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25 July 2002
The Farakka Express
Delhi to West Bengal, India
Dear Friends,
After one more day of gently rocking along on the eastbound Farakka
Express, we will disembark in West Bengal at the border between
India and Bangladesh. It may take some time to pass through the
international check post there in remote Shona Mosjid, because
the friendly Bengali immigration officer will likely offer us
tea, as he did 11 days ago when we first came through. From the
border post, we’ll take a three-hour bus ride to our home
in Rajshahi, ending a long journey across north India and back.
We took our two boys, Everett and Stewart (along with their seven
trunks), to the Woodstock School in Mussoorie, where they are
now enrolled as boarders in grades 12 and 8, respectively. The
three-day, 1,200-mile trip to the school took us up the Ganges
River—from Rajshahi to Patna and to Varanasi, and then on
to Lucknow and Delhi, and on north to Uttaranchal near the source
of the Ganges in the western Himalayas. Our daughter Laura joined
us this summer to help us with the trip. She will spend one more
week with us in Rajshahi before returning to the U.S. to resume
her studies as a sophomore at Centenary College in Shreveport,
Louisiana. All of this traveling and these painful separations
from our children are part of what has been for us a difficult
and precarious return to mission work in Bangladesh.
Last October we evacuated from Rajshahi after hundreds of Muslims
staged violent protests near our home and burned an American flag
to demonstrate their outrage over the U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan.
Even after those anti-American sentiments cooled down, the recent
threat of war between India and Pakistan still jeopardized our
return, because the Woodstock School, where Everett and Stewart
have just enrolled, is only 150 miles from Kashmir. So when we
began our return from the U.S. on June 11, we carried with us
not only a physical load of 21 pieces of luggage but also the
psychological burden of an uncertain future.
Even if everything did go as we planned, we knew it wasn’t
going to be easy leaving Everett and Stewart so far away in boarding
school and then saying goodbye to Laura for a whole year. We knew
well what awaited us in Bangladesh as a reward for such sacrifices—oppressive
heat and humidity, mold and mildew on our medical textbooks, erratic
electricity, shrews in our kitchen, and ants in our sugar bowl.
Despite having put up with all of these difficulties for twelve
years, when I felt Cindy’s tears on my shoulder as we left
Everett and Stewart in Mussoorie, I wondered once again why God
had led our family on this road of inevitable hardship.
The fruits of mission work are not always easy to see, and they
are often invisible to missionaries. At the end of June, however,
as we were preparing for our train journey across India, God gave
us a glimpse of why he led us to Bangladesh. The Church of Bangladesh
invited Cindy and me to attend a baptismal ceremony in Jhinafulbari,
a poor, remote village about 20 miles northwest of Rajshahi. Some
of the leaders of the village had come personally to our house
to invite us to the ceremony. We had heard that a Church of Bangladesh
catechist had been living in the village for several months to
help prepare some people to join the church. On this day 60 people
were baptized, including whole families with young children as
well as elderly grandparents. We saw that they were all poor,
members of the lowest economic class in Bangladesh; and as we
sat on the ground in their village courtyard to observe the sacrament
of their baptism, we realized, too, that some of them had been
our patients either at Christian Mission Hospital or at village
clinics we have attended. Those to whom we had ministered as physicians
were now becoming our brothers and sisters in Christ.
God has called us to care for these people and to nurture them
in their faith. Our particular task is to serve them in a ministry
of compassion and healing, and to help them be compassionate towards
their neighbors so that they themselves can become healers in
their communities.
We remember with deep gratitude all of the people in the U.S.
whom we met during the past year and who encouraged us greatly
in our work.
Your brother,
The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 152
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