Our
family journey continues… I had dropped
off Asha in Delhi in the last week of May where she joined her cousin Joanna for
a flight to Vishakaptnam – where our 2 young ladies were met by Joanna’s
parents Victor and Sarah and whisked off to the Asha Kiran Hospital in southern
Odisha where Victor and Sarah have been for the past year. The story carries on with the mini-family of
Sheba and myself.
And so the
day finally came. 31st of
May. Our last day in Lalitpur as part of
the HBM Hospital family. We had told our
leadership in late March that it would be leaving on that day. And we did.
The
previous weeks were a blur of packing. Box after box filled up. Where did all this come from? Some stuff was culled to be given or sent for
recycling. But so much, especially our
beloved books remained. In the final
week we shifted the 116 boxes and various other household furniture to Sister Leela’s home. And yet even on the very last day there was packing.
When 7 PM on the 31st rolled around we stuffed the last lingering items into a small fleet of
suitcases. Till the last minute. Some Eicher traits never change.
And so our
farewell was fairly short. Our dear friends
from the HBM Hospital family gathered.
Handshakes and hugs. A prayer and
we were in the hospital vehicle with Bharat Singh, driving to Jhansi.
We left
Bethel Villa, our wonderful home where so much had happened, including Dad’s
final minutes of this life, and were driving in the darkness with the open road
ahead of us.
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Needless to say, we were
pretty shattered. Physically tired. Ditto emotionally. Spiritually?
The berths of the Bundelkhand
Express that Sheba and I rolled into late that night were very welcome. An uneventful night got us on time to
Varanasi station. Well, the ‘online app’
said that we had arrived. Actually the
train stopped a kilometer ahead of the blessed place. An did not move for an hour. Finally it began to empty as people couldn’t
stand the heat anymore, preferring to walk along the tracks. I walked through the length of the train
looking for a ticket collector to. None
to be found. Maybe a TC-specific rapture
took place?
Finally, the train creaks to
life and covers the final few 100 meters and then stops. Our bogie is far from the platfrom, but by
walking through 6 or 7 bogies we get to one which touches the kerb and we are
able to alight. Welcome to Varanasi on a
summer noon!
We are met at the entrance by
Aman from the Kachhwa Christian Hospital and whisked away to the small town of
Kachhwa in the KCH vehicle.
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Kachhwa is a small town in the Mirzapur district. Kachhwa means ‘tortoise’ in Hindi and some
would say that the pace of change of the town mirrors its noble reptilian
name-sake.
The Kacchwa Christian
Hospital lies smack in the middle this town in a leafy campus that reeks
history. One of its hoary buildings had
at one time served as an indigo factory in colonial times, and since it was
established as a hospital in 1887 (probably the oldest hospital in the EHA
family), the KCH has seen generations of sacrificial medical and community
health service. Like many such
institutions, KCH has seen its ups and downs.
At one point, with the legendary surgeon Dr. Everard in full flow, the
Kachhwa Christian Hospital was considered the best surgical centre between
Delhi and Calcutta. When I visited KCH
a number of times in the late 1990s it was on the verge of being shut down as
patients had long since sought other places for treatment, despite having an
A-list medical/surgical team posted there.
The
recent decades have seen KCH develop into a beautiful place thanks to a new
generation of remarkable folks. This is
not the place to go into all the details, but Dr. Raju and Katherine Abraham’s
decision to pour their hearts into KCH has not gone in vain. The hospital is physically small but currently
thriving as people come for the treatment that they trust. The varied community engagement activities
and local wholeistic leadership development has seen much blessing take place.
There
are not many mission hospitals who have a pond next to them. Patients and relatives watch ducks swim
around. I could not help thinking of the
pool of Bethesda in the Jerusalem of Jesus’ day when people came to the pool in
the hopes of being healed.
Healing is a life-time
process, and though we had not set out with this as our goal, our current
pilgrim journey has to include refreshing, renewal and redemption. We arrived pretty shattered and it was good
not to have a large list of ‘things-to-do’ in front of us.
Instead we were welcomed by
our dear, dear friend Dr. Chering Tenzing.
Chering did her DNB in medicine from the Christian Fellowship Hospital
in Oddanchataram while Sheba was doing hers in family medicine. We have been blessed over the years to visit
Chering in various sites including Satbarwa in Jharkhand, Herbertpur in Uttarakhand and Lakhnadon in
Madhya Pradesh. Our visit to see her in
Kachhwa in eastern UP was long overdue.
We were hosted by the Shankar
and Blodwen family – and provided much joy by their lovely quartet of
children. And were thrilled to find out
that our mentors Drs. Manoj and Manjula Jacob were also visiting KCH at the
same time.
What blessings to be with people with
love. You never want to say
good-bye. It’s a deep internal pointer
that we are meant for community. Meant
to be together and that this fellowship is intended forever. As the old rousing hymn says: When we all
get together, what a day of rejoicing that will be, when we all meet Jesus,
we’ll sing and shout the victory.
Chering is a
multi-tasker. All the while we were with
her, she was running the ICU, leading her three medical officers and the
nursing team. She is a wonderful writer
(you can see some of her heart at “What Gives”) and has recently taken to visual
art as well with her home decorated with a slew of her creations. In the midst of all her busyness and the
inter-twined conversations with use, Chering found time and energy to make a
delicious meal of momos for all of us!
Shankar and Blodwen are other
jewels. An old head resting on young
shoulders, Shankar currently is the leader of the hospital (“SAO” in EHA-speak)
and is a wonderful model of what godly shepherding is like. An MBA with a heart of compassion, we were
thrilled to hear of the amazing stories of grace which are taking place through
the KCH family.
One of them is of an old
woman who was found lying semi-conscious and encrusted in her own filth by the
side of the road, and whom Shankar brought back to KCH. Over the weeks of care at KCH she gained
strength and her senses. She did not
speak Hindi, and the team realised that she was trying to communicate in
Gujarati. She eventually was able to say
which town she was from. Shankar went
onto Facebook and joined a group from that town and put out the news of her
being in UP (over 1500 kms away).
Someone finally responded and checked the local police station there and
found a missing persons report for an old lady over 4 months previously. What a joy to restore this old woman to her
son. The miracle of being reunited
stemming from the love and prayers and loving service she received at KCH.
Sheba and I were deeply
privileged to be adopted into the Shankar Blodwen family. And what a family it is. They are blessed with four children – a
lovely daughter Prarthana (prayer), and three lively sons in Vishwas (faith),
Arpan (dedication) and the newest member Jeevan (life). What a joy to have these lovelies swarm all
over us. As almost-empty-nesters it was
a treat to see 4 packets of life discovering the world… and the Word.
Shankar and Blodwen are
living life king-sized for the King of Kings.
Their first area of building the Kingdom is in their kids and we were
blessed to see the results already blossoming in these lovely ones. We were pumped for advice about parenting and
other avenues of grace by our hosts, and can only say that we are so impressed
by their intentional lives and the way that they are building up the next gen.
I was taken back to my
childhood as I saw a house full of books, board games, a bird being nursed back
to health, daddy-reading-to-kids, an intentionally simple lifestyle, caring and
consistent disciplining, each room brightened up with Blodwen’s art… the list
of blessings goes on and on. Shankar and
Blodwen have written some of their experiences in a blog (Firm Foundations) and
are fabulous conversationalists. Their
intentional choices made are wonderful example for us all to follow.
-----------------------------
Being very much in recovery
we did not do much ‘work’ – but it was a privilege to share in the morning
devotions on the reality of Jesus’ love even when it doesn’t always seem that
way (the Lazarus story). Sheba
accompanied Chering on rounds and did some counselling with patients. The ICU deals with snake-bite cases, and
self-harm. Sheba was privileged to have
one of the ladies saved from self-poisoning open up her heart to Sheba.
It was a blessing for me to
spend a morning with the community engagement team. Working in a 1.5 lakh population block, the
KCH Community Health and Development Team is lead by Dr. Rubel who has been trained
(among other things) in community dentistry.
I vividly remember meeting Mr.
Bal Bahadur back in 1998 and along with Dr. Santosh Mathew broaching the
thought with him about starting up community health work at KCH. Bal Bahadur was a OT nurse at that time, and
after prayer agreed to step into this field.
My brother Stefan joined a few months later and they doggedly set up
some amazing village transformation work, building a core team and then seeing
it flourish.
The current team works in
three broad areas – reaching out to people with disabilities (there are over
3000 known cases in the 1.5 lakh target population), controlling tuberculosis,
and providing palliative care services.
I was staggered to find out
that Rajini, the community health nurse had attended an HIV ministry conference
we had organised in 2005 in Mumbai, and had used what she learned over the
years in this place.
Each member of the team is
clearly the salt-of-the-earth.
Community work is hard and usually little appreciated by most hospital
staff (and many hospitals’ leadership too).
Our dear friends are meeting with those who are broken, and are giving
them life and hope for change. So much
still to be done, but we can see how much God can use people who are willing to
be used.
Sheba and I were also blessed
to have a session with the nurses. Working
as a nurse in a mission hospital is not easy.
Patients can be very demanding and relatives even more so. People who have been oppressed aren’t
necessarily angels. Much of the human
brokenness surfaces in times of stress and sorrow. No one comes to a hospital for a
holiday. It is not surprising that one of
the coping mechanisms nurses use to stay in control of hard situations is to
shout at patients and relatives.
Especially if they have been shouted at.
Sadly this can become the norm as day after day new waves of patients
and distressed relatives come for treatment.
The antidote? One small step
is to meet with nurses and remind them of just how very special they are. It was lovely to hear from the nurses about
what brought them joy and see a wide set of impacts that they have. So often the nurses’ contributions are hidden
by the credit which usually flows to the doctors for successful treatments, or
is not seen because of patient relative conflict issues. We reminded the nurses about what God says
about them in the word – and how much at odds this is with the messages they
get from the world – from their patients, from their colleagues and even at
times from their leaders and family members.
A few years ago we learned a
powerful illustration which we used with our dear KCH nurses. We took a brand new Rs. 500 note and showed
it to our nursing friends. Then we
crumpled it up and threw it on the floor and said that it was garbage and
needed to be thrown away. The question
is whether it still is a Rs.500 note and whether it still has value? The answer for the note is easy. All it needs is to be picked up, smoothed out
a bit and put back into our wallet or purse.
For human lives, however, the process is not so easy. When we are broken and despairing we so often
are blind to all that God wants us to be, and the beautiful embrace of His love
for us.
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Our visit to the saints at Kachhwa Christian Hospital was the first stop of Sheba and my new pilgrim
wanderings. What a blessing to be with
so many amazing people.We got to taste a bit of the glory of what is happening
among those so many see as insignificant, but whom our loving Lord Jesus sees
as so amazingly precious that He left His glory to become one of us, and offers
us His love and power despite seeing our own limitations so clearly.
Sheba and I had big smiles on
our faces during those precious days. We
are wanderers, but we were at home.
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