The balancing rock of Lalitpur

You are driving North of Lalitpur, along National Highway No. 26, headed towards Jhansi.  And there on your left in the near distance of a monsoonal morning you see a rock on another rock.  Big deal right? 

Well, it certainly is big!

I had seen the rock many a time on my way to and fro from our HBM Hospital Community Health and Development Programme field visits.   But on Monday I determined to take a closer look.

It's the monsoon here in Lalitpur, so there was plenty of mud to walk through as I meandered through the scrub towards the rock.

Coming close you realise just how big it is!

And how amazing that this large, odd shaped rock will stay put - rain, shine, hail or thunder - over all these years!  It is a 'balancing rock' and has been there for how many years?  Centuries? Millenia? without falling.

In a world where so much seems to be tipping and tripping, it is refreshing to see something so apparently precarious, but so solidly and utterly immovable as to have stood the test of time.

Would I like to try and tip this marvel?  Never!  I tend to be on the cautious side (I think at least) and seeing so much solid stone in such an apparently tip-worthy state... I have vivid thoughts of the great granite ending its year's of being upright by falling down on me and squashing my good-self.

So instead I take a quick tour around it.  The other side looks very different!

And just to give you a picture of the size involved, here is our dear Bharat Singh - who serves as one of our community coordinators in the HBM CHDP - and is an ace driver too.  Bharat kindly walked with me through the slush to take a look at the stone - and is a good way to help get a bit of a feel for just how big the stone is....

Presenting: the balancing rock of Lalitpur!

Down home on the Eicher farm...

We understand that our hardy Mennonite Eicher forbears left the old continent for the new expanses of Ontario in the late 1880s.  They were farmers and settled down to tilling the New World soil - and then their progeny moved out across the mid-west so that today you can still find plenty of Mennonite Eichers (some still farming too) across Indiana and Ohio and points west.

The tiny bit of the Eicher family that has been grafted into our dear land of Bharat 3 generations ago has not been very agrarian.  But could that be changing just a tiny bit?

Having moved to Lalitpur, our family is back in a pretty rural setting after 14 years in the big city. Today we live on a big spacious hospital campus in a ground-floor building... with a bit of space for a garden outside!

So lets take a little look at our new world...

We will start by going back in time.  This is what the 'Bethel Villa' looked when I was commuting between Thane and Lalitpur earlier this year.

We had to do a fair bit to get the venerable bungalow ready for the Eichers, including moving the kitchen from the back to the front and adding another toilet to the right of the entrance. 

About half-way through the rebuilding, this is what the future Eicher homestead looked like:

In mid April - four of us Eichers had a traumatic leaving from home as we were not given permission to take Yohan along with us by the authorities - a situation that frustratingly continues into today, and is one of the areas of our life where things are far from 'happy-happy.'

Our arrival in Lalitpur had its own set of hiccups and it was a few weeks before we finally moved into the (mainly) rennovated Bethel Villa.  As many of you gentle readers will have experienced - being the first to live in a 'new' house has its own joys.  An almost endless set of things that need to be adjusted (this door does not close,  that switch does not work, when the power goes off we are left in boiling heat darkness etc.).

And our arrival in May also coincided with one of the hottest summers in memory at the end of two years of scanty rainfall.  Each day was a new experience of what living inside a tandoori oven is like. 

Sauna?  We had one all around us - 24 hours.  I remember idly picking up an empty bottle in our living room - and being surprised at how hot it was.  Our flat cement roof absorbed heat and efficiently radiated it down into us. 

Garden?  A distant dream.

But what a difference some rain makes!

 In an amazingly short time, we have swapped worlds.  The arid, parched days are somewhere in a distant memory.  We have been transported into a cool green planet, with not only rain, but abundant, gushing rain, pouring down now, lightly drizzling then, a week without sunshine but the cool blessing of water all around.

It's time to break the soil, and we found an old man who agreed to dig up the plot of land outside Bethel Villa for us and plant a small hedge.   So at the end of the day, we found ourselves looking at a blank sheet - ready for things to be planted.  The few plants that came along with us (and who survived the Lalitpur summer grilling) remained clustered at our door.

Our first thought was to hire a 'mali' - a man of the soil to plant and tend our little patch of Eden.  The wizen old fellow who did the initial work was candidate no. 1, but said candidate proved surprisingly hard to pin down and a week later our plot was still barren and the rains were still coming.

So last weekend we swung into action.

Act 1.  Drive into town in our Papaya in search of 'plants.'   Find out more about the geography of Lalitpur.  Meet a plant seller who also seems to be a candidate for a political party.  End up at the nursery of the horticulture department - and yes, they have plants for sale.  Lots of them.  And at an unbelievable (for us Mumbai types) price of Rs. 10 per sapling (with a few at Rs. 20).   In Mumbai that would hardly buy you a small plastic bag of soil, let alone a whole plant.  we certainly were not complaining.

Did the horticulture folks have any vegetable seeds for sale?  No they did not - but they did have some Lady's Fingers (okhra) seeds and some Lauki (bottle gourd), which they kindly gave to us.  The price?  Just a smile.  Bless those dear men.

Act 2.  We lug our plants back and array them.  We borrow a mattock from our dear and experienced gardener colleagues Drs. Tony and Asangala Bishwas.  

Some local roses, a few hibiscus, two 'Raat ki Rani', two jasmine, we are set.   Plus we also have our Easter Lillies that have come up from Mumbai with us.  And we have our seeds to plant too.  

Now to delight of deciding where the plants should go.  Let's put that one here - and this one there.  A quick consultation, a hole is dug, the plastic bag cut off and in the plant goes.

We decide that the 5 by 5 m section just outside the kitchen will be a veggie plot.  Using a spoon, we dig little holes a hand-span a part and drop in the Lady's Finger seeds.  Will these little dried balls actually sprout?  They go into the soil and are covered.

The next day we decide to get some manure.  A local family gives us 3 big bags of goat-dropping based mulch.  The local hardware store equips us with some implements.  Mattock?  Sure.  Water pipe? Check.  The manure is spread and our new mattock mixes it into the soil.

Dr. Tony's garden gives us some local grass which we plant in little tufts to colonize the front portion. Will it grow to be a lawn?  Lets see.  Tony and Asangala also give us some maize seeds which we planted in the little portion on the right of the building.  The lily bulbs - when we get them out we realize just how many there are - get spread out liberally.

And the rain comes down again.  This time in buckets.  And so this is what the Bethel Villa looks after our first round of planting the Eicher garden.

These days when we wake up in the morning, it is usually to the greyness of a monsoonal day.

And we take a peek at the plants.

Glory be!  The seeds actually have sprouted!  Who would have thought.

Here is what the Ladies Fingers looked like a few days ago.

Humbling to know just how little we actually do in this great business of growing food.  Yes, we prepare the soil a bit (usually by tilling it).  Yes, we drop in the seeds and water and weed.  But the actual growing?  Those little balls of life which magically transform and start feeding from the soil and the light and the air and building themselves up and reaching for the sky in green-goodness-of-fruit-bearing?

Amazing grace.

Here is another evidence of the finger prints of a Master-Designer who makes all things well - courtesy of our front garden:

So there we have it.  A bit of green in our lives.  We are waiting for your visit to us Eichers at Bethel Villa - and hope that our little bit of Eden will be all the greener when we welcome you.

A last look when a bit of sun visited us recently.  See you soon!

Auden for the second half of 2016

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

- W.H. Auden

Quoted in: The Centrifugal Experience of Knowledge

so how is your father doing?

I just got back from another short Mussoorie stint.  Almost everywhere I go, I get asked the question.  "How is your father doing?"

Sometimes it is followed up with a statement: "He is OK, isn't he?"

A few also tell me that they are praying for him.

How do you respond to the question on hand.  The easy way out is to mumble a "yes", put on a smile, and move on.  Allow the questioner the comfort of knowing that all is well.

Reality is harder.  Even asking Dad the question is hard.  What is he supposed to say?  To give a minute detailed description of the various pains he is going through?  To share what it is like to have difficulty digesting food and have a family looking at you at every meal, hoping that you will eat more?  To tell about his times alone with God - talking to Him and praying in the night hours?

I have at times told people that 'everything is not OK' - but that God is with us despite it all.

That Dad continues to be positive.  And that we are working on helping to alleviate the pain - but that we are walking in new territory here.

Most of us want things tied down in neat bundles.   In crisp categories.  You are either well or you are sick.  But can you be both?

Dad is walking down that path now.  He spends much of his day in naps.  But also is up and about for meals.  He reads God's word and prays.  Most days he takes a small walk if the weather is dry outside.  He takes his medicines regularly.  He tries to eat well.  Mum has been making special meals for him - and the portions are small, but we are happy for every meal Dad has.  He and Mum look out their bedroom window at scenes like this:

photo courtesy Christa Eicher - as are all the photos in this post other than the first - taken by Bhagat Pun

Alternately, Dad gets to see God's glory in small spaces courtesy the flowers that Mum lovingly curates in the garden or up on the small 'green house' on the terrace of Shanti Kunj.

We are currently still working on what levels of pain medication Dad should be on.  We have for the last 2 weeks started him on low-dose morphine, and have increased it a bit this week.  Getting delayed release morphine-sulphate has not been easy, but we are working on it.  In the mean-time, Dad keeps a close account of when he gets up at night, when he takes extra pain-killers, what he has eaten.  All of this helps in making these days as blessed as possible for Mum and Dad.

So how is my father doing?  Well, the outer man is wasting away, but the inner man is being renewed every day.  Each and every sunrise that Dad experiences is a miracle.  We are grateful for every opportunity we have to be with him.  The knowledge that the shadow of death is nearer instead of some far-off-distant-future-never-never-event is blessedly helpful in many ways.  It brings an added joy to every conversation, an added tweak to every good-bye.

But most of all, Dad has been ready to meet his Lord Jesus for years.  If there is someone ready to meet his Maker, it is my dear father.

We know, and absolutely believe, that our Lord Jesus can remove every single cancer cell from Dad's body and give him another 15 years of life.  Why stop there - God has the power to give 100 more years, make that 200 hundred.   And this loving Lord of ours does not in anyway look down on us if we ask Him for more life for Dad.  But, we also know that an awful lot of people have already prayed and continue to be praying for Dad daily - and the cancer continues to work its way through Dad's system.  Will we only receive blessings from the Lord and naught else?  Can there be goodness while walking into shadows too?  We know that God is sovereign - and He is good.  And so we gratefully receive whatever He has for Dad.  Getting another 2 days is a miracle.  So is 2 weeks or 2 months or 2 years... or 20.  We don't have the power to even grow a single extra hair on our heads (I should know!).

So how is Dad doing?  I would say, that given all that Dad is experiencing these days, that he is faithfully walking his path with the joy of the Lord.  With a peace that passes all understanding.  With a faith that continues to glow, especially in the darker valleys that he and Mum are exploring these days.

Walking along side

The big volvo bus of the Uttarkhand Transport Corporation eases out of the Interstate Bus Terminus in Delhi.  Asha is sitting next to me as the cool of the AC gradually wicks away the sweat of muggy pre-monsoonal Delhi.  

Over the next 8.5 hours the bus will ease out through the urban sprawl of Delhi and its satellite cities, squeezing past various roads and other public and private construction sites.  We pick up a bit of speed once we get past the urban areas, and finally get out to fields of sugar cane and poplar plantations.  The road is wider than it was 31 years ago when I took a similar bus trip, but not as clustered with eateries and temporary fruit and curio stalls that seem to clot this lifeline like a sclerotic artery.

In August of 85 I took a bus the same distance and for a similar purpose.  It was a monsoonal August day and my father was sitting next to me as our bus left the Centaur Hotel outside New Delhi airport.  An hour earlier I had my first contact with my future Woodstock fellow students.  I was starting boarding school for the first time in 11^th grade, and we were the ‘new students’ – and most of us had parents with us.  The school had chartered a bus for all the newbies and we were told to report 3 days before the main school started.  And so with my Dad next to me I was looking at fellow newcomers to boarding and wondering who of them I would be friends with as the greenness of the unfamiliar countryside passed outside our grinding non-AC bus.

Yesterday it was I who was the father.  And next to me is this amazing 15 year old who got a miraculous admission into Wynberg almost in the middle of their school-year.  As she dozes a bit on the long bus journey I have to wonder at who she is becoming.  Where has time gone?  Can it really be that Asha will be away from us for the next 5 months as she burns through her 10^th grade?

The bus to Woodstock ended up with us tumbling out to the greyness and dampness of monsoonal Mussoorie.  Yesterday’s trip had us in the back seat of a taxi up from Dehra Dun, driving through the misty darkness with the headlights swiping by the blessed dark green trees and past more garish advertisements for hotels than you can shake a stick at.  Asha is dozing, curled up to my lap, and then the sudden sweetness of the Raat-ki-rani flower pierces the darkness.

A mobile call when we pass the Landour bazar means that we are met at the top of the hill by Vickey who helps carry bags down to Shanti Kunj.   I came up with my Dad as a stranger in a strange land.  Asha’s situation is of a different shade, she has come to Shanti Kunj every year since she was 2.  And it is from Shanti Kunj that she leaves this afternoon to go into boarding for this 5 month spell till the end of November.

Before she goes down today, I have another task to do.  This time it is me who is accompanying Dad and not the other way round.  We are being driven down to his palliative care doctor at the pain clinic of SMI hospital in Dehra Dun.   Dad had gone with me into a new territory as I stepped into Woodstock School – while today I have the joy of taking Dad’s special prescription paper and being driven around Dehra Dun trying to find sustained-release morphine-sulphate tablets.  It takes quite some time and we ultimately do not find exactly what we want, but I leave the main medical distributer with 30 tablets of morphine in my pocket.  That is the easy part, the harder one is accompanying Dad on his path of pain.  After supper tonight he has a sharp pain in his chest and so we give him another 5 mg between his regular doses.  It’s all very very new territory for us.

As I write this Asha is in her dorm.  One big room.  40 odd girls from the 9^th and 10^th standards.   We left just after 3 for the quick drive down to WAS.  Except that is wasn’t quick.  One index of our nation’s wealth is the width of the SUVs that her prosperous citizens drive.  Mussoorie is a wonderful place to be, but Landour’s road (notice the singular) is narrow with a steep drop off.  This means that many places are too narrow for 2 large vehicles to pass.  Most of the time you or the other vehicle back up a bit and then the two cars squeeze by.  Not so this afternoon.  There was a traffic clog of epic proportions.  We waited for 20 mins basically stationary.  Then a few vehicles slipped by us.  A gain of 30 odd meters saw us stuck again – along with at least 30 other vehicles both ways.  

Asha had to report to her dorm by 4 PM.  We made a snap decision.  Walk it out.  Oma stayed with the small suitcase and violin in the vehicle along with Bhagat who was driving us.  Asha and I clutched umbrellas and set off at a brisk walk to do the 2+ kms to WAS.  We huffed and puffed and made it to the dorm and signed Asha in on time with seconds to spare.  Oma and the luggage followed later.

And so another two days in the beautiful and selectively messy parts of our lives conclude.  Our roles change and shift with us taking on responsibilities and experiences previously limited to our parents.  Likewise, we see our kids living out some of the steps we have taken earlier - as well as moving into some paths we have not trodden. And we see our parents walking into areas of their lives, and experiences that we have no living memory of.  

It is such a true comfort to know that we do have a Father who loves us very much, and allows us to mirror and reflect His love to each other.  Whatever part of our journey, He has gone before and is walking alongside us, like Aslan walking beside Sashta all through dark night journey along a mountain path.

Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.

(Isaac Watts)

Thinking, praying, planning together

The last 36 hours have been a blur.

The Harriet Benson Memorial Hospital family has been blessed to be visited by Dr. Sunil Abraham who is a Professor of Family Medicine at CMC Vellore (the first in the country!) - and a dear friend of ours too.

We are going through a strategic review and are looking to develop a 5 year programme to take HBM through 2016-2021.   So we wanted to tap into some of Dr. Sunil Abraham's experience at the Low Cost Effective Care Unit and Shalom Family Medicine Centre of CMC Vellore.

Sunil very graciously squeezed in a visit to us as we at the HBM hospital have three Family Medicine Specialists on staff currently (Tony, Asangla and Sheba) and are working to understand which way the hospital needs to move in the next 5 years .... and beyond!

What a privilege to have Sunil with us.  Here he is sharing with the HBM staff family at the morning devotions.

We kicked off the process late last month with a 'dreaming session' where our staff wrote down what they would like to see happen at HBM.  Over the past few weeks we have been running focus groups with different groups of staff, have done a man-(or-woman)-on-the-street survey about hospital use in Lalitpur, have done an HBM patient satisfaction survey and are trying to understand the patterns of geographical access to our hospital.

The reality of the matter is that HBM Hospital has been struggling financially for some years now, with some big liabilities over our heads and a changed environment where we are not able to function in the way we used to because of new regulations and restrictions on our medical practice.

But as we spent this past day and a half in conversation, sharing, discussion and prayer together with Dr. Sunil, we come away deeply encouraged by the amazing dedication of our senior leaders and so many of the staff.  A joy of seeing a whole raft of new faces who have the potential to be do great things for God (and the energy to match!).  And the knowledge that in all our weaknesses and short-comings, our heavenly Father is so gracious and wants to work in and through us.  And the amazing potential we have to impact not only the town of Lalitpur, but all 6 blocks of Lalitpur district as well as the neighbouring districts in Madhya Pradesh too!

It was particularly appropriate to be meeting as a core 'Transformation Team' along with Dr. Sunil in the historic 'Bacon Bungalow' - the very building that Mrs. Elizabeth Mercy Bacon had purchased in 1890 when she established the Reformed Episcopal mission in Lalitpur.

Here we are, 125 years later, discussing and listening to each other to see where the next steps should be for HBM hospital.

A few years ago, generous funding for the HBM Palliative Care programme helped us to rennovate this beautiful historic building.  And so it continues to be used for building others up!

One thing that came out very clearly from our discussions was just how important each one of us are to take things forward and see transformation happen - but that we have to go forward as a team.  In EHA we aspire to be a Fellowship for Transformation through Caring.

As a unit, the HBM Hospital and all the ministries linked with HBM want to live this out in practice.

And in some ways, we are doing so.  But, of course, we have much more work to be done - and many ways that we can improve.

Sunil tasted a bit of our fellowship in our Thursday night cottage meeting.  We of course pressed him into service - maximum squeezing for the 36 hours he was with us - and so had the blessing of having the HBM family meet at our place and continue learning about the fruit of the Spirit in our lives.

And so we step into the next level of moving forward.

We have expressed some of our dreams.  We have discussed some of the opportunities we have.  We have come up with some possible solutions to the challenges we face.  We have been meeting for specific prayer for the past 3 weeks on Monday nights.

Now we need to synthesize what we have been talking about and develop concrete, visionary-but-doable-with-God's-help steps to put what we are hearing from God into action.

Here is the 'word cloud' from the short exercise we did where we asked our staff to write down how they would like to see HBM Hospital in 5 years from now.  Amazingly to me, the Epi Info 7  programme which we use to analyze our surveys has this function.  I was thrilled to see what came up.  Obviously the whole exercise is to capture some of what we as a staff team would like to see happen at HBM Hospital:

It is striking that the word 'should' is word No. 1 - the biggest word since it was used most often.  "Should" talks about change - and the desire to move into more than just the status quo survival mode. We must change... and with God's help we will!

Thanks for being along with us on this journey.  Please write to us at lalitpur@eha-health.org if you would like to be part of the exciting new opportunities that we are hoping and praying will be implemented in and through us very, very soon!

Rain rain rain rain, beautiful rain

Rain rain rain rain, beautiful rain

We arrived in Lalitpur after our latest Mussoorie trip on Friday last week.  We stepped out of the train just before noon into a sauna.  You have to feel the heat here to believe it.  It feels like… well, you get the sense that if I marianated myself with some curd and ginger-garlic paste and Amma’s secret curry powder – I would be a tasty tandoori treat.  As it is the sun (ok the UV rays from our nearest star) already turn my melanin-deprived skin into various shades of red from rose to salmon to stop-light hues.  So I look the part a tandoori-chicken on the outside too.

The saving grace was noticing that the ground outside our house was soft.  It had rained in Lalitpur the previous night.  We could feel the humidity of the previous rainfall and see the splash marks in the dust.

We continued to bake for the next 3 days, and then what we hoped for took place.  It rained.  And it rained again.  And it rained a third day in a row.  Not just a few splashes of water, but steady, goodly stuff.  Not quite buckets being emptied out from the sky, but certainly enough to gush all over and bring a delicious coolness to everything.

Our friends tell us that we have already had more rain in these few days than Lalitpur had all year in the scanty monsoon of 2015 – and that too being a second year of drought in a row!

Most of our work in the community for the past year has been in the shadow – or should we say the unsparingly harsh sun-shine - of drought.  We have structured a lot of our work to respond to this through facilitating ‘cash-for-work’ activities.  These allow people in the villages to earn through manual labour on land-treatment activities linked with water conservation.  With cash in hand, we were hoping to help some of our families stay in the village instead of migrating for work.

What a beautiful relief to have these delicious drops pouring down.  We got so much rain that our dear “Papaya” (nano car) has been stuck in the mud in its parking place.  

The rain has not come back accident.  God says in His word that He sends the rain on the just and the unjust.  We have been praying, as have folks all over our nation and in other parts of this dear planet… for rain.  And we need to keep praying, as the full onslaught of the monsoon has not hit us yet.  The steady constant sheets of water that we are looking for have not yet been tasted, but we hope – and pray – that they will.

Mr. Baswaraj, who has come for a month to help us out with the watershed management work, has said that the small ‘bunds’ (earthen ridges) which some of our villagers have built on the edge of the beneficiaries’ fields are doing their work:  water has been gathering which previously had just flowed away, not recharging the water table and carrying away precious top soil.  But now it has the opportunity to percolate down – and farmer’s fields are staying with them too.

Having felt answered prayers as wet splashes on our faces – we don’t want to stop.  We want a full monsoonal deluge – with the right amount of rain over the next few months for farmers to get a bumper crop and for the ground water to be fully recharged.

Getting enough water this year will help us avoid this:

 (note the Eicher tractor!)

  

This is a  water tanker that one of the villages had brought from another place so that their households would have drinking water early last month.

We know that the impact of our watershed management activities in the 15 villages we are working in will be very modest.  They will have some impact, we believe, but are far away from covering all the landscape.  However, we do hope that their impact will be felt locally.  We hope that wells near the farm-bunds and gully plugs will fill up faster.  And our desire is that through the hard work of working together, our local village watershed management committees and self-help groups will grow in confidence and be able to access bigger tasks and opportunities in the coming days.

The rain has come.  We hope, and pray, for more.   

What a joy to already see a thin shade of light green as new grass is already sprouting from the soft earth.  What a pleasure to have house where everything is not glowing with heat.  Beautiful rain.  Welcome monsoon – you wet blessing from our dear Lord Jesus who loves our India so very much.