he's dead, pray for his family

So last week I got an email from Compassion saying that my child, Satyaprakash Sona Dayadan, just died from falling out of a tree while playing with his brother. They rushed him to the hospital but it was too late. I don't understand why God would allow this.

Pray for his family. In the pic, Satyaprakash is the one I have my hand around, the rest are his 2 brothers, his sister, his parents and his grandparents.
Please please pray for his family. Do it for real. Pray that they would be comforted by the Father, who is sovereign over his death .

Last Post, Goodbye India

Today we toured Delhi some.

First we started by going to Qutub Minar, some cool tower built by the Mughals in the 1600s. This empire was the source of almost all the cool buildings we've seen, including the Taj Mahal. Then we went to Jama Masjid, which is India's largest mosque. Pretty amazing place to see, it holds 25,000 at its full capacity. After that we walked to Red Fort which was cool. During our touring we actually took about 5,000 pictures with random Indians today. They love the white skin.

We actually got to share a little with one guy who was some businessman who tried to get us to go see some factory or something with him. It sounded a little shady. He showed us the way to McDonald's for lunch though, so that was cool. But he seemed like a nice guy and I gave him a tract. He told me his son studies at a Christian school and Christians are good people. He also said he'd been to church lots of times. He is Hindu though. I gave tracts to a few other people we talked to also, so I pray God uses them. The people that I handed them to all seemed really interested in what they had to say. One guy actually asked me, Tell me about Jesus. He was a Muslim.

From Delhi

So, a lot has happened since I wrote last. We had our last day at Momma T's, got some sweet pics there. It's 10:30 pm here and I haven't showered in about 2 days. That's gross.

We set out to see Satyaprakash on Saturday night, going to the Howrah train station. However, a wreck happened just outside of Howrah about 1 day before. This was bad timing on the Maoists part. They didn't realize I needed to get to Raipur on Sunday morning. So, the train was delayed until about 7 the next morning. So we left then and got to Raipur about 12 am. It was an A/C train so it wasn't too bad. Next day we got up at like 5:15 to drive for 6 hours to see Satyaprakash sona, my compassion kid, in Jagdalpur. This was a pretty amazing experience. I didn't realize how much it would mean to them that I was coming. When we first arrived we were greeted by some cute kids who put lays on us and then we go sit in front of the entire child project (~300 kids). I was like, wow, not expecting this. So, then we met Satya and his entire family (2 bros, 1 sis, gparents, parents) and ate lunch together and saw his home. Then we went to a waterfall and chilled out some more. The day was marked with awkwardness as I couldn't speak their language and didn't really know what to say to them. I tried to come up with questions but they just weren't helping me out much with the whole talking business. After visiting Satya, we slept and got up the next morning to drive 6 hours and get to Raipur by 1 pm so we could eat lunch before our train that left at 2:30 pm. However, we soon found out that the train left at 7:30 pm. Then we found out it left at 9:30 pm. They didn't push it past that, thank goodness. So we got on the train, hoping to get to Howrah station (Calcutta) at like 11 am the next day. We got there about 12:30 pm which was ok but we had to catch a flight to come to Delhi at 4:45 and we needed to go to the opposite end of Calcutta from the airport to get our bags. This was a little bit concerning for a bit but it ended up ok. God worked it out perfectly where we got to the airport just before the flight. Funny how the train delay ended up working out really well. I got to read a lot, at least.

Now we are in Delhi. Tomorrow we see the Taj Mahal. I'm pumped. Time to go sleep now.

Oh, I shared with one guy on the train to Raipur and it was super cool because he was so interested in Christianity. He really didn't know anything about the gospel. Just a 19 year old Hindu who attended college at some school in Varanasi (which is a holy place where old Hindu people go die, in a nutshell). He was smart too. All I really did was bring up religion and he started to fire away at the questions. It was so cool. Anyways, I gave him my email and told him we should be pen pals.

Pray that we hand out our Christmas Hindi tracts well while we are in Delhi. This place needs to gospel. fo sho.

Meeting with New Believers

Ok, so we have continued to do Mother Teresa's and we met a group the other day at Daya Dan (a home for mentally handicapped children) that were from a church in Houston, Texas. Pretty sweet. They were southern baptist and had about 8 in their group. They were almost all older people, which was cool. I feel like it is much harder for the older generation to get out of their comfort zone and go to hard places. Granted, these guys are staying in an A/C hotel, but still. Who cares, they are still here. And that is pretty sweet. They are supposed to bring 40 youth back some time during the summer to serve at Mother Teresa's homes. Lol, I wish our youth could do that. I told the missions pastor that he needed to put those kids under the fans (no A/C in the hotel room) so they could get the full experience. His reply was, "parents."

We went and had dinner last night with Beth, Kyle, and Sarah, as well as some Canadian friends. It was an incredible time to fellowship with the Word Made Flesh staff. It has been awesome seeing them. I love those people. I love SariBari too. I love that it seeks to free women both physically and spiritually. Anyways, I was sad to say goodbye last night. I am terrible at goodbyes.


Ok, now to explain the title of the post. We went to Pastor Kaushik's house the other night (the guy in the front and center of the pic) to talk about the Bible with some relatively new believers. These guys are all interested in the Bible and have tons of questions to ask. We talked some about Hinduism and routes that Hindu's come to have faith in Jesus. It is usually more of a process where the Hindu begins to see Jesus as the main god that they serve, and then they begin to realize that he is the only God. Any way that someone comes to the faith is cool with me. I'm down for using whatever strategy. Anyways, these guys were solid believers who haven't been baptized yet. One of them told me he wanted to clean up before getting baptized. For example, he told me that he wants to look at girls a lot of times when they walk by him, so he wants to quit this bad habit before being baptized. We gave them the answer (and Pastor Kaushik expounded) that our whole lives are a process of sanctification and we are going to always be fighting the battle against sin. We will never fully reach perfection until the next life. I think they got it. We played a very small role in this meeting that happens every week with Pastor Kaushik. It was a cool ministry to play a small role in.

We leave for Raipur to see my compassion kid in 2 days. I'm excited. Pray that we make the most of our time. We have had opportunities to share about Christ and have taken them. I love the Christian life. I love Jesus. I hope I love him more.

Pray for the Charis fellowship church and many churches that meet across Calcutta. Pray that they would be full of the Spirit. Pray for us to continue to use every opportunity to share about Christ in our lives. Pray that the tracts we hand out make a difference in these people's lives. Pray that God would move in Calcutta.

Flesh n Bones

Today at Kalighat (The home of the dying) this guy had a pseudo surgery performed by the nurse. There is a doctor that comes every once in a while, however, the nurse does all of the work. Anyways, today the nurse was pulling crazy things out of this wound. I didn't watch, and the only reason I know is that I saw part of the remains in a dish. She walked by and asked me and Josh to take it to the trash can. It had bones in it! I was like, Josh you got this one. He's going to be a nurse. He can take it. I would have thrown up probably. The poor guy operated on had no pain killers. They are too poor here. I guess he is lucky just to have his foot fixed. It was his foot by the way. I looked at the wound but that is all I could do. He was screaming big time.


This pic is the flower market, it's still going strong. We actually walked through more of it this time that I had last time and it is pretty amazing how much bigger it is than this picture looks. This place is huge. It's primary source of income is Hindu's buying these strings of flowers for their gods that hang in the corner of their homes, as if they are watching over them. bogus.


This is the front of the college library that William Carey helped build. That's about all there is to say about that.


This is the Hooghly river I think. It runs through Calcutta. It is a branch of the Ganges so it is holy. People throw lots of things in this river, including bodies I think. It's holy though so people bathe in it also.
This was dinner last night. Pork. Moa cooked it for us. Big time. Naga food, not Bengali. That means its northeast Indian, if you don't know where Nagaland is. Native food to here is Bengali. The state we are in is West Bengal. Anyways, this pork was money. I had to have way more rice than pork stuff though because it was so hot.

Sari Bari + Momma T's day 2

I forgot to mention yesterday that the day before we got to go see the new SariBari unit in the gach. This is the same building I helped clean out last year. Absolutely gorgeous place for sure. 40 new women are there working now. So now SariBari is up to roughly 60 women. Freedom. I'm going to be bringing some bags back to hopefully sell at Temple. You better buy them. Or else.

I had an awesome time seeing Beth, Kyle, and Sarah. Me and Josh got to go to the flat (same place I went to all the time last year) and eat dinner with a team here. I might have said that on my last post but I can't remember. If so I apologize.

I'm whiped out today. We've been here 5 days now and its taking its toll. haha 5 days. I've lectured Josh too many times already about how different it is for us to come for 2 weeks and if you stay here 4 months. Totally different experience fo' sho'.

We went to kalighat again this morning. It was pretty intense because as we walked up, we were asked to help load a dead dude into the truck to head to the crematorium. I noticed he was fat. Later, I realized who the dead guy was. I took his temperature on Tuesday and he had no fever. Ridiculous. I could tell he was in bad condition though. He ate like 2 bites and didn't really even chew. He basically let me fill his mouth with rice and spit it out later. The sister said it was ok.

William Carey?

So who woulda thought that we'd go see William Carey's college that he founded and a little museum they have for him. I'm inspired now to read his biography lol. It was really cool to see it. Me and Josh went on an epic adventure. We basically went from Howrah station and started with the name of the place we needed to go, knowing we had to take a local train. So I bought a ticket to serampore and we hopped on one of the local trains, hoping to find the right place. At this point I had no clue how we'd find some college in the middle of an indian village outside of Kolkata. We got off at some station named "shrirampur" and I kept asking people if it was "serampore." They kept saying yes. So then we went to some random salesman sitting on the ground and with my terrible bengali skills I said something like, "William Carey where?" He pointed us inside the station area and we saw that there was a plaque there dedicated to him. Pretty cool. But I wanted to see more than that so I was like, "William Carey where?" lol. He pointed us to some rickshaw wallahs and we took a bike rickshaw to the college that he founded. They told us at the gate that the college is not in session right now so we might not be able to see the museum. Luckily, those people were very nice and let us go see the little one room (it had A/C) museum. I touched the desk that William Carey used when he was here. Our tour guide told me that he took it here from England and assembled it. She said that it hasn't been re-painted. And it was in great condition. So I learned that William Carey helped translate the Bible into 35 languages. What a balla'. After seeing all of the cool William Carey stuff, we came back to Kolkata and I am about to arrange for our trip to the taj mahal during the last few days.

I figure we'll do some mother teresa's again tomorrow.

I shared with a guy in an auto rickshaw last night. He gave me the same sort of response that I would usually get on USM's campus during last school year. That would be one of sorta indifference. He didn't seem to care. I don't know what is happening in his heart though.

I can't wait to hang out with my Naga friends some more tonight. Woowoo!