July 2000

Dear Friends,

A four year visa to India!

It is amazing what sorts of milestones one has in one’s life. Graduation, coming to faith (sometimes over and over), marriage, birth of a child, loss or landing of a job. I guess, for us, this new visa to India is that sort of milestone. A whole new world is waiting. It is a little fuzzy and a little scary but definitely a new path. Nepal was such a good experience. We had started our Nepal life with the hope and vision of a new way of contributing to the lives of poor, rural families in Nepal. We wanted to work, in some ways, from the "inside out,"
not really trying to discover and analyze the outward problems of the rural poor for them, as so many development projects do. But rather, we wanted to work with their self-confidence and group skills and prepare them to define and approach the problems that they themselves define as most important and most able to be solved. As it happens, there are now over 100 community groups that are active and working on community-level problems, from drinking water systems to savings groups. It is a happy ending to the work of the Surkhet project and a tribute to the abilities of those communities, which were considered by tradition to be uneducated and backward. I learned so much from those "illiterate, backward, and hopeless" people. I hope they learned even half as much from our work with them over the past seven years.

It has been a long process, but we are finally cleared to go to India. Many months ago, while we were appealing our visa rejection from Nepal, an organization in India called the Emmanuel Hospital Association (EHA) wrote to ask if we would be available to help their community health projects become more "community-driven." Since then, we have been talking, thinking, and praying about that possibility. The Nepal visa was finally absolutely refused and the Indian visa came through. Let’s see. What to do? India? Even we could figure that direction out. EHA is a 30-plus year-old Christian organization of 17 former mission hospitals and 27 community health projects. Their major outreach has been providing curative health care to the communities where they work. More recently the EHA has been moving toward preventative health activities, broadening its idea of what community health includes, and helping communities take more ownership of their health system. They have asked us to help the communities and the organization as a whole move in these directions. Since our experience has been in community organizing, we feel we can add a different perspective and some new ideas and suggestions to the new directions EHA has chosen for itself, as well as learning a lot from this transformation process.

Our family seems to be, at once, spreading apart and drawing together. Daniel (18 years old) has graduated from Woodstock School and will be starting Beloit College in southern Wisconsin this August. The two younger kids, Timothy and Hilary, will be with us in India. So, this year, with Kelli still in college in St. Paul, instead of having one child in the United States, one in India, and two in Nepal, we will have two in the States and two in India. We are beginning to look like a "normal" family.

We continue to feel very privileged to have so many supporting friends and churches. Please note our new address below and the change in our
e-mail address, which is melscofam@hotmail.com (not aol.com anymore).

Sincerely,

Scott , Melanie, Timothy, Kelli, Daniel and Hilary Smith

E-mail: melscofam@hotmail.com