Eating with your fingers

Each time it rains a lot I notice a fear in my mind, I wonder if it is time for the monsoon flooding; and I wonder how I will react to the wading through water sometimes past my knees. Although I’m sure it is something you come accustomed to with some time and encouragement from those who’ve done it many times. I’m not totally clear on it, but it could be that only certain streets are affected by the monsoon waters, streets that have poor draining systems.

Yesterday was fun at SB, I helped check bags – clipped threads hanging on the bags and packaged a few. I had a wonderful assistant, a daughter of one of the ladies who must be about 8. She kept talking to me and I would try to listen for words that I knew, but most of the time I had very little idea what she was saying. I just kept smiling, nodding, saying “hyaN” which means yes. I did try to ask questions about her words but she looked at me like I was confusing. I found out yesterday that she is very ticklish and she loves to play. I wondered if we were going to get in trouble as I chased her around the small workplace.

Yesterday we ate two very nice, big meals. Mutton and rice for lunch (lamb) and for dinner out for a SB staff’s birthday (and friend) where we had several unique chicken sauce dishes, with rice, and roti (bread). It was truly amazing, but we were so full! At Bengali birthdays each person at the table says something encouraging to the one having the birthday. What a great tradition.

I’ve traveled around the city on my own a bit this week. I got lost almost every time I went somewhere new, I recognized a lot of streets they just weren’t the ones I needed to be taking for the particular destination I wanted to reach. But it was a good learning experience. At times I became a little flustered, but it’s this whole grace thing you have to give yourself and just keep telling yourself it’s really okay. So you take a wrong turn and can’t find the coffee shop after 15 minutes of walking from the metro, now I know the right road to take and somewhat of the shops found on the other roads. Though I must say I would rather not have been lost. I would say that I would have preferred not to be alone as well, but there is something in being alone. I’m not sure what it is, a freedom, a confidence that I am forced to have so people think I know what I’m doing (even though they may see me walk past their booth 2 or 3 times looking for my destination… hah that was embarrassing).

In addition to working at SB, I have gotten to go to a children’s daycare and help out a few hours in the afternoon. The kids are sweet, and the ladies working there are kind. The kids are beginning to get used to me, at one point I had two kids crying just because I was in the same room with them; honestly maybe my skin color… that was a sad time. But the older ones talk with me and play. The eldest girl, maybe 10 was helping me write my Bengali letters.

A week from today we leave for Bangladesh, intensive language study. I am going with two staff members of the ministry; I will study for about a month and return to India for further ministry learning and leading. Please pray for my language learning, I am excited to learn more. I just hope I can pick it up fairly quickly, I would love to communicate with the ladies at SB and at the daycare- and there are further benefits of speaking and with anyone in the city and hearing their lives if I only knew Bengali.

Please pray for the staff here, the ministry. They go all day every day of the week; they have a passion for the work they are doing in the city. They want to see more women offered freedom, an alternative work option to selling themselves. That is the problem, these ladies have no way of supporting themselves or their families; and because of the line of work they have been driven into, the culture says they should be rejected forever. The ministry is seeking to change that, and is changing that. You would never know the former lives these women had. Pray now that these women in particular would find spiritual freedom, the Truth we have in Christ.

Thank you for your prayers.