Sunday, July 17. We woke up at six, met for breakfast at 6:30 consisting of fruit and veggie sandwiches and dashed off at 6:45 to get to a Church of South India (CSI) English service which began at 7:30. This church was started almost 90 years ago by the Brits for the Indian equivalent of "hapas", mixed British and Indian descendants. So their worship style is derived from the Anglican (Episcopal) Church, very formal liturgy, much like the Catholic mass. Everything is formalized reading and response. We sang God Is My Refuge and Just a Closer Walk with Thee played on an inadequate keyboard (we would have been better off singing acapella) and Tim preached a short message taken from Jesus first miracle of turning water to wine. We then observed the communion service but did not want to participate and share the wine cup since some of us may have colds. The church than served a breakfast consisting of stuff we could not identify - fried bread kind of like doughnut, and maybe a variation of dosa with different sauces. We then led the youth worship with seven or eight teens and young adults, all about our age. Josh led two worship songs on the guitar, having learned our lessons, we sang only acapella songs with Allison and Michael sharing their testimonies and Calida sharing for ten minutes about becoming living sacrifices. We then gathered in twos and threes to pray for each youth before returning to our hotel at 11 AM. The only meeting room we could find at this hotel was a room off the bar. It was dark and we also sensed a lot of darkness in this place. Indeed, Tim tells us that Madurai is also known as Temple City, because there are more temples here than any other place in India. We prayed for spiritual protection, had our small group devotions and debriefed this morning, so the team members who only grew up in FEC can understand more about liturgical services and how God is honored at this kind of service too. We also prayed for Katherine who appears to have a bad cold or maybe flu and Allison, whose bad stomach resurfaced after being completely well yesterday. Marshall too has a bit of bad stomach, which he attributes to the spicy food alone and says what he needs is simple nutritious foods like ice cream and down home fried chicken (both vetoed). We ate some granola bars for lunch and took the rest of the afternoon off to rest before meeting at 4 PM to have dinner and go to the orphanage for a short time to visit with these girls.
Paulus and Rosie met us about 4 to guide us to dinner and the orphanage. Apparently, the rest did us all good as Kat and Allison both seemed fully recovered. We ate at a restaurant serving bryana, fried rice cooked with chunks of mutton, good, but nothing like the dish with beef we had last Tuesday. There were only 13 girls there at this time, with a few more currently living at this orphanage; sixty something living in schools, almost twenty now married, and a good number working, and some even reunited with her biological family, for a total of about 200 rescued girls, all of whom consider this place their permanent home where they grew up. All of them came as infants, the youngest 5 hours old, all abandoned, originally in front of the temple where they were either taken in to be raised as temple prostitutes or sold or left to die, now abandoned at hospitals. We met the "mother" of the house and her small staff of ladies. She proudly talked about her girls, how some even though handicapped are now holding down good jobs and showed wedding albums of some of the recent weddings The place is clean and homey. The girls sang several praise songs for us, some in Hindi, some in English. We sang a few songs back to them including a couple of VBS songs complete with dance motions which they all enjoyed. We then gave the girls the clothes which Jennifer Kuo's sewing group made, enjoyed eating cookies and drinking chilled mango nectar, before returning back to our hotel by 7:30, sans Meiring and Kloe. They had gone with Rosie to go shop for cloth with which to make chutithar (Indian dress) for the girls and kurtha (Indian shirts) for the guys, custom tailored by the students learning to become seamstresses at the school where we will start our VBS tomorrow - this is kind of their graduating exam project. We will of course pay the seamstresses for their work, so they will actually be making their first product of their future career, giving them a sense of accomplishment. For us, we will be getting a custom tailored product at a fraction of what it would cost us if we went shopping for it, a win-win situation for everyone, except maybe for the retail clothiers. These dresses and shirts should be completed by Thursday, a day before we leave Madurai to return to Bangalore. We will be showing off our Vision Indian uniforms at Home Concert of August 20 so please come. Incidentally, lest you think Vision is loosely spending money staying at three star hotels, we are paying less than $23 a person a night including breakfast but the main reason is security and safety, since the cheaper hotels are located in a worse neighborhood and does not provide security guards for the property.
Beautiful scenery and highway from Bangalore to Madurai
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