Update on Mum's health 24.2.2022

Dear Friends,

Mum had a very restless last night. But what a privilege to be with her for every minute of it, and to massage and comfort her through the hours.

In the morning we were glad when she ate a bowl of suji and drank some water by us asking her to open her mouth and swallow for every spoonful.

As the day went on, it became clear that Mum is unlikely to make a quick recovery. Though the CT scan ruled out internal injury to the brain, a when lot of other post-fall complications are happening to Mum.

Mum is actually very sick. For most of the day she has not opened her eyes. She has also developed a fever and pneumonia and needs oxygen support.  

Mum has been responding to us in a very limited way.  She is unable to answer most questions, other that the occasional monosylable.  

Over the day Mum has sometimes spoken in slurred speech from within her oxygen mask. But though we bend down to listen to Mum, we just couldn't make out the words...

And so we come to the end of the day with Mum in a  challenging state. We firmly believe that the Lord has the power to heal her ... and give her many more days of life.

At the same time, these may be Mum's final days in this life. We.must be ready to accept the answers to the many prayers on behalf of Mum: that God will do the very best form of healing that He chooses at this time. This may be taking Mum to be with Him in paradise now rather than later.

We were glad that Premi was able to talk to Mum over the phone this evening from Alaska.  Mum didn't respond externally,  but we believe that her inner person heard all that has been spoken to her. 

We are deeply grateful for all the prayers and blessings from near and far. Thank you so much.  It is so touching to hear! Your prayers for Mum's complete healing and for wisdom and discernment for us are so appreciated!

- Andi and Sheba Eicher (on behalf of the widely spread-out Eicher clan)

Announcing the Broadcast Group

Dear Friends, 

Some of you will have heard that our mother Christa Eicher had a fall in her home in Mussoorie on Monday 21st morning.

Since then many things have happened, with Mum being admitted at Landour Community hospital (LCH) and being referred to Dehra Dun for a CT scan, and us being able to shift her back to LCH yesterday afternoon.

We have started this broadcast group to channel prayer for Mum / Oma / Aunty Christa. 

We hope to put up daily updates on her condition so that we can pray in a focussed way. 

- Andi and Sheba Eicher (for the extended Eicher clan)

Mum's Fall - Initial Prayer request

Dear Friends

This is the whatsapp note we sent out as we were booking tickets and rushing to Mussoorie from our distant part of Odisha

21.2.2022

Requesting prayers. 

Mum had a bad fall today and has had a head wound and lost blood. She was alone at the time.  She was taken to Landour Community hospital for first aid and observation in their ICU.

In the afternoon she became disoriented and is now being shifted to Dehra Dun for a CT scan.  Stefan should be arriving in Dhera Dun this evening, and Sheba and myself are booked to fly tomorrow (22.2) to Dehra Dun via Delhi, God-willing arriving at 3 pm.  

Your on-going prayers are cherished for Mum and all of us at this time.  

- Andi and Sheba

Radio Contact

Hello Gentle Reader!

It has been a looooong time since this blog was updated.  

If you have come here in the last 1.5 years, and seen only the last post... my apologies.

A month ago today (21st March 2022) we plunged into the latest set of challenges - a health emergency for my mother in Mussoorie.   I started a daily update which was sent out on FB and Whatsapp.  To take us through the story, I am including them in chronological order - with the odd photo illustration to boot.

Blessings from all of us!

The Eichers (of Lamtaput at this point in our pilgrimage) 

501.1

This morning at 5.42 AM I crossed a barrier.

There was no fanfare, just a small set of numbers slipping into new territory: 501.1

500 kms done.

I started jogging regularly 7 months ago in preparation for the Asha Kiran 10 K Run which we were organising then.  And started keeping track on my mobile.

It's now become a part of me.  This strange tug to get downstairs and start stretching my calves as the sky starts to fade into colour.  The almost animal tug to get going, with my mind and part of my body asking 'why?' as the first set of paces begin.

Push forward.  Praise music on.  Out the back gate of the hospital campus.  Onto the blessed stretch of lonely road.  Early morning coolness welcomes the trod, trod, trod.  Today a blessed mist.  Yesterday patches of light rain splattered me.  

Up the early incline.  Get to the top.  Loosen the pace.  Thoughts go towards Asha who jogged with me almost every morning for the 4 months she was with us.  Usually on this bit.  A prayer or two on her behalf.  The thoughts of the days work start showing up.  Deep breaths.  Look at my pace.  Just over 6 mins per km.   Can I get that down?  Open stride as I come to the top of the gentle hill.

The vista opens up.  Rolling hills.  Patch-work forests.  Some bedraggled cashew-plantations.  Rows of eucalyptus rifle by as I push down the hill.  And now the short-cut.  Quick-right onto mud-path.  Head down.  Look down for loose-stones.  Careful, don't want to slip.  Brush-through occasional wet-web.  And then the slight climb.  Hill No. 2.  Got to get through without a fall.  Can I keep the pace under 6 mins?   Scramble up last 10 meters and back onto black-top.

5.47 per km.  Time to kick forward.  Bit of huffing-puffing, deep breaths.  The sun has started to make the rain-cloud-skies shimmer with silver.  I love this place.  A lone motor-cycle passes me.  Driver wearing a cloth face-mask, but no helmet.

Almost at the bottom of the hill.  2 kms gone.  Start up the final gentle climb.  Push, push.  Praise music on again after silly spotify ad.   How great is our God.  Push, push.  Deep breaths.  Final hill.  After the gentle top is gently down.  Can I move the pace down to 5.30?   Come to the mini crest at 5.38.  

500 m left.  Shirt sweat-stained, ye olde legs a-pumpin.  Just a bit more.  Don't run fast, keep jogging at pace.  Glance at mobile, its down to 5.32.  We are coming in fine.  200 meters more.  The sun is glinting off the ginger plants to my right.  The little smudge of a rock-pile near the back gate is looming closer.

Keep going.  Almost there.  Last metres to go.  I'm here.  Legs slow down to walk and blessed sweat-stained relief.  Touch the screen.  The run is over. 3.18 kms in 17.21 mins.  I have reached my goal of doing it in under 5.30 mins per km.

Oh the joy of stopping.  Stretch.  Loosen.  Music still soaring.  What a relief to walk down the bamboo-framed path.  The lark is on the limb.  All is well.  

Quick look into the dew-spangled plot of a kitchen garden we have.  And then up the stairs to the bath and the new day.  Its 6 AM and a beautiful day has begun.

-------------------------------

So here is the strange thing.

I have never jogged like this in my life.  At 51 sun-spins, something new has woken up.  And today I crossed the 500 km barrier.  Am really, really surprised.   I remember Dad reading us "A Father, A Son and a Three-mile Run" where the boy gets up every morning to run cross country and charts out his miles on a map across the US.  He crosses it and comes half-way back.  Just did not seem possible.  Well, today I have managed to accumulate a Delhi to Dehra Dun and almost all the way back set of kms jogged.

A few learnings along the way.

First.  

Habits take time to form.  And start from diverse roots.  This one started last year while we were on our mini-sabbatical.  The long rambling visit in the US gave lots of time for early morning wanderings.  And the first little stretches of jogging were experimented there.  Mostly about 500 meters or so.   From the tiny acorn grows...

Second.  

Goals help.  Big time.  Knowing that we were organising a 10 K run made me want to run it.  To see if I could.  It seemed impossible in Feb.  But by adding another 500 metres every 3-4 days, I slowly worked up to doing 7-8 kms every morning.  Totally at my pace.  Shuffling along.  Walk up briskly up hills.  Jog down.  Keep the old ankles from twisting.

Third.

Small targets are exciting.  For me knowing how much I have jogged really, really helps.  Why should it?  Shouldn't just the beauty of everything out there be enough?  Yeah.  I am sure there are others for whom that is enough.  But I like to keep track.  I do.  I like to finish off a round figure.  Can I complete 5 kms?  Can I nudge my time to a new level?  Hearing that Asha's school minimum mark for girls' inter-house cross country was 6 mins per km was a good spur for me.  Surely I can do that!  And yes, with huffing and puffing it was achieved.  But for me I am doing 3 kms at present, not under 6 min pace for the 5 kms that Wynberg Allen girl students run for.  Humbling.

Fourth.

Applause lifts you up.  OK, I don't get applause at this point.  But when we did a trial run of the Asha Kiran 10 K run in early March, I found the clapping and encouragement of our friends who were manning different parts of the trail to be a huge tonic.   Sadly the COVID-19 craziness has put our beloved Asha Kiran 10 K Run into cold storage...  But by-standers clearly help.  The world's greatest long-distance runner Eliud Kipchoge insisted on running before spectators when he ran his amazing feat of completing a marathon - all 42 kms of it - in under 2 hours (2.85 blistering minutes per km!). 

Fifth.

Jogging changes you.  I am 10% less than I used to be.  A year ago I weighed in at 92-93 kgs.  Today I have dipped to around 80 or so.  Someone I met last month asked whether I was ill.   Could jogging be pathological?

Sixth.

The subtle bit.  What is the right balance?  Am I addicted to this early-morning silliness?  How much of the sly slippery pride has entered?  Do I see the same drive, the same hunger in other parts of my life?  Much to ponder on of course.  Will have to mull over that a bit on tomorrow's jog...  I hope it doesn't rain when the clock slips past 5 AM...

----------------------------------------------------------

The Good Book says: For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. 1 Timothy 4.8

So much yet to learn.   Much to push forward for.   501.1 kms are over.   On, on!

On Baking Chocolate Cake from the Landour Cook Book

Many moons ago, a century shall we say, Mussoorie saw an influx of missionary families every 'hot season.'  Mothers would arrive first, trundling up the ghat to Kincraig in Mussoorie and on up to Landour.   The ladies would take their children out of boarding from Woodstock School and then a month or two later the fathers would join them for a few weeks of R&R.

In the late 1920's the "Reading Club" requested Rev. Parker, the then principal of Woodstock School to build a Community Centre, The building was erected in 1928 catered to the lively summer community, complete with a library and meeting rooms.

The Reading Club of Landour Community Center held weekly meetings there and created a Cook Book, sharing favorite recipes and also giving guidance on substitutions for foods and flavorings not available in Landour, and for cooking at high altitudes.  (From: The Landour Community Centre Cookbooks: From the 1920s to the 1960s and the present)

That Landour Cookbook lives on.  The Eichers in Lamtaput have a well-worn copy which has travelled with us over the past 2 decades from Jharkhand to Thane to Lalitpur and is now being used in S. Odisha.   We used our copy this evening to bake a chocolate cake.  Two actually!

Needless to say, our copy has seen better days.  The cake section (used the most) is rather rich with stuff having spilled on it from eons of open book, measure stuff, whisk it around, splatter...

I am rather fond of the Chocolate Cake recipe by Alfie Campbell.  1 1/2 cups of cold water!  I always wanted to know why we are asked to mix in cold water... and why not milk for this recipe? Anyway, I follow the instructions, and have to say that this recipe has done us well over the years.  This evening a doubling of the ingredients by yours truly resulted in two lovely cakes which are cooling now.

The cover of our Landour Cookbook is special to me, because on one of my parents visits to us (probably when we lived in Thane) my Dad noticed that it was in a poor condition, and he took it on himself to repair it.   And so using some cardboard that he recycled from a file, Dad patched it the veteran copy we have, and wrote "Landour Cookbook" on it with permanent marker.  Almost everytime I see his handwriting I remember him.

Everything fades.  Time slips away.  But we are blessed to live in the now / eternity.

As the needle has now ticked past 12 am, another round of late night baking is over.  A week from tonight we will be preparing for our Asha leaving in the morn for her flight to Mumbai and then Chicago ("so Gott will und wir leben").  This cake one of the many small things we do to prepare for another shift in life.

Strength for today, and bright hope for tomorrow

Blessings all mine with ten thousand beside

Great is thy faithfulness, morning by morning new mercies I see

All I have needed, thy hand has provided,

Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me

Our humble cookbook has helped stitch another thread in the vast tapestry of meaning.  S.D.g.

For such a time as this

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last 2 months, or woken up like Rip Van Winkle after a 20 year sleep, you will be (probably painfully) aware of the word COVID-19.

Our world has changed drastically to put it lightly.  Who would have imagined no flights at all between the US and Europe, of oil being so cheap that it for a short time companies were paying others to store it for them (negative price!), of 1.3 billion people in 'lock-down' with all that it is meaning to our beloved country of India.  Strange days to be sure.

Sheba and I have just completed 6 blessed months at the Asha Kiran Society in Lamtaput, Odisha.  It is a joy to be part of this amazing team of doctors and nurses and community educators and farmer-friendly motivators and, and, and...  We are based at a hospital with a big heart - with a group of amazing people who are living out their call - warts and all of course - with long-lasting fruit stemming from Asha Kiran 30 odd years of devoted work.

And the scenery... drop-dead gorgeous.  A feast to the eye, and the ear too as the stillness is broken not with the ear-splitting sounds of the latest marriage DJ procession which was our Lalitpur staple,  but with a medley of bird-song, and the rustle of the wind in bamboo outside our house.

Far, far away from everything we are, nestled on the South-western corner of Odisha, up in the tribal highlands.  Surely, COVID-19 will not perturb us here?

Well, to put it lightly, we are all connected.  Even in the remote villages where we have work with people who belong to the Bonda (a particularly vulnerable tribal group) we find that they have members who have gone to Kerala and Mumbai for work.  The remotest corner of the world is linked through labour and remittances with the swirling maelstorm of modernity.

As the Odisha state government took the lead in announcing various levels of COVID-19 control measures, we realised that it was no longer 'business as usual.'  All our village multilingual education centres were shut when the local schools were closed - but we are grateful that we had just managed to finish the first term evaluations.  Reading the writing on the wall, our team sent out staff and volunteers to the 157 village hamlets that Asha Kiran has some work in with basic COVID-19 prevention messages.

The training for this was held out of door with physical distancing in place - and allowed us to cover all these villages before the Central Government announced the nation-wide lockdown from midnight 23rd of March!

At the same time, our Asha Kiran Hospital worked hard to develop a separate COVID-19 referral centre in the Asha Kiran Training Centre buildings.  Amazingly, it was up and running within a week of the first planning session.  Kudos to the team who developed systems, fenced off the area, set up a 25 bedded inpatient care centre and a cough OPD where patients with cough symptoms are first triaged to from the main hospital gate.

The agony of deciding who will be on duty was deferred as the doctors and nurses took turns to see potentially COVID-19 patients.  But these 3 weeks have seen hardly any cases - maybe 4-5 cough cases coming to the cough OPD and for the past 2 weeks no one was admitted over night.

Personal protective equipment (PPEs)?  Not available in local shops (we have 3).  Not available by Amazon (no deliveries here during lock-down).  Not available even in the big cities... and so our team started making our own.  And masks too.  Lots of them.

And in the mean-time our community people have put in their second round of visits - this time to a smaller group of villages to deliver medications for people with long-term illnesses who were unable to come to Asha Kiran Hospital due to the Lock-down nixing all public transportation.   And also to find out what the food stocks people had at home (4.5 months on average we found - which is why this is post-harvest time is normally the festival and marriage season).

And yet, as time went on, we still did not have a single patient diagnosed with COVID-19 in our district.   Yes, the numbers of people tested has been small, but surely with such a big disease taking place all over the world...

I found myself remembering Nevil Shute's melancholy book On the Beach which I had read in my teens.  The book has people living in Australia in a post-nuclear-war-world in which everyone in the Northern Hemisphere has died.  The characters are waiting for the radiation sickness to spread down to them and as the book proceeds you hear that more and more cities and town are 'out.'  Needless to say the book does not have a happy ending.

And so I took to checking up on the covid19India site.  Almost every night.  Sometimes multiple times a day.  Watching the numbers start to swell.  Seeing Odisha get its first cases.  But each time new cases were added to Odisha (there are 103 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the state to date), I would check to see if they were from our district of Koraput.  Each time they were from somewhere else.

But today that changed. 

This afternoon the following whatsapp text arrived in my phone. 

And in Sheba's phone too.

We have our first local case.  A young nurse who has come back to Koraput from Kolkota. 

Needless to say, health workers are at the forefront of caring - and also getting the disease.

This is of course precisely why we are here.  To work with our communities to address their challenges.  Be they the old-hat ones of poverty, malnutrition, TB etc., or the slightly newer ones of helping people with terminal illnesses and mental challenges, or the brand-new COVID-19 pandora's box of fear and loathing (combined with a very infectious disease which kills the most vulnerable).

The little red "+1" below marks Koraput's entry in the COVID-19 saga.

How many more people in our communities will get COVID-19?  Will we be swamped with cases at the Asha Kiran Hospital?  Will our on-going community outreaches see a slow trickle of suspect cases build up?  What will happen to the particularly vulnerable tribal groups we serve?

We really, really don't know.  We have tried to prepare for the worst... and are hoping and (literally) praying for the best.  I would be the happiest person in the world if this first case in Koraput is the last one too.

But given that Prince Charles and Boris Johnson and various other high-profile folks were unable to stop themselves from getting the disease, I think that most probably a goodly number of other people will get it in our district as well.

And so we have the opportunity to care for them and share love and hope.  To do to them as we would like others to do to us... and being health-care workers this possibility is real.

We don't know the future, but we know who holds the future.  The COVID-19 situation all around the world has brought much suffering and confusion, but we also realise that it offers opportunities to live our lives the way they should be. 

Can we be firmly in the present with our eyes fixed on an eternal future?  Taking each day with gratitude and love and seeing all our tasks big and small (or small and smaller) as having value.  Loving God and loving our neighbours (esp. our dear family members who we are seeing more of that we have in years!).  Taking a deep breath and allowing Jesus to hold our hands when we are afraid. 

Over the next few weeks our community teams aim to cover the 157 villages we have some work in with basic case detections of recent cough cases - and provide them with a mask and basic medications, prevention education and a follow up to see that they are not worsening.   We hope to eventually provide masks for every vulnerable person (elderly, or living with disabilities, or having long-term sicknesses like stroke, sickle-cell disease, cancer, heart problems) in all our villages.  And to monitor what the food security is.  And to provide compassionate care at Asha Kiran Hospital, and, and, and...

Do say a prayer for us as we seek to live out a life of love.  For Sheba and myself and all our amazing colleagues in the Asha Kiran Society and others in the villages.  For such a time as this.