Just over a week ago, my roommate, Bekah, and I returned to our bedroom some time after dark. With a quick flip of the light switch, I caught a glimpse of a meandering tail moving from beneath my purple dress hanging by the window. Without a thought, I exhaled in relief assuming it was only an iguana. (You know you are in India when a wandering lizard in your bedroom is nothing newsworthy). But, after my dress started dancing on its own, a shuffle and skitter of feet revealed the tail’s owner— a fat rat swinging mid-air from its front claws. A rat is world’s different than an iguana. Let the lizards congregate in my bedroom. But if a rat even so much as pokes a whisker through my door, it is better off dead.
Squeamish when it comes to potential disease-carrying rodents in foreign countries, I froze for a moment in the doorway before running frantically (and aimlessly) as far away from the rat as possible (forgetting there was a small flight of stairs just ahead of me). Bekah, raised on a farm in central Oregon, laughed heartily as she watched me fly for a moment, landing hard on the cement below. Fearless, she marched back in our room to grab the rat by its tail—not giving rabies or external parasites a second thought. As she reached her right hand out to grab the wiggling pink tail, Tiffany leapt into the room armed with a stick screaming, “Don’t touch it, Bekah! It will bite you!” Meanwhile, I had climbed up our shelving unit and was perched on the second-highest shelf, my fingers turning white with their grip and my face turning whiter with fear. With a slight wind-up and forceful swing of her stick, Tiffany whacked the rat somewhere in its middle, attempting to kill it with one firm blow. Just as I heard the noise of the mangled stick hitting the rodent, the power went out. After a second or two of silence, Bekah, Tiffany and I started screaming simultaneously. There we were in total blackness, a loose rodent scurrying somewhere out of sight. With my over-active imagination I pictured the worst: a bloodied rat (injured from its recent “beating”) running aimlessly across our bare feet—or worse—up a pant leg. After thirty or so terror-filled seconds, the lights came back on. The bulbs flickered at first, giving the feel of some twisted and fearsome fun house. A moment later, the electricity returned completely revealing the rat’s obese furry body still hanging from my purple dress. Bekah grabbed the dress, wrapped the creature in it and ran out our door, flinging the rat from the cloth in a parachute-like manner off our balcony, its body flailing mid-air as it disappeared into the nighttime darkness. I managed a muffled, “sick” then began to laugh with Bekah at the absurdity of the situation. “It could have been worse,” Tiffany said, Bekah and I agreeing. “It could have been a monkey or something.” I told her I’d rather have a monkey in my room than a rat any day.
Never say things like, “I’d rather have a monkey in my room than a rat any day”. From recent personal experience, I’ve found that statements like that have a way of triggering God’s clever humor. Sometimes instantly. The day after the rat incident, a monkey was found perched on the ledge just outside our door. When I say “monkey”, I am not referencing some sweet, furry, banana-eating Curious George stuffed animal-type monkey. No, Indian monkeys are quite the opposite. Nasty, greedy and manipulative, it seems they find their greatest pleasure in tormenting human beings. Last October, a deputy mayor in New Dehli was even attacked by a “horde of wild monkeys”, thrown from his roof and killed. Indian monkeys are seriously vicious. This monkey was no different. After an evening of twenty or so girls in the orphanage chasing the monkey with sticks, he finally left the property. The strangest part was that monkeys are no where to be found on Rameswaram Island. They don’t live here. The girls concluded that this one must have hitched a ride on a fruit truck, conveniently choosing the ledge outside our room as his final destination the day after we thanked the Lord our rat visitor was not a monkey. Such luck.
After one too many animal encounters in our bedroom, I was feeling ready to breathe some “new air” outside the compound walls. But, because of the current dangerous political circumstances, and after a lot of prayer and personal surrender, I had finally realized that venturing outside the compound walls was not going to happen. Soon after I had come to terms with staying put and focusing on the work God has given me here on campus, Pastor Appa called to tell me to pack for three days because Justin, Bekah, Tiffany and I would be taking a road trip to Kerala (the state just west of Tamil Nadu). A timely answered prayer. We were ecstatic at the thought of leaving campus for awhile and exploring Kerala—a state who’s rumored beauty we had all heard about more than once. Pastor Appa told us only two things, “You will leave tomorrow for three days” and “you will bring back a male goat” (the extreme short-term notice and request to bring livestock back from a vacation once again reminded me just how far away from home I am). The appointed three days turned into a week of visiting destinations all over Kerala—a few of which I wrote about in my journal. The following are selected excerpts from the trip:
September 29, 2008
After nine hours in a diesel van—the majority spent in extreme car sickness, rolling around like a loose marble in the back of the van without a seatbelt (I don’t do well with rigid switchbacks and potholes half the size of the vehicle)—our team arrived in Kerala. I had missed most of the sites as we bobbed along, swerving in and out of cattle, pedestrians, and logs in the road. What I could see was limited to the perceptual view point of my back as I lay flat on a grass mat in the rear of the van between towers of luggage. As night approached, I noticed winding mangroves, bent date palms and coconut palms growing in a canopy of green above us. I sat up to get a better view. Reuben, our driver, told us, “We’re in Kerala now!”
I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, where she steps out of black-and-white Kansas into Oz in Technicolor. Kerala was just a border line from Tamil Nadu—but worlds different with its endless greenery, waterfalls, and rigid cliffsides. Even the air felt fresher. It reminded me of what I would imagine a jungle in South America might look like.
Reuben stopped at a banana stand to buy fruit for the remainder of our journey. “Kerala is known for bananas,” he told me as he stepped from the van, pointing out yellow, green, purple and red varieties—each a different size. In my “fruit naivety” I had always assumed there was only one type of banana—the “normal” type you find in the produce aisle at an Alberston’s in Washington state. I felt enlightened. Reuben stepped back in the van, dropping a newspaper parcel wrapped in twine on my lap. I unwound the twine and peeled back the newspaper revealing fifty or so miniature bananas no bigger than my thumb. We laughed as we ate the bananas, marveling at their miniscule size.
Tired and road weary, we watched darkness seep in from our respective window views before we reached our hotel this evening. Kerala is beautiful at night. I can’t wait to see it in tomorrow’s light.
September 30, 2008
Today there was more driving and more banana eating. We also ate cubes of papaya while sipping on cardamom tea at our first stop in Amboori—We Care International—a nonprofit devoted to the education of widowed and abandoned mothers and daughters.
When asked if we’d like fresh papaya, I didn’t expect “fresh” to mean a man literally scaling a papaya tree, his arms and legs wrapped around the trunk the way a toddler clings to the calves of their mom or dad. After scooting his way to the leafy top, he whacked a fruit stem with his curved knife, and crawled back down—as easily as he went up—with a gourd-shaped papaya, speckled in yellows and greens.
While eating the papaya, its texture dissolving quickly on our tongues into a lingering mild sweetness, we listened to the founder, Don Hargate, tell us his story. How he came to Kerala, how his wife, Carol, is a part-time professor and a full-time human rights advocate, and how he dearly loves the women and young girls that he serves like they are his own family. Don was one of the first white people we had seen since arriving in India. It was both strange and refreshing greeting someone with a handshake and not having to pause or repeat words for clarity.
After hours of discussion on the veranda of We Care International, we prayed with Don and his Indian “family”. Just after the “amens”, Reuben pointed to the top of a mountain we could see from the view of the veranda. As I was pondering the beauty of the curved mountainside, Reuben told us to head back to the van. “That’s where we’re going,” he said. “To the mountain?” Bekah asked.
“Yes…we’re going to climb.”
We did climb, for two or three miles, up rigid switchbacks in our flip flops. Ben, our Indian “guide”, was in his polished loafers. The lack of appropriate hiking foot wear was obvious as at least one of us managed to slip and slide every few minutes. At one point I lost all grounding and fell directly onto by backside to which Ben (who knows very little English) shouted out “Booty protection!” I just laughed, perplexed at how he thought of such an accurate phrase. Thank the Lord for blessing me with more-than-adequate “booty protection” for such spills.
The higher we climbed, the broader the view became. Bekah and I paced ahead, reaching a grassy outlook at the peak. We stood, wind-blown and awe-filled at the valley and rivers far below us. To our left was a large Hindu temple—its hall-like entrance covered in empty coke bottles filled with coconut oil and half-burnt incense sticks. Hindu shrines and temples are often intentionally built at the highest crowns of hills or mountains.
Assuming we had conquered the mountain, Bekah and I sat on a knobby rock covered in sun-burnt grass, waiting for the rest of the group to reach us. Twenty minutes later, we took a short “walk” along the cliff’s edge, only to find another higher peak beyond us—crowned at the top with a giant white stone cross. “How did we miss that?” we asked each other, shocked. Justin had already made it to the summit as he was perched on the cross, his legs dangling off the edge of the stone statue.
The last leg of the hike was the hardest, steepest, and most overgrown. I couldn’t help but reflect on the blatant symbolism shining through it all—how we assumed we were at the “top”, but realized the true summit was found in the presence of the cross. The road to the cross was difficult to reach, but once we reached the peak, we could see so much more from that vantage point. It was powerful. There was a sense of reverence at the top of that hill.
October 2, 2008
After a morning of walking along a lake side in a scenic park, watching mugger crocodiles and eating salted gooseberries, our van made its way to the Kerala ocean side. We stayed at a populated beach until sunset.
As the crowds tapered, a work-worn Indian woman with a basket resting on her head repeatedly approached us in attempts to sell us her fruit. After two or three refusals, she continued to follow—until we set a grass mat on the water-pressed sand and sat down to read. Her name was Chanda, Tiffany found out after agreeing to buy a pineapple.
Chanda cut the fruit in angled slices as she told us about her family—two sons and two daughters. With sincere graciousness, she thanked Tiffany for being her first and only customer of the day. Sales were hard—even on a popular beach. “And what about your husband?” Tiffany asked. A question that triggered trembling cheeks, Chanda’s hand lifting her purple sari over her face to fight tears that had already sprung from little droplets into streaks covering her face. She told us he had died just two months before from a heart attack.
We were able to pray for Chanda there on the grass mat. We prayed for increased hope, but my stomach felt sick at the prospects of her life—a single mother of four providing for her children through weak fruit sales. I imagine there are days she sells nothing at all—returning home with a basket of rotting fruit and a crushed spirit. I really wanted to believe that God will supply that hope to Chanda, but it hurt to look at her with her eyes shut as we prayed, tears still rolling and lips still trembling. After we finished, Tiffany bought the rest of the fruit in Chanda’s basket. She couldn’t stop smiling at Tiffany’s kindness. I was thrilled to see a glimpse of hope in Chanda…hope for today.
The days in Kerala were full. Full of a variety of experiences, from riding elephants through coconut groves, to visiting tea plantations, to moments of personal connection with people like Chanda. Another nine hours in the van brought us safely back to the compound in Rameswaram after a week on the road.
Squeamish when it comes to potential disease-carrying rodents in foreign countries, I froze for a moment in the doorway before running frantically (and aimlessly) as far away from the rat as possible (forgetting there was a small flight of stairs just ahead of me). Bekah, raised on a farm in central Oregon, laughed heartily as she watched me fly for a moment, landing hard on the cement below. Fearless, she marched back in our room to grab the rat by its tail—not giving rabies or external parasites a second thought. As she reached her right hand out to grab the wiggling pink tail, Tiffany leapt into the room armed with a stick screaming, “Don’t touch it, Bekah! It will bite you!” Meanwhile, I had climbed up our shelving unit and was perched on the second-highest shelf, my fingers turning white with their grip and my face turning whiter with fear. With a slight wind-up and forceful swing of her stick, Tiffany whacked the rat somewhere in its middle, attempting to kill it with one firm blow. Just as I heard the noise of the mangled stick hitting the rodent, the power went out. After a second or two of silence, Bekah, Tiffany and I started screaming simultaneously. There we were in total blackness, a loose rodent scurrying somewhere out of sight. With my over-active imagination I pictured the worst: a bloodied rat (injured from its recent “beating”) running aimlessly across our bare feet—or worse—up a pant leg. After thirty or so terror-filled seconds, the lights came back on. The bulbs flickered at first, giving the feel of some twisted and fearsome fun house. A moment later, the electricity returned completely revealing the rat’s obese furry body still hanging from my purple dress. Bekah grabbed the dress, wrapped the creature in it and ran out our door, flinging the rat from the cloth in a parachute-like manner off our balcony, its body flailing mid-air as it disappeared into the nighttime darkness. I managed a muffled, “sick” then began to laugh with Bekah at the absurdity of the situation. “It could have been worse,” Tiffany said, Bekah and I agreeing. “It could have been a monkey or something.” I told her I’d rather have a monkey in my room than a rat any day.
Never say things like, “I’d rather have a monkey in my room than a rat any day”. From recent personal experience, I’ve found that statements like that have a way of triggering God’s clever humor. Sometimes instantly. The day after the rat incident, a monkey was found perched on the ledge just outside our door. When I say “monkey”, I am not referencing some sweet, furry, banana-eating Curious George stuffed animal-type monkey. No, Indian monkeys are quite the opposite. Nasty, greedy and manipulative, it seems they find their greatest pleasure in tormenting human beings. Last October, a deputy mayor in New Dehli was even attacked by a “horde of wild monkeys”, thrown from his roof and killed. Indian monkeys are seriously vicious. This monkey was no different. After an evening of twenty or so girls in the orphanage chasing the monkey with sticks, he finally left the property. The strangest part was that monkeys are no where to be found on Rameswaram Island. They don’t live here. The girls concluded that this one must have hitched a ride on a fruit truck, conveniently choosing the ledge outside our room as his final destination the day after we thanked the Lord our rat visitor was not a monkey. Such luck.
After one too many animal encounters in our bedroom, I was feeling ready to breathe some “new air” outside the compound walls. But, because of the current dangerous political circumstances, and after a lot of prayer and personal surrender, I had finally realized that venturing outside the compound walls was not going to happen. Soon after I had come to terms with staying put and focusing on the work God has given me here on campus, Pastor Appa called to tell me to pack for three days because Justin, Bekah, Tiffany and I would be taking a road trip to Kerala (the state just west of Tamil Nadu). A timely answered prayer. We were ecstatic at the thought of leaving campus for awhile and exploring Kerala—a state who’s rumored beauty we had all heard about more than once. Pastor Appa told us only two things, “You will leave tomorrow for three days” and “you will bring back a male goat” (the extreme short-term notice and request to bring livestock back from a vacation once again reminded me just how far away from home I am). The appointed three days turned into a week of visiting destinations all over Kerala—a few of which I wrote about in my journal. The following are selected excerpts from the trip:
September 29, 2008
After nine hours in a diesel van—the majority spent in extreme car sickness, rolling around like a loose marble in the back of the van without a seatbelt (I don’t do well with rigid switchbacks and potholes half the size of the vehicle)—our team arrived in Kerala. I had missed most of the sites as we bobbed along, swerving in and out of cattle, pedestrians, and logs in the road. What I could see was limited to the perceptual view point of my back as I lay flat on a grass mat in the rear of the van between towers of luggage. As night approached, I noticed winding mangroves, bent date palms and coconut palms growing in a canopy of green above us. I sat up to get a better view. Reuben, our driver, told us, “We’re in Kerala now!”
I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, where she steps out of black-and-white Kansas into Oz in Technicolor. Kerala was just a border line from Tamil Nadu—but worlds different with its endless greenery, waterfalls, and rigid cliffsides. Even the air felt fresher. It reminded me of what I would imagine a jungle in South America might look like.
Reuben stopped at a banana stand to buy fruit for the remainder of our journey. “Kerala is known for bananas,” he told me as he stepped from the van, pointing out yellow, green, purple and red varieties—each a different size. In my “fruit naivety” I had always assumed there was only one type of banana—the “normal” type you find in the produce aisle at an Alberston’s in Washington state. I felt enlightened. Reuben stepped back in the van, dropping a newspaper parcel wrapped in twine on my lap. I unwound the twine and peeled back the newspaper revealing fifty or so miniature bananas no bigger than my thumb. We laughed as we ate the bananas, marveling at their miniscule size.
Tired and road weary, we watched darkness seep in from our respective window views before we reached our hotel this evening. Kerala is beautiful at night. I can’t wait to see it in tomorrow’s light.
September 30, 2008
Today there was more driving and more banana eating. We also ate cubes of papaya while sipping on cardamom tea at our first stop in Amboori—We Care International—a nonprofit devoted to the education of widowed and abandoned mothers and daughters.
When asked if we’d like fresh papaya, I didn’t expect “fresh” to mean a man literally scaling a papaya tree, his arms and legs wrapped around the trunk the way a toddler clings to the calves of their mom or dad. After scooting his way to the leafy top, he whacked a fruit stem with his curved knife, and crawled back down—as easily as he went up—with a gourd-shaped papaya, speckled in yellows and greens.
While eating the papaya, its texture dissolving quickly on our tongues into a lingering mild sweetness, we listened to the founder, Don Hargate, tell us his story. How he came to Kerala, how his wife, Carol, is a part-time professor and a full-time human rights advocate, and how he dearly loves the women and young girls that he serves like they are his own family. Don was one of the first white people we had seen since arriving in India. It was both strange and refreshing greeting someone with a handshake and not having to pause or repeat words for clarity.
After hours of discussion on the veranda of We Care International, we prayed with Don and his Indian “family”. Just after the “amens”, Reuben pointed to the top of a mountain we could see from the view of the veranda. As I was pondering the beauty of the curved mountainside, Reuben told us to head back to the van. “That’s where we’re going,” he said. “To the mountain?” Bekah asked.
“Yes…we’re going to climb.”
We did climb, for two or three miles, up rigid switchbacks in our flip flops. Ben, our Indian “guide”, was in his polished loafers. The lack of appropriate hiking foot wear was obvious as at least one of us managed to slip and slide every few minutes. At one point I lost all grounding and fell directly onto by backside to which Ben (who knows very little English) shouted out “Booty protection!” I just laughed, perplexed at how he thought of such an accurate phrase. Thank the Lord for blessing me with more-than-adequate “booty protection” for such spills.
The higher we climbed, the broader the view became. Bekah and I paced ahead, reaching a grassy outlook at the peak. We stood, wind-blown and awe-filled at the valley and rivers far below us. To our left was a large Hindu temple—its hall-like entrance covered in empty coke bottles filled with coconut oil and half-burnt incense sticks. Hindu shrines and temples are often intentionally built at the highest crowns of hills or mountains.
Assuming we had conquered the mountain, Bekah and I sat on a knobby rock covered in sun-burnt grass, waiting for the rest of the group to reach us. Twenty minutes later, we took a short “walk” along the cliff’s edge, only to find another higher peak beyond us—crowned at the top with a giant white stone cross. “How did we miss that?” we asked each other, shocked. Justin had already made it to the summit as he was perched on the cross, his legs dangling off the edge of the stone statue.
The last leg of the hike was the hardest, steepest, and most overgrown. I couldn’t help but reflect on the blatant symbolism shining through it all—how we assumed we were at the “top”, but realized the true summit was found in the presence of the cross. The road to the cross was difficult to reach, but once we reached the peak, we could see so much more from that vantage point. It was powerful. There was a sense of reverence at the top of that hill.
October 2, 2008
After a morning of walking along a lake side in a scenic park, watching mugger crocodiles and eating salted gooseberries, our van made its way to the Kerala ocean side. We stayed at a populated beach until sunset.
As the crowds tapered, a work-worn Indian woman with a basket resting on her head repeatedly approached us in attempts to sell us her fruit. After two or three refusals, she continued to follow—until we set a grass mat on the water-pressed sand and sat down to read. Her name was Chanda, Tiffany found out after agreeing to buy a pineapple.
Chanda cut the fruit in angled slices as she told us about her family—two sons and two daughters. With sincere graciousness, she thanked Tiffany for being her first and only customer of the day. Sales were hard—even on a popular beach. “And what about your husband?” Tiffany asked. A question that triggered trembling cheeks, Chanda’s hand lifting her purple sari over her face to fight tears that had already sprung from little droplets into streaks covering her face. She told us he had died just two months before from a heart attack.
We were able to pray for Chanda there on the grass mat. We prayed for increased hope, but my stomach felt sick at the prospects of her life—a single mother of four providing for her children through weak fruit sales. I imagine there are days she sells nothing at all—returning home with a basket of rotting fruit and a crushed spirit. I really wanted to believe that God will supply that hope to Chanda, but it hurt to look at her with her eyes shut as we prayed, tears still rolling and lips still trembling. After we finished, Tiffany bought the rest of the fruit in Chanda’s basket. She couldn’t stop smiling at Tiffany’s kindness. I was thrilled to see a glimpse of hope in Chanda…hope for today.
The days in Kerala were full. Full of a variety of experiences, from riding elephants through coconut groves, to visiting tea plantations, to moments of personal connection with people like Chanda. Another nine hours in the van brought us safely back to the compound in Rameswaram after a week on the road.
The day after returning from Kerala, Tiffany approached me at the desk in the office with a small shoebox. She lifted the lid and peeled back a black t-shirt lining the inside to reveal two newborn chipmunks, their eyes still closed. “Look what I found in my room this morning,” she said smiling, “They crawled through a hole above the air conditioner—I can’t find their mom anywhere.” She was convinced that we could be their new “moms” and pulled out an eyedropper that she had been feeding them milk from. Just another animal encounter to remind us that we were back on campus. Admittedly, the chipmunks are quite adorable…and I will take them over a rat any day.
Our new "pet" chipmunks, Jack and Olive.
The view after a long hike
One of Kerala's beautiful beaches 
Tiffany, Chanda, and I 
Overlooking the tea fields at sunset
Three stages of tea 
Abbie! I love hearing your stories, adventures, and insights. And I am glad you are doing well and were able to have a few days outside of the campus. I miss you loads and pray for you often. Your stories are funny to me and I am reminded very much of Sri Lanka and how geckos crawling into my wardrobe were a regular, daily occurance (but that is sick about the rat!) Love you!
ReplyDeleteummm...remember that time when there was the huge spider in our garage? and you were like "WE need to get it" and then you were perched on a chair while i was getting it? this story reminded me of that. ha. i'd rather have a "huge" spider than a rat or a monkey. :)
ReplyDelete