the continent. It's like nothing I've ever experienced in West Africa, all the lush scenery and pastoral little villages that wouldn't have looked out of place in the German Alps. (We thought we might have taken a wrong turn somewhere when we came across signs for Heidelberg!)

Our destination was George, a little town nestled in the mountains of the Western Cape that's home to another ship friend. Lourens. We met up with him and he took us to a little guest house, run by a friend from his small group, where we'd be staying. Binks, the owner, made us feel right at home in the little cottage, and if you're ever in George, I can definitely recommend a place to stay!

There were two big things we wanted to do in George; caving and ostrich riding. Both had me slightly nervous, but for very different reasons. Thankfully, we started off with a beginner's introduction, a standard tour in the Cango Caves that was full of vast, open chambers and no hint of claustrophobia.

Honestly, if it wasn't for the whole irrational fear of enclosed spaces that seems to plague me, I think I might want to live in a cave. It was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. It was full of soaring stalagmites and perilously-hanging stalagtites. In the second chamber, when the lights were turned on, I had to blink away tears to see it all clearly. It's incredible to think that there are probably hundreds and thousands of places like that around the world that no one has ever seen, incredible pockets of beauty that exist in the secret places, just to glorify God.

That day, we were too late to do something called the Adventure Tour, for which I was openly grateful. I needed a little time to get used to the idea that I was going to be crawling through places named The Devil's Chimney and The Letterbox. The next day, with the HoJ, Lourens and Jelliot (Julle and Elliot just takes too long to type) there to bolster my courage, we headed back into the dark for some adventures.

I surprised myself, honestly. Most of the places we were crawling through had an end in sight, and so I was able to hang onto that and not get too scared. The first smallish place we squeezed through had me feeling shaky and near tears by the end, but I'm far too stubborn to give in that easily. (Plus, I knew I had to crawl back through there on the way out, and having a breakdown on the first go-round wasn't going to help anything!) I'm glad I did it, if only to prove myself that I'm stronger than I thought, but I was much more excited for the next item on the agenda: ostrich riding at Cango Ostrich Farm.

One of our goals on this trip is to ride as many animals in as many countries as possible. We ticked elephants off our list in Zimbabwe, and I even pretended to ride a lion there, but ostriches was one I hadn't even considered until Lourens told us about it.

The HoJ and I were taken on a tour around the farm by Shane, a guide who seemed bent on pushing the limits of my gullibility as far as possible. To his delight, that was pretty far, and he had me convinced of several absolutely ridiculous ostrich facts before relenting and owning up to his jokes.

It was good enough getting to pet Dusty, a dwarf ostrich, and feed Betsey, her neck all wrapped around us, but the real fun came when we were shown to the corral. Phil graciously let me go first, probably more to see whether I'd meet a swift and inglorious end, but I was more than happy to get on that bird.

Riding an ostrich, it turns out, is like nothing else in the world. You're sitting on this massive bird, feet clenched around its chest, hanging onto the wings for dear life while they push it out of the stall and take the hood off its head. (While the hood's on, they're completely docile, stupid enough to believe that if they can't see you, you're not on their back, getting ready to take them for a ride.) And then, all of a sudden, you are absolutely flying around the paddock (and no, I don't fail to see the irony in that choice of term), the ostrich seemingly trying to get you off its back by dint of the sheer speed it's running at. I think the look on HoJ's face in the second photo kind of sums up the entire experience.

I think the whole thing lasted about twenty seconds, but I couldn't stop laughing for a least twenty minutes afterwards. If you ever get the chance, go ride an ostrich.

When it came time to leave George, we took our time getting home, stopping off at the southernmost tip of Africa, Cape Agulhas, probably the furthest south I'll be in my life, since Antarctica doesn't hold much pull for me.

There is still much to tell about what we've been up to in Cape Town, but we're heading out to go find something fun to do inside in the rain, so that'll have to wait for another day.