{FECA Vision Choir} Report 8

Saturday, July 16. Today is a week since we landed. Our health has been pretty good. Rachel and Kayla had sore throats when they came. Allison and Marshall had minor bad stomach, and today, Katherine and Kayla have slight sore throat and stuffy nose, a few of the girls are not sleeping enough, staying up late to talk so they are catching up their sleep on the bus. Of all the food we ate in Bangalore, our favorite was a curried beef over rice cooked at the orphanage on Tuesday. The beef was tender, cooked just right, that most of us had seconds or more. But one of the teachers at the orphanage was Hindi, and even the smell of the beef caused her to put her veil over her nose. So while we enjoyed the food, we still have much to learn. As Paul reminds us in Romans 14:20-21, "Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats. It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble."

After breakfast and devotions where we read verses from John 10 about hearing the Shepard's voice, we spent a few minutes practicing listening prayer. After checking out and packing up the bus, we learned that Pastor Joel and his daughter Shiney are both sick with the flu and so he and his wife will not be traveling down with us. We learned a bit about the orphanage and school we will be visiting in Madurai. Twenty years ago, a middle aged couple felt called of the Lord to come to Madurai. With no idea what they were to do, they prayed, and soon learned of a practice where parents would abandon their infant girls in front of the temples, because the dowry they would have to pay for their daughter's future marriage was exorbitant (the order of $5000), much much higher than typical in the rest of India, so they gave them up basically to die. This couple started rescuing these baby girls and that is how the orphanage started. As the children grew, a school was started. These young ladies soon became well known throughout Madurai as smart, intelligent, well-mannered girls which every family wanted their sons to marry, with no dowry required, a wonderful example of redemption: from unwanted waifs to sought after treasures. The school now has about 1500 students including vocational training for nursing, school teachers, auto mechanics and electricians. Another ministry this couple started is ministry to people dying with HIV/AIDS (India denies they have a serious problem with this disease and so does not provide medication to ill patients nor care that these "non-entities" {like handicapped persons} become believers). These ill patients soon found Jesus and died peacefully, so the reputation soon spread that instead of dying miserably, believers in Jesus died peacefully so many came to faith.

The 450 km drive to Madurai is mostly on a nice two to three lane toll road where we can speed along at 80 kph (50 mph). The Indian country side is verdant and lush and beautiful. It has gotten progressively warmer as we drove south, from the high sixties when we left Bangalore to the mid-eighties with accompanying high humidity. After about three hours, we stopped for lunch at 12:30 in a veggie restaurant by the road side and ate paper dosa, a paper-thin crepe, and utabang, rice pancake with an onion topping. The dosa is a two foot diameter pancake, fried, and folded into a roll. Utabang looks like an 8" pizza and like dosa, is made of rice flour. After this light meal, we continued our drive to Madurai. It started to rain when we got within about 60 km of Madurai which also caused the temperature to steadily drop to the low seventies, PTL. But the heavy rain also caused extensive flooding slowing our progress. Tim's GPS also took us to a route with a low underpass which our bus could not get through so we had to detour around, traversing flooded zones at least a foot deep in sewer contaminated water. We finally arrived at our hotel at 7:30, called Poppys, with beautiful and nicely appointed rooms. We were met by Paulus and his wife, Rosie. Paulus is the son of the couple (now home with the Lord) who started the ministry here. We ate a buffet dinner at the hotel and turned in early since we have another early start tomorrow, Sunday

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