Traveling alone.

Traveling alone.
At first I questioned my call from God to come to India. I questioned Him on everything that comes with traveling: finances, time, language barriers, living accommodations, is it God calling me to India or is it just me wanting to go to India. Not on traveling alone though. This question did not arise until I actually started my trip.

Traveling alone.
Not to point out the obvious or anything but you spend a lot of time...alone when you are traveling alone. Airplane, layovers, waiting for an English conversation, lack of social life...

Traveling alone.
Because I'm only one many things are easier. My schedule is up to me, more food for me, accommodating a single guest is easier on hosts, I get more time to debrief on personal experiences.

Traveling alone.
It means that when you see something horrific you have to hold it in because it is only horrific to you. When you want to laugh at silly cultural differences you are the only one laughing. A pun is hard to translate so you hold them in.

Traveling alone.
Eleven weeks of traveling alone is not a piece of cake. I am unsure if I would have come to India knowing that some days it hurt to be alone.

Traveling alone.
God needed me to travel like this. He needed me to be singled out from all of my comforts. By having me travel alone God has been able to pour Himself into my life without me being bombarded with my weaknesses at home. And God has placed many wonderful people along my path these last ten weeks to care for me and guide me. He needed me to believe that I am traveling alone so I could learn maybe the most important lesson of this trip.

That lesson being, although it may seem as if I'm traveling alone, I'm not.
I would be a fool to go anywhere alone. I would be a fool to believe that God is not with me in every breath that I take. I would have been a fool to have not listened to God's call because I thought it would mean I would have to be alone in all my experiences.

When God calls you, you go. Whether it is only you, or you and your best friend, twelve strangers or forty strangers. You go, because you are never traveling alone.

Hannah Joy.

I have sunshine, on a cloudy day.

Please excuse my lack of updating.

All is still well here. Everyday I enjoy more more and everday I experience something new.

India has a funny way of highlighting my weird quirks. Animals for example. I find so much joy in animals. (Shout out to Darby and Rivers...my dogs at home.) And oh, there is a lot of joy to be had in watching animals in India. The other day I had to weave in and out of about two dozen /rams along a motorbike path. I was so afraid of making noise or touching one of them but at the same time I kept laughing. All I could picture was this scene in America and how outlandish it would have been. And here? Just another day.

I was sitting in the classroom at the slum yesterday waiting for students to come and I watched a goat patiently watch a fried corn-on-the-cob  food cart. After about ten minutes he made his attack and got away with a prize in his mouth!! He didn't just run away he sort of jumped with glee in every trot. I was proud of him and again just smiled because I knew that it was one of those "only in India" moments.

When it starts to get dark out the bats come out. Yes, there are bats in America but I hardly see them in Kansas or Chicago. So it's a pleasure to see a bat sweeping across the dark blue sky.

Enough about animals.

I'm still loving teaching the kids in the slum (Ramtedki). The numbers vary every day. One day last week we barely had ten kids and some days we have had up to thirty. Most of them are working. Either for money outside of the slum or doing house work with their moms. Sometimes you can see them dozing off because they are so exhausted. Other times they all have so much energy you can't get them to sit down for two minutes. I'm a familiar face there now too. The women all great me and the children come running up calling out "Dee-Dee!" (big sister in Hindi.) They all wish me a good afternoon and as of recently they learned how to reply to my question of "How are you?" with "I am fine" or "I am happpy", sometimes I even get "I am not hungry." (That's the one I'm most happy to hear.)

Last week we had three sewing machines moved into the CSW Rehabilitation House. The women will learn how to make simple dress/blouse designs and cloth bags. A couple weeks ago we had a week long program with another women's project here in Pune where everyday a group of women all gathered at the CSW House and learned to make different kinds of paper bags and perfume. They already have an order for 1000 bags! The house will also be recieving a vapour machine within the next two weeks. (Vapours are used for the bread in the Holy Communion.) A great effort was put forth to get this machine and there is a lot of excitement about it. 

HCC works in a very unique and effective way. They do not hand out money. Simple money handouts are too temporary for the needs that need to met. HCC provides training and the basic resources for the people to get on their feet. Rather than just letting the women live in the CSW House until it is time for them to move on, HCC is preparing them for a new career. So the time is right, the women can move out be self-sufficient and strong. 

A few weeks ago my friend Rajesh did my henna:

I can hardly believe that I only have three weeks left until I'm back to dancing like mad with Erin, having fika with Kaj and enjoying my mom's cooking  for two weeks... AND moving into a new house with five of the most awesome girls in the world!

I can hardly believe that I only have three weeks left until I won't get to go to the slum every day, I won't be enjoying the fellowship of the CSW women and I won't be eating Indian food three times a day. 

Lets just say I'm teetering in the middle of being ready to go home and not ready to go home.

Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart.

Proverbs 3:3

Hannah Joy.

P.S. Mosquitoes love me here just as much as they love me in the States. Eck.

Who are our neighbors?

The Bible says that the greatest commandment is to love your neighbor because for the most part it fulfills all the other commandments.

So who is our/yours/my neighbor? What does it mean to love them?
I've had a chance to really take in what it means to love your neighbor, how different my neighbors have become and how loving them is more complex than I ever would have imagined.

It stretches beyond the matter-of-fact mail box neighbors, it streches across all state, country and continent boundries, it soars over rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. It goes deep within every corner and every forgotten about piece of earth.

The Bible clearly states what love is. It is kind, patient, not rude, not for self gain, does not envy, it is always there, is not jealous, helps whenever there is a time of need, not easily angered. LOVE NEVER FAILS.

In Kansas my neighbors were: Shawnee Heights students and faculty, Brookwood Covenant Church members, Supersonic Music employees and it's guitar/drum crazed customers, the international students my parents opened our home to, friends who loved me and friends who hurt me, those in my quaint Shawnee County neighborhood. --These are comfort neighbors.

In Chicago it is all the Albany Park/North Park neighborhood residents, North Park University students and faculty, coworkers in the library, students in the Chicago Public School System, the homeless, Edgewater Presbyterian Church, all the girls I have lived in close quarters with, all ethnicity's that color the city. --This was a new challenge for me. Learning what it meant to show the homeless love and acceptance, understanding the children in the classroom and how important it was to love them at school because it may be the only place they get it, loving the 40 strangers I share a bathroom with because that is what living in a community is about, showing love to the foreign born residents of Chicago in order to show respect to their culture and give them comfort in this new country.

In India. Love has never been so heavy or loud in my heart. Love has been easy to give in some places but sometimes I've had small challenges.

In India my neighbors are the HCC members and friends, children in slums, mothers in the slums, the drunks in the slums, the commercial sex workers, the ex-commercial sex workers, the men who are pursuing sex in the commercial sex worker area, begging lepers, begging children in the road, eunuchs, all of the watchful eyes from strangers wherever I go.

All these neighbors require a different way of receiving love. The love I show the child in the slum is different than the love I give to the commercial sex worker. It is still love. It is not rude, it is kind, it is there when the person is in need and it does not fail.

Jesus did not stay with only the his comfort neighbors, like the ones I only surrounded myself with in Kansas. (There are many what I'm calling "non comfort neighbors" in Kansas, I just didn't seek them at the time. I am not saying that Jesus work cannot be done in these places, it most certainly can.) To love as Jesus did we have to walk down the red light district and love all the people in it. To love as Jesus did we have to walk into the slum, passed all the drunk men (loving them even if they are drunk at ten in the morning leaving their wife and children to work harder than they have worked a day in their life just to provide food and feed their husband's addiction), to get to the upper room where anywhere between 15-30 children may come to receive the simplest of education and give them love no matter which side of the bed you woke up on.

What's true love if you aren't challenged to love those neighbors the commandments were talking about?


Do something that makes love a challenge, that makes you so uncomfortable that you just want to turn around instead of going forward. Always remembering that Jesus was once in your shoes.

Hannah Joy.