Jodhpur to Delhi to Newark to Dallas

Friday, 1:30pm – After lunch with Joseph and his family at another 5-star in hotel in Jodhpur (this whole “scouting” business is rough!), we said goodbye to Veer and boarded a plane for Delhi. The 1-hour plane ride sure beat the alternative 12-hour drive. Sam Thomas met up with us in Delhi and took us around the city and to dinner since we had 5 hours until our flight for the states boarded. Morrison also accompanied us (he runs the orphanage in Delhi). Morrison and I had a fun time running around the city-center while Jon and Ed shopped for shoes. We counted 3 Nike stores, 2 Addidas stores, a McDonalds, Pizza Hut, etc. This culture-contrast amazed me. He also educated me on the reason for all of the city name-changes. “Bombay” was changed to “Mombai” and “Calcutta” was changed to “Kalkota,” because, according to Morrison, the Parliament had nothing better to do, and wanted to stay in news. Bombay and Calcutta were British names, and the new names were Indian names.

Saturday 1:30am – 15 hours from Delhi to Newark, 3 hour layover in Newark, New Jersey, and a 3 hour flight to DFW, and somehow with the time-change, we show up Saturday at noon. It’s good to be home. After eating every form of chicken (curry, tikka, Tandouri, etc), I’m ready for some of Shatrine’s home-cooking.

The Maharajah's Palace: Jodphur, India

Thursday 1/11 6:00pm – Before we spent our second night at Ajit Bahwan, we had dinner “across the street” at the Palace of Umit Bahwan. This is where the Maharajah (the King of Jodhpur) lives. While India is now a democracy, the Kings are still very wealthy, prominent figures. The maharajah still lives on part of the grounds, and the other part of the palace operates as a 5-star hotel. Though we were dressed casually and were initially turned away from the restaurant because they were “booked full” (despite the many obviously open tables), Veer worked his magic, insisting that they serve us. He casually, yet firmly, mentioned that we were coming back with a group of 25, and wouldn’t if they don’t take care of us. Needless to say, they quickly prepared a table for us (go Veer!). Joseph also joined us and showed us around the town. He is the pastor of the church in Jodhpur and also has a school there.

Pali Autograph Session

I just realized I haven't introduced the folks travelling with me. It was just three of us. Dr. Ed Smith (the president of Faith Christian School in Grapevine) and Jon Brooks (the campus pastor) and myself braved the trip together primarily to scout out the locations and sites for our trip in March with about 20 students.

Thursday 11:00am – We headed out to Pali (about two hours from Jodhpur) to visit another Emmanuel School and orphanage. While we were there, it was lunch time, and we got mobbed by all the students wanting autographs from the Americans. I must have shook over 300 hands. Pictured above is Jon getting mobbed.

Veer's Family

Wednesday 1/10 1:00pm At Veer’s home, his wife, Blessie, prepared our best meal of the trip. Even though they have a city wide power-outage everyday from 8:00am-Noon, she got up early, went to the market, and had it all ready for us. It was fabulous. We got to meet their three-year-old son, Jeremiah, and the one-year old daughter, Joanna Grace. We also met their two adopted sons, Makasa, and David (what great older brothers they are! And such servants).

6:00pm About a two-hour drive from Veer’s in Beawar, we stayed at Ajit Bahwan in Jodphur. The hotel actually belongs to the Maharajah, and is where his close relatives stayed. It was the first place we had high speed internet, but even that was sketchy. The hotel accommodations were very nice, though. It’s amazing to go from people barefoot in the streets with cows and dust to a palace with hot water, electricity, and extravagant art on the walls.

New Building in Beawar

Wednesday 1/10 – Off to Beawar to visit with Veer’s family and check out the land where they are building their new school. Right now they meet in a rented building (and the lease is up in May).
Brief political background: There are two major political parties in India: BJP (a Hindi religious political party which is currently in power in the state of Rajasthan), Congress (a secular party who tends to be more on the “free democracy”-spectrum). Coincidentally, the political party most in support of Christianity is called the “Marxist Party” although they are very much a minority (of the 200-some seats in Parliament, they hold only one). Back in February, the BJP party (who was in control in Rajasthan), persecuted the Emmanuel School Society, claiming they were publishing anti-Hindi books. They imprisoned the President of the organization and held him in prison for about 3 months before releasing him due to political pressure from outside of Rajasthan. During that time, there was damage done to many of the Emmanuel Schools around Rajasthan, and many of the students un-enrolled.

Veer’s school took quite a hit, and actually closed for about a month. When they re-opened, many of their students enrolled in other schools. Many of the families are leery to enroll their students in the Emmanuel school because of the bad press they’ve received, however, as they continue to offer excellent education, hopefully families won’t be able to ignore it, and will begin to become attracted to the school once again. Veer’s ministry owns 2 acres of land, and is in construction to build a new school building on the property that will hopefully be ready for the next term of school. That will bring a lot of credibility to the program. We were able to visit the school (we even got a full-on greeting with flowers, and an all-school song presentation) and we also went to check out the new school site. It was neat seeing the plans, and many of the walls completed already.

Raipura Orphanage

Tuesday 1/9 4:00pm – We visited the orphanage in Raipura (30 minutes from Kota where we were staying). They were doing their daily “prayer and song time” when we got there, so it was neat to see all of the kids singing the songs (some in English). The most amazing thing to me was that the orphanage was run by orphans. When the children grow up and “graduate,” some of them elect to stay and become leaders. The students are divided into rooms, and each room has a leader and a co-leader. The leader is about 16, and the co-leader is 15. When the 16-year-old graduates, the 15-year-old becomes the leader, and they continue to move on. Students then graduate study to become nurses, teachers, or pastors and begin ministries of their own. There is a hospital just down the street from the orphanage where students study medicine, and they also offer services to the community. A majority of the nursing staff there are actually orphans that came through the program there.

It’s an amazing model, and we saw evidence of it in Veer. Veer grew up in the orphanage in Raipura going to school there, and then went to Bible college. He is now 28 and he runs a school of 300 students in Beawar as well as pastors a church there. He is beginning an orphanage as well (he has already adopted two boys of his own). He truly is one of the most amazing individuals I’ve ever met, and yet he remains such a humble servant. Veer came and met up with us Tuesday night in Kota, and then sort of became our tour guide for the rest of the trip. I can’t imagine traveling in India without him.

Thomas Family

Tuesday 1/9 7:30am – While in Kota, we stayed at “The Bishop House” which is where Sam and M.A Thomas live, as well as where the Emmanuel Bible College is located. They have nice living areas for guests (with hot water), but the best part is the food. Sheila cooks all of the meals, and really runs the whole place. She walks around holding a cordless phone like a monarch’s scepter, directing people and making sure everything is in order. We had pancakes and omelets for breakfast, and for lunch, she sprinkles in some traditional Indian food (but she knows how to cook for Americans… not too spicy). Dinner was also exciting as we ate with M.A., and were joined by his brother (visiting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates) and their father (a ripe, 98-years of age). After the meal, the three of them broke out the hymn book and sang. It was pretty incredible to hear them sing “When the roll is called up yonder” in Hindi. The father also prayed over us before heading to bed. Sam came and joined us as well, and it was incredible to see the three generations living there together. We had an interesting conversation about how this is rare for us to see and how typically in American cultures, people often send off elderly to retirement homes, and visit them once a week. Sam explained it like this, “Why would I want to send off the Ark of the Covenant from my home?” It’s incredible how they treasure him even though he requires a lot of care.

1:00pm – At the conference, we made some interesting connections. I was given a tour of the Talwandi School in Kota (where the conference was held), and I got to see their computer lab. They have about 15 computers even though they don’t have Internet access. The students learn Microsoft programs, and build websites off-line. It will be interesting if we can help them get set up with Internet connection and begin to do some exchange with them. I met Ira and Indu: the Social Studies teachers at the Emmanuel School – Talwandi. They were very savvy (Ira already has her students do History projects using the computer lab, and Indu has an email address, so we will hopefully be able to be in contact), and we may be able to do some sort of dialogue with our classes.

Sunday 1/7 9:00pm - We arrive in Delhi, and instead of staying in a hotel for the night, and catching a morning train to Kota, we had to rent a vehicle and drive through the night to make it to the conference in the morning. What would have been a 3 _ hour express-train ride, took 11 hours through the trafficked/pot-holed roads. We slept a bit on the drive, but we had no choice since we missed the train we reserved and the next train was booked solid.

Monday 1/8 11:00am - We arrive in Kota at 11:00am with enough time to grab some lunch, shower, and head to the conference to teach 5-sessions. Even though we were exhausted (an all-night drive through bumpy roads, and horns honking every 30-seconds allowed for little sleep), the presentations went well. We brought a video projector because Dr. Smith's presentations required one, and we thought I would be able to use the projector as well for my sessions. However, when we got there, we realized that we would be teaching at the same time, and what I thought would only be one time teaching, I found out I would present 10 times in all (twice to some groups, three times to other groups). Luckily, they had a video projector, so I was able to use the projector we brought to teach my sessions. We also lucked out, because we found this out at the airport before we left, and Shatrine brought her laptop to the airport for me to bring and use (thank you, SHATRINE!).

Travel Diary

Well, I'm back safely, and though I didn't have Internet access much while I was there, I took a journal, and thought I'd post them here:

Friday 1/5 11:15am – Off to the airport (DFW). We arrive with plenty of time (you never know when you fly international), but had no problems getting our tickets and through security. In fact, we were standing in front of our gate at 11:30, even though our flight wasn’t to leave until 1:45. We had barbecue, and did some strategizing/talking about our expectations for the trip. 1:45 came and went. The flight was delayed. 2:30, they said we could leave. 2:30 came and they said, “3:00pm” Because of bad weather in New Jersey (where we would connect with a flight to Delhi), air traffic control wouldn’t even clear us to leave Dallas until 5:00pm. By that time, we would not be able to make our connecting flight. So we went home, and figured we’d try again the next day (this time catching an earlier flight out of Dallas). After quite a while with Lisa (manager for Continental), we tried every other possibility, but very few flights go direct to Delhi, so we’d have to settle for the same flight from Newark, NJ to Delhi the next day.

Saturday 1/6 5:30am – Off to the airport (DFW)… again. This time, we got off without a hitch. We enjoyed our emergency aisle seats (thank you, LISA!)… and it was almost worth it; especially considering that our 14-hour flight from Newark to Delhi would also be in the emergency aisle. So I enjoyed the comfortable seat… awake. I did all of the math, and figured that I had to adjust my schedule so that I could be on “India-time” by the time I arrived. I planned ahead and only slept one hour Friday night. So I stayed up for the entire flight (24 hours with only one hour of sleep). Then I crashed at the airport (thank you, Ambien). I got 3 hours in Newark, and then we boarded our flight at 8:50pm (US-time) and I slept the first 6 hours.

Raipura Orphanage

I found a wireless signal in the lobby of our hotel in Jodhpur, so I'm posting some pictures of what we did earlier in the week. Here is the orphanage in Raipura, just 30 minutes from Kota where we did the conference.

Teacher's Conference: Kota, India

Here I am giving my presentation at the Teacher's Conference. It was neat to be able to share some of the things that are happening with technology in education. Many of the schools have computer labs, and learn html, java, etc, but because of costs, they have to work offline. They rarely get to navigate the web, and post their work.

I'm in India

I would post some pictures and videos and such, but I'm having technical difficulties. Perhaps I'll upload some soon so you can see what I've been up to here. We've been here 6 days now, and this is the first time I've had internet access. That says quite a bit about technology here (though EVERYONE has a cell phone). Hopefully when I return in March, I'll be able to help get some of the schools we visited set up with some high speed internet. Hopefully, in fact, some of my new friends from India may be reading this! The teacher's conference went great, and I met quite a few savvy teachers ready to utilize some of this technology, and several already are! It's just so expensive right now to get high speed going, and it isn't enough part of the culture for the demand to drive the price down. Hopefully soon. Well, I've got to run and catch a rickshaw, and I'll try and post some pictures when I get back to the States!