Compassion programs in Bangladesh and Nepal

I know I sort of dropped off about blogging on my trip to South Asia last October, but there was one thing I wanted to be sure to tell you about.

I had the opportunity to visit a variety of compassionate ministry projects in action that are funded through your giving to Nazarene Compassionate Ministries (ncm.org). I'd read about a lot of these ministries but to see them on the ground and the real people who are positively affected was really cool.

For background, many of NCM's projects are run through local churches and volunteers or employees out of local churches. This means that the church is the center and the driver of any activity designed to lift people out of poverty. The church helps the people in its village and surrounding villages with no strings attached -- no one is forced to go to church and they don't have to be a Christian or convert. In fact, many of the people who are participants in the projects are adherents to other religions. At the same time, spiritual teaching may sometimes be offered in conjunction with a project, but it's not forced on anyone. These projects are conducted entirely on the motive of love for fellow man and a desire to improve their lives holistically -- relationally, physically, spiritually and emotionally.

First of all, there is something called a compost project. I saw several of these in rural villages in the south of Bangladesh. Local churches teach people how to dig a square-shaped hole in the ground and then fill the pits with the dung from the many cows that are present in the village. The material turns into compost that can be used as fertilizer to make their crops more abundant and healthy.

Here's a picture of a woman with her compost pit.

Another type of project is a fish pond. Since meat from cows and chickens is probably very expensive and limited, people in Bangladesh eat a lot of fish. NCM projects enable people to dig ponds and fill them with fish, which multiply and become plentiful. It's easy enough to cast nets or fish with a stick and string and hook to harvest the fish and sell them for a profit which enables the owners to buy things they need. They can also eat them for a source of inexpensive protein.

In one project, a family is growing mahogany trees, a very expensive type of tree because the wood is very precious around the world for building furniture and knick knacks. This is a long-term project because the trees will have to grow for many years before they can be harvested.

A seed project is when NCM provides a small scale farming family with seeds or seedlings which they can plant and nurture until they're ready to harvest. From the harvest the family will collect new seeds, as well as sell some of the vegetables for project and eat the rest of the harvest. This creates long-term sustainable living for a family, who may share the new seeds with neighbors who can then reproduce the project on their own land. Here's a property in Nepal where many of the crops are from such a seed project.

The last project, which may be my favorite because I am a big fan of entrepreneurism: Self-help groups. Groups of women and teenage girls band together to save small bits of cash that they have and pool their savings as a group until they have enough to pay out a loan to one of the group members. The one receiving the loan uses it to buy materials to start a small business. With the profits from the business, the woman pays back to the loan to the group, who are still saving, and in turn they give out more loans to group members. Together, they work toward raising themselves and their families out of poverty.

The woman in this picture used her loan to buy a sewing machine and materials to make clothes which she can then sell as her own small business.

The man in this picture started a small snack shop with the loan his wife took out from the group, and together they are building their small business through his wife's entrepreneurism. Although some of the men in the village were derisive of a woman getting into business, this man said he was really proud of his wife for her hard work and business-mind and how she was providing for their family. He defended her from some of the men's criticism, which I thought was really cool.

Another major initiative of NCM is to establish child development centers (CDC). These are small educational centers where village children can come to learn spiritual truth, but also basic hygiene, and to be educated if they cannot go to a regular school -- so they might learn math, reading, English, and other basic skills. They sing songs and also play together and maybe get a hot meal or snack. Some of these CDCs are supplemental to the education the children are already getting, so they might get up at 5:30 a.m. and go to the CDC from 6 to 7 before school, or they might go to the CDC after school. Many of the children are able to participate in CDCs because of people like you who sponsor them for about $25 a month. We visited several CDCs and got to see how happy and energetic the children were.

All in all, I was very impressed with meeting all the individuals who are participating in these NCM projects. The biggest thing I noticed was how full of hope they were. They believed that by doing their part in these projects, they could improve their lives and provide for their families in better ways. They could see a way up from their previous circumstances. I have always respected how NCM operates and the vision that it has, as well as the care it takes to do only good and not harm in the way it conducts its social enterprises. But my respect only deepened after seeing the projects and the people for myself.

I also really enjoyed the chance to just chat (through a translator) with the women in the self-help groups, who had loads of questions. We asked each other what we like to eat in our own cultures, what our husbands are like, and just normal things about daily life. They were simply charming and I was sorry that I couldn't spend a few days with them, instead of a few hours.

Hühnerleber

The other day I went to the store and on a whim decided to buy some chicken livers.

I know, I know. Hey, we both like breaded, deep fried chicken livers. Don't judge. It sounded good.

Trouble was, I hadn't looked up the word for "liver" before I went. I figured with a little pantomime it would be easy enough, though.

At the meat counter I said, "Haben Sie Hähnchen..." and then I pointed to my liver. The woman seemed confused. She guessed, in German, "chicken wings" and then "chicken breast" and I kept saying, "Nein" and pointing more emphatically at my lower right side (never mind that I'm not entirely sure which side the liver is on). Then she asked me if I wanted chicken stomach. NO, definitely not. She asked another lady behind the counter and I heard the word "English" meaning they were saying that this customer probably only speaks English. Both women agreed in German they didn't know what I wanted. I said "organs" in English but still we weren't communicating. Another customer walked up and joined the guessing game. Finally she said, "Leber?" and I knew that was it. "Ja, ja!" I said, happily. The butcher pointed to a frozen meat section and I went over and sure enough, there was a package of frozen Hühnerleber.

And so we had breaded, deep-fried chicken livers last night for dinner. Yum!

King's Day, or Epiphany

I like to think that the whole country of Germany took the day off for my birthday on January 6.

In actuality, it is a national holiday to celebrate Epiphany, a time to celebrate when the wise men found and worshiped the child Jesus.

I really enjoyed having the day off for my birthday. After a leisurely morning, I decided to take advantage of the rare brilliant sunlight to go for a coffee in our neighboring medieval village of Schaffhausen.

While there, I noticed the different bakeries had kiosks outside their shops selling Königkuchen, or King's cakes. I remembered that in some cultures, these cakes are served on January 6 to help commemorate the day, and a tiny plastic baby Jesus or sometimes a small king, is embedded in one of the pieces of cake, and one lucky person will find it by presumably biting down on it while eating the cake. (There's a reason we don't have these in the States. It is actually illegal to embed an non-edible item in a confection.)

I thought it would be fun to try out one of the cakes, since I've never had one before.

I bought the smallest one they had and excitedly
brought it home to try it out. It was an odd shaped round loaf of bread with bulges here and there, and with granulated sugar and sliced almonds on top and raisins inside. I cut a triangle out and ate it. I was surprised, but shouldn't have been, when I almost broke a tooth on something very hard. I pulled out a little white plastic figure of a magi.

I guess that means I get to wear the golden paper crown that came with it. :-)

I'm sorry to say the Swiss King cake was very disappointing. It was really just dry bread. I was expecting something more confectionary, or at least a good dense moist bread, since the Swiss do bread so well. Maybe it wasn't fresh anymore or I should have gone to a different bakery. Well, I wasn't impressed.

That evening, Andrew blindfolded me, took me on a long meandering drive and then carefully led me to the house of a fellow missionary family who hosted a surprise get together for my birthday. Friends from the village came by for delicious cupcakes, cookies and ice cream and decaf coffee. We gathered around the table playing games and laughing. It was a good time. And I received some beautiful roses!

All in all, it was a fun Epiphany, or birthday.

Closing 2013, starting 2014

With Christmas and New Year Day already behind us, we would like to wish you many blessings in 2014! We hope that you spent an Advent season full of love and loved ones, and that you anticipate many good things in the coming year.

Christmas this year was much different from last year. The only common denominator was that it was our second year in a row away from our home and family. Last year we spent the week exploring Croatia on our own, and while we enjoyed the unfamiliar and the adventure, it was a bit too lonely for our liking (except when some friends returned from their own trip and spent New Year's Eve with us). It was also a time of worry, as Andrew's dad was hospitalized due to a heart attack (which thankfully he has fully recovered from).

This year we decided to stay put in Busingen, where, if we were going to be alone, at least we would have the comfort of our own bed, our own kitchen and our own stuff.

It turns out that it was a very social Christmas after all. We hosted a Christmas Eve Day brunch at our flat with overnight blueberry cream cheese French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee, and much laughing and storytelling among some friends whom we knew were also away from their families at this time of year.

That evening we enjoyed a cultural Christmas experience that was very warm and special, at the home of our friends Thomas and Cornelia. They introduced us to a Swiss/German Christmas tradition of eating together, reading the Christmas story from the Bible, singing some Christmas songs and then sharing small gifts with one another. We felt privileged and blessed to share in this sacred family time, being counted as part of their family for the night.

About 2:30 a.m. on Christmas morning, we set the alarm so we could get up and Skype with Gina's family, who traditionally celebrate on Christmas Eve. It was 6:30 p.m. their time. We had fun laughing with them, watching them open gifts and seeing our niece Scarlett opening toys for the first time, since she is just 1 1/2 years old. 

On Christmas morning, I made Andrew's family's traditional pigs 'n a blanket, with hot dogs, cheese and canned crescent rolls. We opened a few gifts. Then we spent the lunchtime and afternoon with fellow missionaries and friends Martin and Cezi, who had family visiting from Albania. We also invited Gina's chiropractor, who kindly joined us for the delicious homemade Italian and Albanian food.

That evening we Skyped with Andrew's family who traditionally celebrate on Christmas morning. We again watched them open gifts, and then they passed around the computer so we could chat with different people.

We concluded the day with Gina's tradition of watching George C. Scott's Christmas Carol movie.

On Friday, Dec. 27, we drove to Chartres, France, to visit our missionary friends Dave and Betsy, at whose home we spent last Christmas in Croatia. They were borrowing the home of another missionary about an hour outside of Paris and had brought along two of their friends from Croatia, along with their two kids. We joined a bustling household of 6 to make a total of 8, and hung out around the house talking and eating, or exploring Chartres, or taking day trips into Paris to walk the streets and visit the Louvre for a few hours. It was a great time with good friends.

On New Year Day, we drove back from Chartres, and ran into some engine trouble along the way.

About two hours into the 8-hour drive, we began to hear a sudden, loud clanging noise in the engine. We pulled up at toilet/rest stop by the highway. We poked around the engine but couldn't see anything obvious. We saw some different mechanic shops listed nearby in our GPS but we knew they would all be closed for the holiday. So we called Nikolaj, our resident car expert in Busingen, who then called our automobile insurance company in Frankfurt. They told him to tell us to use one of those SOS phones that are placed intermittently along the highways throughout western Europe. There happened to be one at this rest stop. But it was situated directly beside the freeway and the noise of the passing cars was very loud. As a result, we couldn't understand the woman who answered, and who didn't speak English anyway. 

Gina prayed that God would send someone to help us. The next car to pull over, we approached and asked if the driver spoke English. Turns out he was American who lives in Paris. He went over to the SOS phone and told the lady where we were and what we needed. 

Forty-five minutes later a mechanic with a tow truck pulled up, looked at the car and saw the timing belt was fraying. He cut off the frayed part and indicated we were good to go (he didn't speak English either). He wrote out a bill and we gave him both our debit and credit cards. But because we have American swipe cards and not chip cards (which most Europeans have now), his machine wouldn't take them. We only had half of the cash on hand. 

We tried to pantomime that he could drive us to an ATM but he kept waving his hands no. Then we used our cell phone to call some other missionaries in Paris for whom we happened to have a phone number, and asked them to talk to the mechanic in French for us. They convinced him to drive us to an ATM. To do that, he decided to put our car on the back of the tow truck and tow us 20 minutes back the way we had come to a rest stop that had an ATM. We pulled out the cash and gave it to him and he drove away. 

It was an annoying situation but we are grateful that's all that happened and that we weren't stranded on the highway in heavy rain, or at night, or that there wasn't something worse wrong with the car necessitating an overnight hotel stay or something.

We are a week into the new year now, and outside a trip to Spain for a leadership conference at the end of the month, 2014 is a relatively blank canvas for Gina, who doesn't have any plans she knows of other than her normal work routine. Andrew's year has a bit more structure and purpose. He will submit his research proposal to NTC in Manchester, UK, at the end of the month. If it is approved by their council, he will be accepted into their PhD program in the fall. He also plans to study Latin intensely during the next six months, and preach in our local church about once a month. He has also committed to teaching an EuNC course again in Bulgaria this fall.

We want to thank everyone again for your prayers, love, support and giving, which makes it possible for us to continue serving the Lord here in "Germitzerland," far away from home and family. We love you and wish for each of you a year in which you abide ever more closely with Jesus.

March of the ants

Dorli had told me stories about the amazing ants in Sri Lanka. She had lived in the district center for a year in 2009.

At that time, she had had some German chocolate in her apartment and a horde of ants found their way up to the fourth floor or wherever her apartment was and invaded the package of chocolate. She cleaned all of the ants from the chocolate, sealed it into a ziplock baggie and hung it from a clothesline in her bedroom.

The next day she came home to find that the ants had formed a line that crawled across the floor, up the wall, along the clothesline, ATE through the ziplock baggie and were swarming inside, devouring the chocolate. She said they had also gotten all through her zipped luggage and she had had to take everything out and then leave the empty suitcase open in the sun on the ground outside until all the ants wandered out.

With all the warnings about the incredible ants of Sri Lanka, I was not prepared for this to happen to me in Nepal. When Dorli and I went to the mountainous area in Nepal, after the training was done, we left our big suitcases at the hotel where we’d stayed that week for the training, and took only our backpacks with us. The people at the hotel left our suitcases sitting in the reception area, which was open to the outside.

When we returned from the mountains and opened our suitcases, they were full of very tiny red ants.
The interesting thing was where the ants congregated in my suitcase. I had a package of sugar candy — open — tucked among my clothes. There were only 2-3 ants on that. There were, however, hundreds of ants milling around in the laptop I’d brought from the office. They were all over the keyboard and down inside among the keys. I guess they were eating all the crumbs and bits of dead skin that had fallen below the keyboard. No matter how many ants I swiped off the top of the computer, more continued to emerge and crawl around the keyboard and screen for the next 4-5 days. Just when I’d think they were all gone, more popped out.

The other thing they got into was a Ziplock baggie of Wet Wipes. There were hundreds of ants inside the Ziplock bag. They somehow smelled the wet, soapy wipes, ate through the plastic and were eating the wipes. I threw the whole package away. In doing that, I removed most of the ants from my suitcase and found very few after that. I was glad they weren’t all through every item in my suitcase. They had congregated on the computer and in the Ziplock baggie.

Dorli had a bigger infestation because she had had food in her suitcase and they had gotten into most of that so she had to throw most of it away.

In spite of all the warnings about ants in Sri Lanka, I did not have a problem with them in the district center there in Colombo.

Racing the clock

For 4 to 5 days in Bangladesh, Dorli and I were in the rural, southwest part of the country to conduct the three-day storytelling training. It had taken 11 hours to drive to that part of the country in what should have been a six-hour drive, due to the various religious festivals going on in the country. The leadership  decided that they would fly Dorli and I back on a small regional airplane for a 45-minute flight to avoid the long drive back. The van that had taken us south would return with our luggage, arriving in Dhaka at 3 a.m., where we would already be peacefully asleep in our beds.

The morning of our last day in the south, we got up and had breakfast, packed up our things and climbed into the van. Our first order of the day was to drive to some development projects and meet with the people involved so Dorli could report on them to the organization she works with in Germany which funds these projects.

While she was visiting seed projects, self-help groups and child development centers projects, I was at a Nazarene training center interviewing Nazarene pastors and leaders about their ministries.

The plan was that Dorli and Milton -- the communications and NYI coordinator who hosted us -- would return from the projects at 3 p.m. and we would regroup in the van to drive to the nearest airport to catch our flight. Our flight was at 6:15 p.m. It was supposed to be a 90-minute drive to the airport. Leaving at 3 p.m. would mean we would get to the airport at 4:30 and thus be there almost two hours before our domestic flight.

At 3:15, Milton and Dorli still were not back and so I continued my interviews in the training room.

At 3:30 they came around the corner at a run, rushed into the training center shouting, “We have to go! Now! Now!” I quickly packed my backpack and we both took a fast pit stop in the bathroom. By 3:45 were in the van and flying down the roads.

Based on the promise of a 90-minute drive, we should have been at the airport at 5:15, with still an hour before the flight. It seemed to be cutting it close, but we thought that should still be fine for a small airport and a domestic flight.

However, it was soon 5:30, then it was 5:45. We kept glancing at our watches.

At 5:45, the van driver swung off the highway and into a gas station. Milton yelled in Bengali, “No! No! We don’t have time! Keep going!” They yelled back and forth a bit and the van driver pulled through and back onto the highway.

About 5:50 p.m, Dorli and I started to ask where we were and why we hadn’t arrived yet. We began to despair of catching our flight.

At 5:55 we finally drove through the gateway to the airport. We breathed a sigh of relief. However, we weren’t in the clear yet. The road from the gateway to the actual airport stretched ahead of us for kilometers, and it was filled with pedestrians, wagons, people leading cows, bicycles, motorcycles and other cars. We crept along, weaving through all the foot and vehicle traffic.

At 6:05, we pulled up in front of the airport. Thankfully we were leaving our big suitcases in the van, so we could run unhindered with just our backpacks. As we passed inside the doors and made a run for the ticket counter, the security people stopped us and indicated we had to put our backpacks on an x-ray machine situated right by the front door. We threw everything on the conveyor belt and then snatched it up on the other side.

With Milton at our side we ran to the ticket counter and shoved our passports at the agent. He said, “you need to check those backpacks.” Milton told him in Bengali, “Nope, They’re not doing that.” We were all in such a frantic hustle I guess the agent decided it wasn’t worth bickering about so they let us take the backpacks. They thrust our tickets at us and we crossed the room to some glass double doors leading into the gate area.

There was another security check, so we gave quick hugs and goodbyes to Milton, thinking we wouldn’t see him again, and then tossed our backpacks on the second X-ray machine belt. On the other side, they insisted we go into a curtained booth for a pat down by a woman.

Dorli went in first and popped back out very quickly. She said the woman had only run the wand along one of her arms and then stopped and sent her back out. I took my turn in the curtained booth. The woman didn’t even wand me, she just stamped my ticket to say she had done it and ushered me back out.

At this point, only three minutes had passed since we had entered the airport. It was 6:08.  I was a bit relieved to still see people entering the gate area behind us. We rushed out of the doors leading to the tarmac.

At this small airport, you would walk down a long sidewalk to the airport runway where your plane would sit waiting, and you’d climb some stairs attached to the small plane to get up inside. Dorli and I ran down the sidewalk to the airplane sitting on the tarmac just outside a chain link fence.

As we approached the plane, Dorli looked at her ticket and said, “Well, our ticket says NovoAir, but this plane is labeled United Airlines. I’m sure it’s fine, let’s just get on.”

There was a man standing beside the stairs on the plane. He looked at Dorli’s ticket and said, “You’re at the wrong plane. Your plane is down there.” He pointed to another plane further down the tarmac.

The stress and hilarity of the situation finally got to us. Dorli and I burst out laughing. Now we had the problem of trying to jog on the runway while laughing hysterically. I can’t imagine what we looked like to the man standing at the second plane: Two white women, shrieking with laughter at a full-out sprint down the runway in the darkness.

The plane was still waiting not only for us, but some more passengers coming behind us. The man took our tickets, we climbed up the stairs, and walked down the aisle while gasping for breath and still laughing. We flopped into our seats — which were one behind the other — and laughed until we were crying. We were making quite a scene but the Bangladeshis just ignored us. I looked at my watch — it was 6:10. The flight was supposed to take off at 6:15.

The cabin crew were still getting the plane ready to go and more people were climbing on the plane. About two minutes after we had settled into our seats, we looked up to see Milton standing in the aisle with his backpack, grinning and waving at us. We gasped in surprise. He then found his seat. Steve, another storytelling trainee who had been with us in the van, was right behind him. Dorli figured out that after they’d waved us into security, they must have gone back to the counter and asked if there were any seats left. There must have been at least 2 seats left so they’d bought two tickets and gone through security in even less time than we did.

We were so happy that Milton and Steve would also be able to go back to Dhaka the easy way with us and not have to ride all night on dangerous roads in the van with the driver.

The plane took off at 6:17.

I was utterly in bewilderment that we had arrived at the airport 10 minutes before a flight, gone through security twice, checked in at a ticket counter, run down the runway and still managed to get on our flight in a total of 5 minutes. Only in Bangladesh and only in a small airport.

I was never so relieved to make a flight.

Caught between two festivals

When I walked out of the airport, lugging my suitcase and backpack into the hot, humid and hazy morning of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, there were cows everywhere.

We had inadvertently planned our training right smack in the middle of two massive holidays for both Muslims and Hindus. It was the Muslim festival of Eid, in which every family must sacrifice either a cow or a goat to atone for their sins throughout the year. The ritual slaughter is followed by a big feast when they eat the meat. It's a lot like Christmas for Christians, in that they will travel across the country to be with their families and all the businesses close.

At the same time, due to the lunar calendar, it was also the Hindu festival of Lights, or Diwali.

According to Wikipedia: "Diwali involves the lighting of small clay lamps filled with oil to signify the triumph of good over evil.^[11] These lamps are kept on during the night and one's house is cleaned, both done in order to make the goddess Lakshmi feel welcome.^[12] Firecrackers are burst because it is believed that it drives away evil spirits.^[13][14][15] During Diwali, all the celebrants wear new clothes and share sweets and snacks with family members and friends."

I didn't see any firecrackers or lamps or candles but there were strings of lights draped over some streets.

All of this festivity meant that the wide, two-lane roads crisscrossing the city were packed with traffic: cars, charter buses with people crowded inside and also on top, rickshaws, dump trucks, bicyclists, tuk tuks (three-wheeled taxis that are smaller than a small car), motorcycles and mopeds. There is no adequate way to describe a Dhaka traffic jam, except to say that it's everyone honking at once and zero respect for lanes, with every vehicle crammed into every tiny space between every other vehicle, constant and dangerous cutting in lines, etc.

We got caught in a couple of these traffic jams. In one of them, we were coming back after having been on the road already for from 2:30 p.m. to 6 p.m., because we had gone out of Dhaka to the countryside to see some development projects related to helping poor women start their own businesses, as well as compost their cow feces and plant sustainable crops. When we reached the city it was dark. We couldn't turn down several streets we needed to be on because there was a massive cow market there and they had closed the roads. The cow market was so that the Muslims could buy cows for their ritual slaughter. Also, the roads were full of people leaving the city to go to their families in the country.

Unable to turn left or right, we remained trapped in the stream of cars inching forward moment by moment, or often simply sitting at a standstill, with bicyclists and motorcycles weaving through. The road had a median in the center, and at every opening in the median, traffic police had blockaded it so that no one could make a u-turn into the opposite lanes. So we were stuck for about an hour. Finally, our driver pushed his way through one of the blockades and we pulled into the crazy sea of cars going in the opposite direction, in an attempt to get back to where we had first started and try to go another way.

I was so thankful that during what became a two-hour jam, I did not have to go to the bathroom. We finally made it back to the district center about 8:30 where we had dinner and collapsed into bed at 9:30.

On another day, we were driving to the south of the country where the training would be held. At one point we were sitting for 90 minutes to 2 hours to get on a ferry. We passed about an hour of that time attempting to gnaw through sticks of sugar cane, which were hard as rocks. The locals chewed right through it, but Dorli and I struggled and struggled to get to the sweet, sticky, drippy pulp. After about an hour of fighting with it, we finally got there, and along the way provided a lot of amusement to each other and our co-travelers.