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.

We’ve certainly appreciated all the prayers and encouragements from all of our friends and colleagues, and Christ has certainly looked after us. In travel, we received many mercies, especially in stumbling across a very friendly helper in Delhi late at night to help us find a good taxi to the airport after a ten hour lay-over that we spent in city centre, and also in regards to being able to rebook a flight from Varanasi to Delhi at a reasonable price with only a couple hours before departure (we arrived at the airport outside Varanasi and were told by our airline that our flight had been rescheduled for earlier and that we’d missed it. Even though the airport was rather small, with only a few flights each day, we found a flight on a different airline that left only an hour after our original scheduled departure, and our first airline issued us a refund).

In the next few days, we’ll post a couple entries regarding our time in India over the last two weeks, as well as a few photos.

We were two weeks in the United States seeing friends and family, which was mostly good, minus allergies and mild sickness affecting our short off-time.

We’re used to the possibility of air travel delays in our mode of living. However, I am still a bit frustrated at the lack of airline responsibility regarding weather related delays. They basically have to do nothing, and as a result I’ve spent overnights and days in airports in the past because of cancelled flights, and recently, these five hours of little information, and of course, no vouchers for food or anything. I know it’s not really their fault that aircraft get held up by weather, but is it the travelers fault that they don’t have any extra aircraft or air-traffic management to deal with those largely common occurrences? And certainly it’s not the company’s fault in those situations, but they are still under law responsible to pay their staff overtime. Why not any sort of concessions (at least regarding food and accommodation) for their loyal customers?

Anyways, we’ve still time to make our flight to India and get ready. And we’re not loud complainers. I’m just giving some thoughts towards the logic of ‘market guided’ consumer related laws. Perhaps the FFA should take a look at some of their regulations and some of what their European counterparts have in place. But I understand it’s hard times for the airlines. Right?

Catch you in few weeks! God bless.

Last week, the January DTS finished their three-month Lecture Phase, and today, two teams of seven (six students and one staff each) are leaving for two months of outreach: one team to India, and one around Ireland. They will return at the beginning of July for a week of debrief before their DTS officially ends.

The Ireland team is lead by Sharayah Prowse (of Canada) who will also be working closely with some YWAM staff in Belfast. For a majority of their outreach, the team will be in Belfast, living on the Shankill in the YWAM Belfast offices, working across sectarian divides in largely working class communities. During the weeks, they will be working with the Forgiveness Programme, bringing workshops on forgiveness to youth of all ages in segregated neighborhoods and schools, and helping out in a YWAM outreach cafe on the Shankill Road. The team will also be doing youth outreach in Kesh, Co. Fermanagh, as well as outreach in conjunction with Summer Madness (Ireland’s biggest Christian youth festival) in Belfast and the Urban Soul street outreach in Dublin.

The India team is lead by Francis Khamanra (of Sierra Leone), who will be teaming up with a variety of YWAM and non-YWAM ministry contacts across India. They will arrive tomorrow in New Delhi, where they will meet up with a DTS team from Belfast for a week and orient themselves to a new environment, before heading off to Calcutta for two weeks. In Calcutta, the team are ministering in local churches, as well as participating in outreaches to homeless, widows, and orphans. Similarly, they will also work in local churches in Varanasi, where they will be for three weeks, also offering practical assistance to local missionaries and helping with evangelism in surrounding villages. The team will also be working with colleagues in Greater Norda.

Our desire for these next two months is not only that these teams, through partnership with long-term contacts, will be able to impact their nations for Jesus, but furthermore, that the participants in these outreaches will be changed to live long-term missional lives. The purpose of a DTS is not a one-off fulfill-my-commitment-to-Jesus time of missions service, but rather a time to lay foundations for a life of dedication to the Great Commission. Having spent three months in lectures and Christian community, only applying that time of learning to the needs of a world that ‘groans’ for a new existence (Rom. 8:22) will make it more than just personal theory. We pray that this experience will be transformational for all that are involved.

Related blog content:

• Renee and I will be visiting the team for two weeks while they are in Varanasi. Read about our pastoral visit plans.
• Pictures from the final days of this DTS’s Lecture Phase are available in our photo gallery.

Some of our community will be aware that both Renee and myself will be traveling to India in the last few days of May, staying for two weeks with an outreach team we’re sending out from Closkelt. The outreach team is leaving in less than two weeks for a two month DTS outreach all around India – six students and one staff. We will join them in Varanasi (and possibly Calcutta), primarily in a pastoral role to see how staff and students are interacting with each other, India, their ministries and their responsibilities.

Related links

The Closkelt DTS team will be piggy-backing a team from the Belfast DTS that left in April. That team is on the ground right now, and you can read about their adventures via a couple blogs. Two colleagues from the Leadership Teams of YWAM Closkelt and YWAM Belfast (respectively) have been them for a couple weeks on a pastoral visit and have particularly good stories about the haps.

• Heather Clark is director of communications for YWAM NI, and writes about some of her mishaps and joys in India on her blog.
• Erin Seibel has been leading DTSs in Belfast for the past couple years and is visiting her outreach teams with Heather in India and Burundi.