The end of the sun

Sunset January 28, 2017

Can you see the sun?

Although the temperature gets up into the 70’s by mid-morning, it’s down to the low 50’s or high 40’s at night and the apartment doesn’t warm up all day.  I am always looking for the sunspot. The sun comes on the back porch between 7 and 9 a.m. and I have been taking my station there every morning to accumulate some therms.  So glad for my sheepskin boots and warm hat.

They have honored me with a desk in the faculty offices, a big open room divided by 3 foot high partitions, but almost no faculty is ever seen there. Students will bring their work directly to the professor's house sometimes.  I think the person in the space designated for my station never comes and they put a secondary desk in the space.  Near the window.  The sun shines in every day after my Hebrew class, so I am bound to be there.  By lunchtime, the sun is shining in the general area of my front door, and I open it and sit on the edge of the couch nearest the door.

By 2:30 pm it’s time to close all the doors and curtains and keep what warmth is available inside.  There are still areas on campus where the sun is shining later in the afternoon and I take a walk to warm up.

However lately, a different phenomenon has affected the sunspot.  Apparently the farmers on the hillsides begin burning the dry grass around this time of year.  The other day I was standing on the back porch and I could see the smoke rising from between the ridges.  I could smell it even before I saw it.  In spite of the fact that these fires will run up and down the hillsides at will (the students have already gone and dug firebreaks on the ridge coming up towards the college to help protect the ubiquitous garden plots behind every apartment building), the farmers burn the dry grass because it forces new grass to grow which they need to feed their cows. It also appears that some people set fire to the dry grass for 'mischief' and the government is asking people to monitor the situation and report any burning that they see.

The daytime temperature difference is noticeable.  Sometimes the light is just diffuse amid the haze; sometimes the sun is actually visible.  Many people here say that it is just fog.  But it is no as longer warm as it was  and it will probably remain this way until the rains begin in March or April.

Construction

Aizawl is the capital of Mizoram and thus replete with government workers.  The second major industry appears to be tearing down buildings and putting up new ones in their place.  Sometimes it is because they are quite old and sometimes the road has shifted and the buildings are no longer secure.

 
Buildings are made of miles of rebar and tons of concrete.  There are piles of rebar lying all around the campus.  There are, amidst the tea shops, sweets stores, and motor bike parts stores on the main drag of town, cement stores with bags and bags of cement piled inside.  Every pillar, post, floor, and ceiling is fashioned by hand, cast between boards and manually troweled. 

They are building a new conference center here at the college and about 4 workers are involved in the process.  They have a cement mixer, although I'm not sure if they're using it.  Bamboo ladders and walkways are precariously balanced between the ground and the different levels of the building. There are two other building projects, a new block of apartments and a public toilet.  The lavatory crew has no cement mixer.  They are mixing the cement by hand with the help of a hoe/mattock looking thing. I found out that the conference center was to have been finished last year, but you can see that all they have is one floor, some pillars and a partial ceiling.

 Rebar is always left sticking up from the pillars in case someone might suddenly decide to add another floor to the house.

New apartments

The construction workers do not go to church.  On Sunday they can be seen hanging out their wash on the roof of the incomplete building.  Except for long breaks in the class schedule, the workers, who come from different parts of India, live on site.



I don't really have a great picture of the 'side of the hill' aspect yet, but maybe you can get an idea from these photos.  Some houses have the lip of the front threshold practically on the edge of the road and the entire house is supported by very long pillars.  I'm glad I haven't been invited into one of those.

My second lesson

There is a female faculty member in the apartment beneath me.  Her field is in women’s studies and her doctoral dissertation was on the female vegetable vendors in Mizoram and their connection to faith.  I’m not really about the importance of how that goes together, but maybe I will ask her sometime.  She speaks beautiful English and was the English teacher until they needed her to teach some other classes.  They are currently without an English teacher and they have asked me, but no one has made any schedule yet.
We began talking about the lost tribes and I told her some of what I thought, including that I believe that YH is using the lost tribes movement to gather 21st century believers to Himself and to Torah, rambling into the Scriptures, and the paradigm of the northern kingdom, end times, and the difference between rabbinical law and Torah, and such things.  She has a good grasp of all the concepts and seemed fairly receptive to the possibilities.  However, she said that her mentor has suggested that the Mizo have grabbed onto the idea of being the lost tribes because they had their identity torn from them in the time of the missionaries and their native culture, aside from their language, was destroyed.  They are simply looking for some roots to be attached to. 
Yeshua said that we are to abide in Him.  He is our root:
John 15:1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.15:2 Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he taketh away:and every [branch] that bears fruit, he purges it, that it may bring forth more fruit.15:3 Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.15:4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can you, except you abide in me.15:5 I am the vine, ye [are] the branches: He that abides in me, and I in him, the same brings forth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing 15:6 If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast [them] into the fire, and they are burned.15:7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.
If we produce the fruit of the lion of Judah's line, of course we will look like lost tribes.
Later we got to talking about Trump (everyone here is very interested in American politics even though this is an extremely isolated part of the world), and she expressed some concern about religious fundamentalism of every kind. She basically supports the Palestinian cause.  Well, this is a Presbyterian college after all, although most of the faculty strongly support Israel.  In fact, she confessed to being quite secular, that she believes that all religions are good and a path to God.
Unfortunately, she will be leaving here shortly.  She has received a huge promotion and is going to be the Dean of the correspondence courses division in the College in Calcutta. 

Wash rinse repeat

This is a manual washing machine. Mine is particularly manual because the hose letting the water into the tub doesn’t fit onto the machine, so I have to hold it there myself while the tub fills.  You have to turn the water on and off at the faucet at the appropriate time.  You take the left hand cover off and put your clothes and detergent in and set the wash time.  When that finishes, you set it to drain the water in the tub.  After that, you take the clothes out and put them in the right hand spin side of the machine.  Wringing is helpful though taxing.  Then you set the spin time.  Then you repeat the process for rinsing the clothes.

 The drain hose from the washer just goes to a hole in the porch.  I assume there’s some pipe attached to it underneath.  But many of the water conduits do not have full piping from faucet to drain. I have opted to brush my teeth in the kitchen because at least the sink drain is connected to a pipe.  The sink drain in the bathroom is connected to nothing.  The water just runs onto and across the floor towards the general drain hole for the shower.  I guess the toilet is properly piped….
Dryers are not common. Every apartment building has an open roof where people hang their wash to dry.  Unfortunately for me, it is up another flight of these steep, slightly slanted cement stairs with no handrail and the thought of walking up carrying a basket of wet wash is daunting.
I have a clothes “wire” strung across the back porch.  They gave me six clothespins, but I’m sure I can get more somehow.  Of course, the wire is somewhat rusted and will probably stain my clothes.  The sun does shine on the porch for several hours in the morning, there is a constant breeze, and the air is particularly dry.
An unsolicited dryer showed up here the other day.  There wasn't really any place for it, so it's sitting in the 2nd bedroom and vented into the second bathroom, not the window, mind you, just the bathroom.
So I’m washing clothes about every 3rd day because that is all the room there is in the washer and on the line.  I won’t really need all that underwear that I brought.  I’m thinking about the extra roll of toilet paper I could have packed.
On an unrelated washing machine note, I saw ads for a 'unisex' washing machine while in the airport in Delhi.  On checking into it, I found that this is a new ploy to get men to do the wash at home.  When washing machines first came out, all the buttons were simplified because women were too 'stupid' to understand how to use them.  Now it seems that men are too 'stupid', thus, the unisex washing machine.

Third world internet

In a word, slow.  There is wifi in my apartment most of the time, but not always.  Sometimes the proxy server fades out.  Sometimes the electricity goes out.  There is a generator which I can make use of, but I have to go outside my apartment and throw a switch on the meter.  Then, when the electric comes back on, I have to go out and switch it back again.  Anyway, the generator has to be running for that system to work.  Everyone talked about hearing the generator running, and when it finally did, there was a low, constant hum, quite discernible from my kitchen. Of course, if the electric is out, the wifi doesn’t work, but even after it is restored, it still doesn’t work because someone needs to reset the proxy servers and that doesn’t always happen right away, especially over the weekend.

The best signal is in the admin building, which is where all the classes are held.  I have sufficient signal here to actually receive text messages on my phone, but not enough for skype.  I experimented with one choppy call; it’s not really functional for communication.  Anyway, the admin building is open only from 9:30 pm through 5:30 am EST, so it’s not practical for calls.  My regrets to Hebrew learners who were promised lessons while I was away.

In the admin building, I have to use safari.  In the apartment, with the proxy server, I have to use firefox.  If I'm in the admin building, I can get youtube, but not in my apartment.  And so it goes.

As for me, I am having sort of a media fast, enjoying lots of sunshine and spectacular views of the mountains, which I am sure are better for my mental, physical, and spiritual health.

Church

(after 3 days of no internet)

Everyone goes to church here on Sunday.  The whole province.  When I was here in November, I went where the majority of the faculty go and was informed that it would be my home church.  It is all in Mizo and I understood nothing.  Ruata is the pastor of the English speaking congregation and he has invited me to go with his family.  He says they have a wide variety of internationals, so that will be a better option for me.  Staying home is definitely not an option.

The college has chapel every morning Monday through Friday.  They are still singing from the Presbyterian hymn book and I actually know many of the songs.  Occasionally they sing one or two translated into Mizo, and there are a few indigenous hymns, which sound just like the Presbyterian hymns.  All the songs are in major keys, 4/4 rhythm accented by the native drum, which is similar to our bass drum.  Boom boom boom.  There are always an extra few booms between the stanzas with one loud one so you know the next stanza will start on the next beat. They also do some choruses, but ouch!  The boom boom just can't pull off any lively or syncopated music.

They hymn book is notated solfeggio, d, r, m, f, s, l, t, d₁, etc. in four parts.  The letters are spaced with hyphens according to the length of the notes.  The hymn books, which have been published locally, have many, many typos which some students have corrected by hand in individual copies.

In the local church they have “dancing”.  The people, mostly men, walk around in a circle, counter-clockwise as was pointed out to me by more than one person.  I am not sure of the significance of this.  I sort of resembles some native American dance displays, only much less vigorous.  There is no dancing in the college chapel services, but the wonderful thing about the chapel services is that the building was built with wonderful acoustics and almost all the students are male.  The sound of so many men singing in harmony is just glorious.

small world

I went up to the admin building to use the wifi and met Ruata in the faculty office area.  Turns out he finished his ThD at Columbia Seminary in Decatur in 2013.  I remember hearing about him the last time I was here, but I don't think we actually met.  He is head of the counseling certificate program. Since I had never heard of this seminary, I wondered if I didn't understand the folks that I was speaking to (that happens a lot). No surprise that I hadn't heard of it: it is quite small and under the Presbyterian Church USA.  There are 350 students and 30 faculty, and they serve the international community of Presbyterians world-wide, including Korea and India. (In spite of the PCUSA position, most Koreans and Mizos strongly support the state of Israel and the Jewish people.)

Ruata has two children still attending college in the Atlanta area.  His family’s experience in coming to Georgia has made them the most hospitable of people.  Basically they arrived to Decatur in the middle of the night to an empty apartment; no furniture, no food, no transportation.  They have kindly invited me to come to dinner every single night, if I like, and to bring me whatever I need from the city.  He has advocated for me in getting what I need (and some of what I don’t need) for my apartment.

He and his wife Nutei had a third child who took his own life in February 2016.  They have recently opened a crisis center in Aizawl city, where Nutei works every day from 9 to 5.  She shared a great deal of her experience, how in her prayers it seems like the Father was already preparing her for some event, how He has comforted her in the grieving process.  This loss still occupies a great deal of their thoughts and conversation.  I don't know any more to do than to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15).

I appreciate your prayers on their behalf of their complete healing.

kosher meals on air india

I like to order kosher meals on the airlines.  They’re usually a bit better (I had delicious sea bass on the Air France flight to Delhi), you tend to get served first and you don’t have to worry about getting some weird thing that you don’t want to eat.  However, it seems that Air India doesn’t really comprehend what kosher means.  Coming into Calcutta in the morning, I was offered a tray with an apple and a banana surrounded by miles of saran wrap.  Problem was, I was really hungry by that time so I asked for the omelet meal that everyone else was having and they obliged and gave me a regular meal as well.  

The snack on the flight to Aizawl is always pitiful: some tiny sandwich on white bread (with the crusts removed), the filling being something vaguely resembling cream cheese and pieces of cucumber.  I suspect the small sandwiches are the result of the British influence.  It seems that everyone here eats such sandwiches for lunch.  For my kosher counterpart, I was offered some boxed mango juice with the banana, apple and orange, again wrapped in the requisite saran wrap.

I guess their understanding is that the food is supposed to be kept separate from other food and that fruit is always kosher, not offensive to anyone.

So if you are ever in the position to fly in this area, just get the Hindu meal.  It will be strictly vegetarian, although maybe a bit spicy.

Life is cheap

For less than $15 I bought the equivalent of a TracFone, the sim card (which we bought for a woman standing in the bazaar with a basket of face masks for sale)  was about $5.  I got a combo of 100 calls/texts for about $1.50.  But the minutes don’t run over at the end of the month 😞.  

I went to the vegetable market and bought about 2 kg of cabbage and cauliflower for 30¢, 1/2 kg of carrots for 5¢, about 5 apples (which all come from China apparently) for $2, and a humongous avocado for 50¢.  All the faculty live on campus and pay the equivalent of $30 a month for rent.  On the other hand, I have no idea how salaries run.

About 20% of the world’s population lives in India.  While there is no caste system among the Mizo tribal people who live in this area, it is prevalent in the rest of the country and so some people’s lives are considered very cheap.  When you have a great deal of anything, you don’t tend to value it. 

Praise YH that He values all 7 1/2 billion of His creatures. 

Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man. (Genesis 9:6)

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. (Psalm 8:4-5)

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:29-31)

My first lesson

Hooray hooray, no problem, the College sent a car and driver to pick me up at the airport =and= there was hardly any traffic on the way back.  One of the 5th year students who speaks excellent English came with him.  The ride is only 35 km but it takes over an hour because of the terrain (yes, that is a road on the side of the hill. To get a real feel for the ride from the airport, get on google maps and track the directions from Lengpui Airport to Aizawl Theological College).  We came to the Principal’s house to pick up the key to the apartment, but the Principal was not there.  He was invited out to a dinner party, as the student was informed by the Principal’s wife, who was feeding the pigs.  While we were waiting for a few things to be brought to the apartment, I asked the student what they did with the pigs.  He didn’t say anything, but the look on his face let me know they were going to be consumed, and I asked if this were the case.  He said yes, and they are having a big party the next day; they would slaughter a pig and cook it and eat it, and I would surely be invited to the party.  I told him I don’t eat pig.  He asked me if I was a vegetarian, a situation much more likely than eating kosher in this country.  I told him, no, that it was written against in the Bible.  He replied that it is written that Jesus/Yeshua declared all foods clean.  I started back at Acts 10 and suggested that Peter’s interpretation of the vision was clear and that God had declared all people clean, not all “food” clean.  I talked about the Hebrew concept of food, that only what was already food could be clean and that the words ‘declared all foods clean’ were not in the original text and not the intention of the original text.  They read the NRSV here and ‘declared all foods clean’ is what it says. He seemed to understand what I was talking about immediately, although sometimes Asian politeness takes precedence over forthrightness.

Please pray for many more openings for such conversations.  Thank you and shalom.

a city set in a hill

The entire city of Aizawl is smashed into the side of a mountain.  Looking out from any one of the ridges, you see many other ridges.  As a result, all the roads are parallel to each other, connected by hairpin turns for cars and sets of stairs for pedestrians.  There are no street signs and you can throw away your GPS.  My host for today said it took him a year to learn where everything is and sometimes if he leaves for a few months, he forgets.  And he is Mizo, but from a village on the Burmese border.
It appears I have some internet in my room now, although I think it's going to be pretty slow.  I will be up at the administration building tomorrow and post some more substantive info.
In the meantime, you can look at these pictures.