Live Below The Line Day two- Dal Curry and a birthday party.

Today, my sister Amber is turning 8!
I've eaten Indian food all day. I had Daliya for breakfast again (see yesterday's post)
and for dinner, Dal -(Split pulse curry) with rice. It was hard going to a kid's party and being so hungry, but not being able to eat anything. It did make me think though, about all the kids who don't get presents or nice food on their birthdays. That sounds pessimistic. Especially those for whom living to such an age is an achievement. It's not that I'm trying to be pessimistic. It's simply a reality that we usually try to ignore in favour of our own problems. I don't know if we can really afford to ignore our children, the next generation of the earth.

Dal with rice -Aprox cost; 

$1.27 - plus an extra portion of dal.

1/2 cup dried rice -$0.20
(For Dal)
1/2 cup lentils or split peas (I used toor dal) -0.30
1/4 tsp mustard seeds
1/4 tsp cumin seeds
1/8 tsp fenugreek
1/8 tsp turmeric - $0.02 (For all the spices together)
1/2 stem curry leaf -$0.04
3 tinned tomatoes -$0.45
1/3 onion -$0.13
1 clove garlic $0.10
1 teaspoons oil $0.03
(To garnish)
1/4 carrot chopped, $0.05
1 teaspoon chutney, $0.02
Pinch of salt $0.005 (Yes, I'm using half cents)

Cook the lentils until they are mushy. Toast the cumin and mustard seeds in the oil. Add the onion and cook. When it is translucent, add the tomatoes, garlic, and remaining spices. Pour in the mushy lentils, ideally cook until they are more of a paste than lentils. Then serve with rice. I had chopped carrot, and a teaspoon of chutney.

Inspired by the more authentic recipe at: http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/tomato-dal-andhra-tomato-dal/
You might also like to try this one http://onelifetoeat.com/2010/04/23/masoor-dal/

Live Below The Line day 1 -"Welcome to the third world"

I have now survived the first day of Live Below The Line 2015!

I woke up to a storm that had wiped out our power. We had no running water and no way of heating food.  "Welcome to the third world" I thought. Most people living in extreme poverty don't have electricity. (They'd have to pay the bill from $2.25 per day). Just as I was contemplating the value of cooked food, the power came back on.

Today, I had two meals, and the total food cost for the day was $2.10. I did publish a meal plan last week, but I've had to change that around when I realised that I won't have time to cook tomorrow afternoon since I'm (If weather is better) going to my little sister's birthday party.

For breakfast, I  made my bowl of spicy idian style porridge -vegetable "daliya", except with less vegetables than I'd like. It was okay, which is good because I'm going to have this for breakfast every day. ...I might change which spices I add each day to make it more interesting.

Meal 1 -Daliya -Indian style spicy porridge Aprox meal cost; $0.60

This is sometimes eaten as a healthy breakfast in India. It could also be a dinner. I don't know what my Indian sponsored children eat for breakfast, or if they even have breakfast, but I chose it for it's fibre content, it's cheapness, and the feel of being like a 'real meal' rather than being a simple breakfast.

50g (1/3 cup) kibbled wheat, or rye.
1 tomato from tin
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
teaspoon oil
Sliver of onion, chopped
1 Clove Garlic
1/5 carrot
1/5 of a chilli

Boil the kibbled wheat until it's cooked, you can do this the night before if you like, it takes about 10 minutes. In a seperate pan, toast the cumin seeds, add onion and garlic. Pour in the kibbled wheat, then add chopped carrot and chilli.

Inspired by the more authentic recipe at http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/vegetable-dalia/

Meal 2- Babenda -dish from Burkina Faso.Total cost; 1.50

According to what I read in a diet book, the taste of strong things like mushroom, and strong cheeses is very satisfying because it is similar to the taste of meat. ...Or something like that. If that's true, the people in Burkina Faso have it going on with Babenda. It's apparently one of the staples, so I bet Nouridine eats it.
I substituted their traditional fermented beans with miso paste, and dried fish with tinned fish.
This made a really filling dinner, and I have about 1/2 a cup of Babenda left over!

1/4 cup peanuts -$0.22
A large handful of silverbeat -$0.03 (Cost to grow)
1/2 Tin of Sardines - $0.64 (Saved the other two sardines for a snack later)
1 1/2 Tablespoons of miso paste -$0.42
1/2 cup rice -$0.20

Grind the peanuts and mix well with the sardines and miso paste. Add the raw rice, and grind it a little to break up the grains. Put it in a pot with the silverbeat and 1.5 cups water. Cover with a lid and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Stir in the silverbeat. Lid off, simmer until the rice is cooked, (About 15 minutes) then cover and let it sit and soak up all the water.

Inspired by the more authentic recipe at http://globaltableadventure.com/recipe/babenda/

My second trip to India.

Hello, welcome to my blog. If you are new and came just to read about my recent visit to India, this blog is all about my commitment to contribute as little as possible to human exploitation and poverty. Today I'm writing about my second short term mission trip to India.

I was signed up to a Cambodia Philippines team since the beginning of the year, but I switched teams at the last minute to a Sri Lanka team. I didn't truly want to go to Sri Lanka, but I believed God wanted me to switch to that team. About a week before I was supposed to leave home, I was told the Sri Lanka team had been cancelled due to political problems and the missionary pulling out. The three leaders and seven teenage girls including myself were to be sent to India instead. I was ecstatic about going back to the country I had fallen in love with the year before.

Before going to India, my team trained in the lord's boots camp and learned some basic building and ministry skills. If you are not familiar with Teen Missions' programme, you can read about it at http://www.teenmissions.org/about/

We got to Vijayawada, India late at night after two and a half days of traveling. The next day, we set up our living space and looked around the Teen Missions base. It had developed a lot since my visit eleven months before. 

Jan 2014, we made the concrete foundation for a duck pond.

Dec 2014, the completed duck pond next to the ready to harvest paddies

Jan 2014, Hanging out on a bench by the palm oil trees.

Dec 2014, Hanging out on the same bench.

Soon, we began our main project, building a wall around Teen Missions India. This would help them to meet new regulations and ultimately keep their ministry of training young Indian Christians going.

We arrived and it looked like this. Just a trail of concrete with half done steels sticking out of it. We would have to put moulds over the steels, and pour concrete into them to create pillars. Some of the steels needed to be tied first. Then we would be able to start laying bricks in the gaps between the pillars.

 Most of the time someone was working in the kitchen helping our cook leader, and someone was on prayer duty, or someone was sick, and we sometimes had only four team members on the worksite, but we stuck to our work constantly. We seemed to get a lot done quickly.

And then we learned -I  re-learned, the art of laying bricks "Indian style". The method was not quite the same as the one we practiced every day of bootcamp, because we had different tools and a different kind of brick. This photo was taken shortly before we finished. We finished all the lower level concrete pillars of the wall, half of the upper level pillars, and layed four half sections and a quarter section of bricks. We didn't have enough time or people to finish the entire wall, but we got a good start on it. This wall needs to be eight feet high. Other people in India are finishing it now.

In break times and during our evening devotion sessions, and when they helped us with our work, we got to know the Indian BMW students. BMW stands for Bible, Missions, and Work. These girls and boys went through a Teen Missions summer programme just like ours; their teams travel within India rather than overseas, so they got to help their own people. And now they are studying

In our last week, we got to visit the WON church again. (My other team had worked with them for a week last time) We helped them to level out the rubble of a building they had demolished ready to build the foundations of a new church, and to move some firewood, and to straighten out fence posts and pull weeds. I was really excited to see that they are now running their orphanage out of the sight that we did a lot of work on last year.

We played games with these children and performed a puppet show play for them, telling them a shepherd story Jesus told. Then we gave them each of them some special presents, a pair of slip on shoes, and some writing books and pens, and a wordless bracelet or small gift. They seemed thrilled with their present.

We also visited the leprosy colony, where I had also worked last year. It was set up many years ago as a place to house those effected by the terrible skin disease, leprosy, away from society. Today, there are still a few people living there who have the scars and deformation of leprosy, but their children also live there. We were told this was a begging supported community. Teen Missions has been trying to build relationships with this community. The children performed a little song for us.

We spent a day in Hyderabad before we left, and met some of our awesome brothers and sisters in Christ there. It was really great fellowship. I will always remember the little music session we had in a corner of their church hall where they taught us a song in Telugu, and we jammed, in English, in Telugu, in Spanish, in Maori, and in some other languages, knowing God heard all of it the same.

We also got to do some last minute tourism, taking one last look around the country we had mysteriously fallen in love with along the way.

Following a long wait in Hyderabad airport as our flight was delayed, and trying to stay awake until boarding just before midnight, and a really uncomfortable nap on the plane, and a meal at about 2am, I found myself at Singapore airport trying to work out why everyone didn't look Indian. I was tired. Cut me some slack. We met up with the South Africa Teen Missions team, who were travelling back on the same flight to Australia.  We spent five days in Tewantin, Australia, listening to more sermons and thinking about keeping our commitments and relationships with God once we returned home. This is one reason why Teen Missions is a unique experience that changes people. 

I hope you enjoyed reading about this trip. Last year my post about my missions trip got more views than any other post on this blog, but I'd really like it if you look at some of my other posts. I'd love it even more if you followed my blog or left comments. But what would be even more wonderful is if you used the information on it to influence the things you buy. That could have a really lasting effect on other people.

My trip to India

Recently, I went on a short term missions trip across India with Teen Missions. It was a great experience.

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.