Teen Missions is an organisation dedicated to training young people for futures in missionary work and Christian service. Teenagers are involved with Teen Missions during their summer school holidays. They are trained at a boot camp and then go overseas in teams and help a charity, church, or mission there.
My team was made up of fifteen people; Four leaders and eleven team members from Australia and New Zealand. We trained for ten days at a boot camp in Queensland, Australia. My team's work was based in Vijayawada. We traveled by train from Madras where our plain had landed, to Vijayawada. This was a very exciting 7 hour train ride.
We were comfortably seated on sleeper class trains, which has partitions throughout the cabin. Three bunks hang off each side of each partition. I loved looking out train windows and seeing the landscape in India for the first time. I saw a lot of farmland; cotton and tea fields, and paddocks of buffalo. There was also a lot of cultivation and ponds. Sales people walked up and down the aisles with boxes of delicious smelling food items. None of us had exchanged our personal money into rupees yet, but one friend of mine was given a free piece of food. I couldn't tell what it actually was but it was crunchy, like deep fried egg, and tasted like salt, chilli, and cumin.
That train ride was also my first experience of beggars. When I first saw a crippled Indian man crawling through the aisle and clinking coins in his hand, I was a little shocked by the sight of his permanently folded legs, but I was not afraid. He was my fellow human being. Not a monster that I should fear. I had always heard about these people; now I was seeing one. Is it true that the injuries are inflicted by kidnappers so they will make more money? A documentary I had watched had indicated that child beggars in India were often forced to beg give their funds to criminals. How then could you help these people? I had thought. What if you gave them food? I had no food, and I had no money. I didn't know which language the man spoke, but I didn't make eye contact and he passed by. A few minutes latter a blind beggar followed him.
When we got to Vijayawada, we did some work with an orphanage run by Win Our Natives churches. At boot camp, we had learned to lay bricks, now we assisted a professional builder to build a small room, as well as playing with orphans, and children who lived nearby to the building site.
After a week of working there, we had almost finished the wall and it was time to move on. For the next week and a half, we worked at the Teen Missions India base. This is where Indian Teen Missions participants are trained. Unlike us, they do not go overseas, but travel within their own country and reach their own people. At each Teen Missions base, a bible college is run during the year. We got to know the Indian students here. Our tasks were concreting, and cleaning. We built the foundation for a duck pond and made concrete beams. We also cleaned out a storage room, and I spent a day dusting behind their staircase.
While we were at the Teen Missions base, we got to do a puppet show at a school, and also did some sightseeing and street evangelism.
Street evangelism was a new experience for me. We did it nicely, politely asking people if they would like a tract and giving them one in their native language. We didn't speak it so we had to rely on English's popularity as a second language. We also just asked people if we could pray for them, which many people liked. We also left gospel tracts sitting around, and threw them into car windows.
That Sunday, we ran Sunday schools in rural village churches.
The last place we worked was a Leprosy Missions shelter. Leprosy is a disease that effects the skin and nerves. It is slow to develop and progress, but as it progresses, it can cause the loss of feeling or use in fingers and limbs. This makes it hard for people to work and they are discriminated against. The disease can be treated with antibiotics, but there is such a fear of leprosy in society that lepers are often outcast from society. We met many people and families affected by leprosy. The children were very sweet and we got to play with them, hold them, and pray for them. We also built a dirt road around some of their houses.
We left India via Delhi. We traveled there on a train. We spent 27 hours on a train. On this train, we met a kid called Prince, who spoke very good English.We hung out with him for a long time. As we got into the North the weather got colder. We visited Agra, which has some historical sights like the Taj Mahal. We also saw historical sights in Delhi.
This has been a very long post. I hope you enjoyed hearing about my trip.
Wow, you are very brave to go to India. I love your compassion. You don't judge anyone, but accept them for who they are. I was interested in the beggars that you mention. How can people help these people without keeping them in continued slavary of begging, or do you think they are o.k with this way of life?
ReplyDeleteI think the police have to become more effective in preventing that kind of exploitation.
ReplyDeleteI met a lady at a train station who was begging with her children. The team wondered if they were employed by a small shop in the station because they were getting tourists to buy them packets of chips and biscuits, and then they would return the unopened packets to be sold again. They could not speak English at all, but the lady caught my attention and gestured me toward the shop. I gestured her toward another stand that sold hot food and bought her a small meal, which she ate, and she gave some to her baby. Later, she came back to me and gestured to show me she was smiling.