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June 26, 1999
Dear Everyone,
Greetings! Thank the Lord for e-mail, and I mean that seriously.
When one lives out of a suitcase for 14 months, and without a
permanent address, e-mail is a real blessing. I haven’t written
sooner because I had hoped that by now I would have settled into
my base. As many of you know, I am the regional health consultant
for South Asia for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and even
though I can no longer be based in India, I need to be in this
region. We haven’t yet decided where I’ll be based,
but right now we’re considering Pakistan, Nepal, or Bangladesh.
Good things are happening. You may remember that in India I worked
with the Emmanuel Hospital Association, an Indian Christian health
organization that has 17 mission hospitals. Well, right now they
have a team in Albania providing health care to the Kosovo refugees.
The first team will be returning to India while the second team
is just going in. Amazing, a Hindu Indian living in the United
Kingdom approached the EHA office in London asking if he could
finance an EHA medical team to go to Kosovo. So a Hindu financed
Christians to care for Muslims. What a wonderful event!
I am currently in Nepal. I came here in March since I had the
return portion of a plane ticket that was going to expire and
also to meet with Kiran Martin, my Indian colleague/co-author,
who came to Kathmandu. We spent 10 very intense days working on
the book. A very productive time.
The book’s tentative title is "Working with Slum Communities
in Developing Countries: Running a community health and development
project." This is a practical "how-to" book for
people working with slum communities at the grassroots level,
and especially addresses the unique characteristics of slum communities
and their problems, especially those in the areas of environment
and health. It stresses the importance of community groups as
agents of change, especially women. It will come out sometime
in 2000, published by Macmillan and circulated by TALC (Teaching
Aids at Low Cost). I am writing it with two colleagues, Kiran
Martin, the Director of ASHA, a community health and development
project in Delhi, and Ted Lankester a former missionary in India.
We have visited many slum projects around the world, so the book
will have an internaional appeal.
In May I went to London to work with Ted Lankester and to meet
with the editor at Macmillan. The manuscript is virtually finished.
Now it’s tying up the odds and ends, especially figures and
photos and copyright permissions for the few charts, etc., from
other resources. I am really happy to be on the home stretch.
I am truly thankful for the time I have had to work on the book.
I suspect that had I still been in India, we would be far from
finished. God indeed has a plan in mind even when our small picture
of the whole prevents us from understanding the logic at the time.
My schedule is filling up with regional health coordinator tasks—in
the next few months I will be helping the United Mission to Nepal
consider their path for the next five years. It will be an important
time since the organization is committed to turn over its many
projects to Nepali leadership, a process it has already started.
I will also be visiting some mission hospitals in India and spending
time with two community health projects in Bangladesh. As regional
health coordinator, I am able to spend several days with organizations
I am visiting, which gives a real opportunity to get to know them
and to share and provide some recommendations. And if I can fit
it in, I’ll also be participating in an evaluationof a community
health project in Nepal. I am indeed fortunate to be able to visit
and learn from all these committed programs. I feel a bit like
a honey bee who travels from flower to flower, cross-pollinating.
It’s a privilege. It is exciting to see Nepali Christians
at work. Gurung is the director of a large community health and
development project that has already been turned over to Nepalis.
He is a wonderful, gentle person with a very warm smile, and a
very able administrator. His parents are Tibetan refugees who
left Tibet when the Chinese invaded the country in the early 1950s.
Gurung converted to Christianity and at a price. His family has
disowned him. Gurung is volunteering his organizational skills
to another charitable organization started by Tibetan Christians
in Kathmandu that is providing vocational training to Tibetan
youth. Refugee status is especially hard for Tibetan youth since
they have not known Tibet, have little hope of a free Tibet, and
so have to make it in a country with another language and culture.
They are discriminated against and have real difficulties in getting
jobs.
Ramesh runs another Nepali community health and development organization.
One of their main efforts is to provide literacy programs to the
women in the villages that the project serves. Ramesh realized
that in his own church there were many illiterate people, mainly
women. So, in his spare time, he has organized literacy training
in several churches. It entails getting the teaching materials
and volunteer church members who are literate and training them.
Very exciting.
Some prayer requests:
- To protect EHA staff working with the Kosovar refugees, and
that they may provide Light to the Muslims they serve
- To protect Indian Christians from persecution
- That I will soon have a base—will actually live out of
a bureau instead of a suitcase!
Your sister in Christ,
Beverley
The 1999 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 147
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