Paroikos

7:00am CST November 19th I head out for Africa. I hope to post plenty of updates about the work there in Africa over the next three weeks.

-Matthew Ude

I have mentioned, I believe, in previous blogs about the state of my water supply here in Chennai India, but for the purposes of this blog I will review the setup quickly in case any have forgotten or never heard. On top of my apartment building there is a big black plastic container. It is basically my own personal water tower. The water sits up there and then slides down the multiple tubes until it spills out into my kitchen sink or all over my bathroom floor, sometimes of course it continues its journey carrying unwanted debris through the drain and out into the vast Pacific Ocean. The only problem with this setup is how the water gets up into the big black bottle.

Don’t worry there is a pump I don’t have to carry it up myself, however the pump must be switched on when the water is low and off again when the bbb (big black bottle) is filled. There is no automatic shut off and if the bbb fills up and the pump is left on the water spills out across the wall hitting my neighbors house and splashing down over his windows and into his yard. Usually, if the tank is empty when I begin filling it, it will take about 30 or 40 minutes to fill up. Anyone who knows me, knows the chances of me remembering thirty minutes after I turned it on to turn it off again are pretty much equal to men building a colony on Mars. It just isn’t going to happen. Again, usually this isn’t a problem as I will suddenly hear the sound of rain and wonder why it is raining on only one side of the building. Somewhere between the thoughts “I hear rain” and “it sure looks sunny out this window” the truth breaks through and my torso is diving for the switch while my legs try to catch up.

This morning however is a good example of what happens when the bbb, my goldfish memory, and duty join forces to create havoc in my immediate neighborhood. This morning Dave and I were heading out to one of the churches to preach and share fellowship with our brethren here in India. Dave was going to pick me up at 9:00am. True to form I was up into the early hours of morning working on my sermon among other things. Thus I pushed back the ummm delights of arising as far as possible. About 8:15am I found myself starring at a multi-holed stainless steel nozzle. I had barely turned the knobs below when the steady stream of cleansing fluid began to decrease in force and massm, which is my usual cue that it was time to turn on the pump. Now I was left with two choices. 1. Forget the shower and go to church radiating the fresh aroma of 8 hour sweat, 2. Turn on the pump and come back from church to find a large lake sitting next to my house. Option one wasn’t really much of an option and I was determined to avoid option two, so after flipping on the pump I kept repeating “gotta turn off the pump” over and over in my head until I was done with my shower.

After church Dave and I stopped at a local Sunday brunch buffet and made sure we ate our money’s worth. When I got back to my apartment full of food on a Sunday afternoon, I sat down on my couch with David Baldacci’s newest Camel Club novel, which quickly turned into me lying down with David Baldacci’s newest Camel Club novel, which silent slipped into a state of unconscious relaxation without David Baldacci’s newest Camel Club novel, which had slipped to the floor. Before my eyes closed shop however I did notice that the power was off in my apartment for the moment. The fact that the florescent light above my head was beginning to flicker made just enough of an impression upon my incoherent senses to register as a thought. The fact that I heard rain outside my window was not considered significant until crossing over the bridge between the thought factory and storage shed it ran into mister “you turned on the pump this morning.” The combined effort of the two was a far greater stimulant than the rich black coffee that was at the moment residing within my veins.

Apparently, about an hour after I had left with the pump still running, my neighbor called the man who lives directly below me who in turn called his brother the landlord. Unable to shut off the pump itself because the switch was inside my apartment, they had shut off the power for that whole half of the building and later had turned it on again when they thought I was home and had hopefully had switched the pump off. As it turned out they were half right.

Despite proving that I was born a blond, the story reminded me very much of our life as Christ’s witnesses. Peter knew that he was overflowing, overflowing to the point that he was spilling all over his neighbors, which often greatly annoyed those near to him. “For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.” Acts 4:20. Peter’s fountain was flowing and he would not indeed could not shut off that pump. Yes it annoyed his neighbors to be splashed with that living water, but Peter didn’t care. He knew they needed that water. The reason that we so seldom overflow in every area of our life witnessing to Christ, is simply because we so often shut off that pump. If we aren’t full ourselves we aren’t going to overflow, and five minutes of bible reading and prayer a day isn’t even going to come close to filling us much less splashing over. Keep the pump on, keep the tank full. Meanwhile I will try and remember to shut off mine, especially when I leave this Wednesday for Africa.

Love and Grace from our Lord Jesus Christ, and greetings from your brethren in India,

Matthew Ude

A while ago a friend of mine mentioned something about me being over here in India away from the greed and materialism of the western world. That made me chuckle and as a said then materialistic greed is certainly no less prevalent over here. If there was any doubt in my mind as to the truth of that statement a recent news article in Economic Times made a little more blatant. The last paragraph from that article is below.

“Thus, the 7,000-odd knitwear and ancillary units of the town [a small town in southern India] employing some 600,000 people are chanting Om Obama after Om Labhum, said a local wag. As Labhum is the local word for profit and Om is a Hindu word for veneration, most units in Tirupur have Om Labhum written on their sign boards.”

In other words they are not only chanting “Praise be to Obama,” but have “Praise be to Profits” written on their shirts and sign boards. The rest of the article can be found here.

Just a few quick notes about today that I thought you might like to hear:

Before I go on to my next point I have news for you all hot of the presses. An email from John Bobek literally just landed on my desktop, in which he says, “Thanks for the info. Your dad doesn’t even look close to being old enough to have a child as a missionary in India.” And people usually think having nine kids will age you faster.

2 – Item of interest number two. The man wearing the cap in the picture to the right is a pastor in the Koppedu district here in India. But he no sooner walked into the room this morning (actually I walked in he was there first) than I thought, “that man is an American in disguise.” And is it just me or does not that picture scream “Three American Floridians planning the day’s big fishing trip”? D. Paul with his glasses and mister all American with his hat and long hair. Okay maybe more like Cubans when you see the concrete style buildings in the background.

3 – My third note for the day has to do with cows. Those of you who know me know that tree hugger or even vegetarian are some of the last words that anyone would ever think of to describe me, despite the fact that Aaron and I spent three days working for the Sierra Club during which time we were asked why we hadn’t brought our fake IDs with us. That being said even I was a little disturbed by what I saw today. In India it is fairly common to see bull water buffalo with small logs (or maybe you would call them thick sticks) dangling from their necks. Their owners tie one end of a rope around their neck and fasten a thick stout stick to the other usually so that it drags along right in back of their front legs. The idea is if they get any ideas and start to take off running they will get tripped up on the stick. What I saw today was a similar idea but a slightly different variation. The rope is tied around their horns and instead of a stick dangling from the other end it was tied around one of their front legs. There was only about maybe two and half feet of rope between. This forced the head of the beast to remain a foot or two from the ground and every time he took a step his head was jerked sideways and backwards. Okay maybe it doesn’t make the top list of animal cruelty but it sure makes my neck ache just thinking about it. Don’t worry I don’t plan on staying up tonight plotting my revenge on the cruel owners.

4 – Last but by far the most important. Here is (see below) a picture of the village where I preached today. It reminded me a lot of a camping site in the US. Small gravel driveway next to a tiny barren spot of earth for your tent, or in this case hut aka home, communal water spigot, surrounded by forest, hills, and not much else. Most of the children were wearing clothes I wouldn’t even think to give to goodwill. Please remember them and all of our Indian brethren in your prayers.

- Matthew Ude

Today is Diwali but I have already written enough about that. Today I only want to make a quick note that I was scolded by an Indian electrician for attempting to fix something myself. This naturally makes me feel proud as a true American.

This morning when the electricity was still not back on and the fridge was rapidly making an unscheduled defrost, I decided to poke around and see if I couldn’t find the problem. I knew the problem was probably simply the breakers and in America it would be a simple matter of looking for which switches were red and flipping them back. But of course here the technology is a little behind. At least in this apartment it is and everything still uses the old breaker system. For any who don’t know already, a breaker is simply a small copper wire strung between two points, when there is too big of a surge the wire breaks. Given this it still didn’t seem like to big deal to find and fix the problem on my own. The problem was there are three different sets of breaker boxes all containing numerous breakers, none of which are identify, and all of which look like they should have been replaced a long time ago. The wires on all of them didn’t look like anything that I would trust and I couldn’t find any that were obviously broken. So the general hypothesis between the two halves of my brain was that one of the wires was simply too corroded or wasn’t making good enough contact. This means that I had to test them all by replacing them one by one. To make matters worse I didn’t have any wire to use to replace the old wire. I did eventually find one breaker where the wire was obviously broken and stripped some wires from a computer part I wasn’t using to replace the broken wire. When I had fixed this wire and replaced the breaker electricity came on for everyone in the building EXCEPT ME. At this point one of my neighbors walked by and asked what I was doing. After discussing the situation with him, he said he would try to find an electrician and entice him to come even on a holiday by offering him a little extra.

The electrician showed up and warned me that Indian current is 220 (which I knew) instead of the American 110 (which I also knew) and that I shouldn’t be messing around with it. But when he saw the breaker I had fixed he said it was a good job and the wire was perfectly fine for the job. One point for the good old American do it yourselfer. After that he found a breaker box that I hadn’t even known about where there two breakers that had not only burst but had done it with some force leaving copper stains all over the casing. Both of these breakers naturally were only for my apartment. After that he found a point where the main wire itself running to emmy/em apartment had broken from an electric surge. This obviously was making it difficult for the electrons to run in proper circuit (yes I know it is alternating current and they don’t actually run in a circuit let’s just go with it).

Now however, I have a much better idea where all the breakers are and where to look for problems next time. The electrician also left behind some wire. By the way the bill for the electrician even including the “extra” that was promised because it was Diwali came out to 900 INR, or $18 USD by current exchange rates. Enjoy your week.

_Matthew