About ten days have passed since we returned, and I was hoping to put something up on the blog about our time in India sooner, but we’ve had some issues on our return that have occupied our attention, especially some health concerns.

We were only in India for two weeks, and 98% of our time there was spent in a city called Varanasi. We sent a team of seven people (including one staff leader) to India from our winter DTS in early May, and by the time we came in late May, they’d just arrived in Varanasi for a three week stay, after one week in Delhi and two weeks in Calcutta.

Varanasi
Varanasi (formerly known as Benares) is considered the ‘holy city of India,’ and is an important place of pilgrimage for Hindus; a contact described it as ‘the beating heart of the Hindu universe.’ The river Ganges flows through the city, and along it are a multitude of ghats – the famous steps leading down to the shore of the ‘holy river,’ on which temples are built, religious ceremonies performed, and bodies are cremated. The river is considered a Devi goddess, and bathing in her is supposed to grant forgiveness for sins committed in many lifetimes; although samples have put the fecal coliform bacteria levels at 1.5 million per 100mL, bathing and scrubbing in the Ganges is a common sight (safe bathing levels are 500 bacteria per 100mL! [1]).

Currently, Hindus comprise the vast majority of the population of Varanasi, but in the past, the city has had a vibrant Buddhist history. Saranath (or Sarnath) is a park basically on the north-eastern outskirts of Varanasi, a two minute walk from where our team was staying, where Gautama Buddha is said to have preached his first sermon [2,3]. Since it’s currently off-season, the area was scant of the tourist and pilgrims which normally flock there in the winter, although quite a few temples and monasteries are run and stocked by foreign Buddhists, such as Japanese, Thai, Korean, etc. Very few locals are Buddhists, according to a contact, who said the number is probably less than 1%.

Local Christians are also quite few, though definitely worth mentioning because of their commitment to prayer. With the spiritual centrality of Varanasi coupled with a multitude of 330 million Hindu gods, the heavenly atmosphere can feel quite intense (and I’m not one to say such things very often). We found that most of our organizational colleagues based in Varanasi are from other parts of India, and that they, along with the visiting teams and volunteers from YWAM and other groups, feel strongly that unlocking Varanasi for Christ will be key in unlocking the nation as a whole.

Team and ministry
Our main purposes in visiting our team in India were to offer support to the students and staff leader, to see how ministry was going, and to ascertain the potential for a long term relationship with the contacts. We knew the team had been facing some difficulties in dynamics and in health, especially as one of the students had been diagnosed with appendicitis a few days before our arrival. On the day we landed in Varanasi, that student went into a local hospital for emergency surgery to remove her appendix and would spend the next week recovering after a successful operation. We were thankful that another of our students is a fully trained nurse who has previously been to India and that she was able to stay with our recovering student and make sure they got everything they needed before a parent arrived to bring her home for recovery.

In the midst of this, the rest of the team were pressing on with their ministry, despite travel-related sickness and heat that hovered between 35 and 45 °C (95 – 115 °F), exacerbated by constant power-outages (no fans then!). Local YWAMers run a home for widows [4] (often treated poorly in India) where the team helped with practical work in and around a self-run bakery. They were also running computer and English courses for Christian Indian workers, as well as going out with local YWAMers for ministry and evangelism in nearby villages and prisons. In light of the spiritual atmosphere, praying and prayer walks, especially along the ghats, were also important.

Our time
Our last impressions of India were of an extremely helpful and friendly people. Though wary of touts and salesmen, we were so encouraged and blessed by the random strangers who would so willingly help us out of sticky situations. In particular, during a stopover in Delhi city centre before our flight back to Europe, we were having a really tough time finding a proper taxi to take to the airport until we came across a man who offered to walk around for us to find good transport. That sort of thing happened at least two other times that day alone. (But if we came again, we’d pick another time of year, like winter!)

After spending time with the team as individuals and as a group, we decided to change their plane tickets so they would return to Northern Ireland to finish the last two and a half weeks of outreach directly with YWAM NI, and particularly working with us at an upcoming festival (Summer Madness). Finishing their time in Varanasi, they would have spent their last couple weeks at a prayer house and in Delhi, and we felt it would be best in their circumstance to come and be actively engaged in the variety of things we have going on here right now. Thus, we’ve been busy modifying our plans, but the team has arrived this past Thursday, rested and debriefed a bit over the weekend, and I’ve dropped them off to work with a ministry contact of ours in South Armagh this morning.

Photos: Check out photos from India in our photo galleries.

References:

1. According to Lonely Planet’s India Travel Guide (ISBN: 9781741043082). Also a similar entry about the Ganges on the Lonely Planet website.
2. You can read more about Saranath at this Buddhist website.
3. Sarnath on Wikipedia.
4. A website on the YWAM widow’s home can be accessed here. The website looks a bit out of date, though, and the picture of the home on the main page is not at all how it looks now. Great info on the roles of widows in Indian society, as well as more info on Saranath.