India, Day 1 - Goodbye is always the hardest part.

This is part one of my recap of my forty-day journey through India.  Some entries will be short photo essays, others will be more prosaic, long-form narratives.  This first one is more along the lines of the latter.  Enjoy.

"So, when do you leave for India again?"

"In about four hours."

Every trip is bookended by goodbyes, first to the people you leave at home, and later to the people you meet while traveling.  I hate goodbyes, and this day was to be full of them.  I love traveling, but only in the middle.

The night before I left for India, I didn't sleep well.  Even though my day's schedule began early, I got up several hours earlier than was necessary, because I simply wasn't resting well, and laying in bed rolling back and forth seemed a greater waste of time than getting up and pacing back and forth on my feet.  As there was a marginal possibility that my family would finish construction on our new home in my absence, I rose up and got dressed amidst a landscape of stacked boxes containing all of my worldly goods, which I had packed in anticipation of the possible move.  The environment drove home every aspect of the idea of "leaving home," and for a brief moment I felt like I wasn't coming back.  Once I had my clothes on, I had nothing left to do.  My bag and check box were both packed, double-checked and by the door.  Yes, I packed six weeks' worth of clothing in one backpack, my Monsoon Gearslinger.  I pack light and travel light.  I anticipated the inevitability of my buying gifts or a some new shirts along the way, and a packable duffel bag, reduced to a six-inch disc of fabric when collapsed, dangled from the clip of my backpack.  Sadly, my own efficiency had left me with too much time on my hands; the morning dragged on forever.  I was also experimenting with intermittent fasting at that time, and as such I didn't even have breakfast to kill a half hour.

I did a lot of pacing until I called my dad to say goodbye.  He was out on a business trip to Washington D.C., and I wouldn't see him again until I arrived home.  Afterward, I left at 7:00 to meet my friend, Jeff, for coffee and a book swap.  He had lent me Lucifer's Hammer, and I wanted to return it and loan him my copy of The Four Hour Body before I left town.  We only had about forty-five minutes to chat, a restrictive time for two people with a tendency toward motored-mouthing, but we did the best we could with the time we had.  But upon saying goodbye and exiting the Drowsy Poet, my next stop wasn't the airport; far from it, in fact.  An associate pastor at my church had passed away that week, and I wasn't about to miss his memorial; international flight be damned.

The loss of Pastor Mike Dekle was a blow to our church and the community at large.  Mike wasn't just a gifted administrator, he was a devoted husband and father and a great friend to many people.  He and I weren't very close, but I saw all four of my grandparents succumb to terminal illness, and I was very sensitive to Mike's own battle with cancer, and I wanted to support his wife and son during the service.  In addition to supporting the family, the service allowed me the unforeseen opportunity to see the members of my church one final time before I left town, as well as a number of other old friends from other churches in the area.  The service was a celebration of a well-lived life, and the reception gave me a chance to say a few final goodbyes and pray with friends.

After the service, my mother, sister and I went to one of our favorite restaurants, Siam Thai.  It might sound funny, eating Thai food before going to India, but I honestly love Asian cuisine, whichever region it hails from.  Siam Thai is also a family favorite, and I wanted one last opportunity to splurge on something familiar and well-loved before leaving home.  Several plates of chicken and bamboo shoots later, my mother and I had coffee at a The Bad Ass Coffee Co. while my sister attended her voice lesson.  When the lesson was over, we regrouped and the three of us went to the airport together.

In the airport restroom, like a scene out of Burn Notice, I changed out of my jacket, trousers and tie and put on a lightweight khaki shirt and a pair of Magellan cargo pants, emerging from the lavatory looking, well, like someone bound for India.  India was (and at the time of this writing, is) in the throes of monsoon season, and I had purchased several new athletic shirts and a few pairs of fast-drying pants for trip, all in accordance with a self-imposed rule of "pack no cotton."  I would love to travel the world attired like Indiana Jones or Josh Bernstein (I even have the hat), but practicality often dictates otherwise.

Clothes changed, there was still time to kill before I needed to go through security, and I re-entered the limbo of the early morning.  I sat with my mother and sister in the terminal, and we passed a few minutes in uneasy silence.  There really wasn't much to say.  We're an emotional bunch, and I didn't want to cause any unnecessary strain by speaking too much.  In the context of a year, seven weeks isn't a terribly long time, but it's still a respectable period of time to be apart from loved ones, especially when I would be making so much of the trip alone.  We talked a little bit, here and there, but I was honestly relieved when the time finally came for me to put dignity on hold and pass through security.

The actual goodbye was still hard.  I hate leaving people at the airport; it reinforces the separation before it even begins.

After the last hugs and kisses were exchanged, I shouldered my Gearslinger and went forward.  The exact protocols of TSA screenings change a little bit each year, but I stay one step ahead by keeping all of my change, toiletry carry-ons and phone in plastic bags in my pockets until I'm through the screening area.  It's a practice that saves me the trouble of rummaging around in my backpack while ill-tempered fellow travelers urge me to hurry up.  As much as possible, I like to design my circumstances to stay relaxed.  It works pretty well, so much so in this case that a female flight attendant, seeing my buzzed hair and single, compact bag, asked me if I was military, because she was unused to seeing any other group of young males be so polite while going through security.  Plus one for Southern manners.

Once through security, I boarded the plane.

The plane flew.

The plane landed.

I found myself in Miami International Airport, with a long layover and, again, very little to do.  I wandered through the terminal, marveling at the sameness of every shop.  I made a few phone calls home, speaking once more to my dad before I crossed the threshold into the realm of international phone charges.  My father runs his own business, and with the added pressure of handling a lot of his own contracting in the construction of our new home, he had been unable to see me off at the airport himself, and it was important to me to speak to him one more time.

When dad and I were finished speaking, I hunted down a coffee shop and bought a cup of green tea to chill out with while waiting for my flight.  It was a long trek--the international terminal in Miami rambles on interminably.  On the way back, I passed a heavyset black man on the concourse, and he hailed me in a thick Caribbean accent.  It turned out that he was from Haiti, and was passing through Miami on the way to visit family.  He was having trouble finding his gate in the massive terminal.  It so happened that I had seen where his gate was located on my way up from my first flight, so I walked with him for a while and took him to where he needed to go.  He summed up the airport with a single sentence: "Miami's just too big, man."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

My Haitian friend at his gate, I made the hike back to my own gate (tea still in hand!) and gave Jeff a ring to tie up the loose ends from our abridged conversation of the morning.  Jeff has also served in India; that was actually where we first met and became friends, and that left us with plenty to talk about before I left to go back for an extended period.  Anyone who has been to India will testify that it is a hard country to adjust to, between the cultural differences and the sheer frenzy resulting from a population of 1.2 billion people, and Jeff and I enjoyed a few good jokes as to the challenges facing me upon my return.  As we spoke, the call came over the loudspeaker: it was time for my section to board the plane.

I finished with Jeff, shouldered my bag once again and boarded the plane.  It was late.

Next stop: London.

Reliving India

Last night, I emerged from a small airplane into a familiar atmosphere of warmth and humidity.  After a whirlwind six weeks in India and a few days spent in England to decompress and reacclimatize to Western culture, I was back with my friends and family in Florida. I woke up yesterday morning, and before I even opened my eyes my first thought was "where I am going to day and how am I getting there?"  Then I remembered that I was at home and in my own bed.  My family was in the next room with a pot of freshly-brewed coffee.  It was a wonderful, wonderful feeling.  I am honestly still a bit numb, and the knowledge that I am actually home with my family is still sinking in.

For the record, Oxford was a wonderful place to decompress.  As a fan of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the filmed adapations of Harry Potter, several days in a city with such a rich literary history and a dozens of recognizable movie locations provided several days of diversion that I needed to return home to the family as something other than an edgy, coarse-mannered mess.  I also had the opportunity to see good friends, new and old, even getting the chance to meet Andy Proper, an Oxford photographer with whom I have corresponded on Facebook for the last two years.  The only drawback to my time in England was that something in the water disagreed with my stomach in the strongest possible terms.  After six weeks in India with no lasting damage, a glass of UK tap water was enough to give me gold-medal stomach cramps and runs.  It's a funny world.

Apart from my long walks through the ancient "city of the dreaming spires," I also had time to reflect.

In the third-floor loft graciously provided for me by friends in Oxford, I spent several mornings staring out the open window, racking my brain in an effort to digest and make sense of everything I saw and experienced in India.  My friends whom I stayed with have both participated extensively in missions, and we spoke extensively on the subject of service in other countries.  With their counsel I came to the following conclusions:

1. I don't need to rush to find a resolution at the end of the trip, or expect God to rush in with one as I seek to boil down my experiences to a cohesive, single "lesson."
2. I shouldn't assume that the experience should be measured by how much change I consciously caused.  I should look also at the changes caused in me.
3. There might not be any single, unified final conclusion at which to arrive.

So, for now, I'm not even going to try.  Instead, during this week, I am going to relax, start the photo editing process and relive the journey image by image.  You, dear readers, will relive the journey with me as I post my photos as a daily journal, covering the events my journey from days one through forty.  I dumped four camera cards and my iPhone yesterday for a grand total of 5,643 image and video files, and I cannot wait to start curating, separating and processing them.  I humbly invite you to follow this blog closely, because I guarantee you that it will stay interesting for a long time to come.  In addition to the photographs, the written recap will capture my own personal revelations as each photograph triggers a fresh memory.  As I articulate them for readers, I will be better able to make sense of the trip myself.

Was the trip a powerful experience?

Yes.

What made it powerful?

Everything.

Can I name individual elements of the trip that made it powerful?

No.

But I can still quote Tom Wilkinson:

“The light, colors, the smiles, it teaches me something.”

India is coming to this blog, but I won't challenge you like a big shot to "be ready," because I'm not sure that I am.

Journey's End

And another adventure draws to a close.  The serene beauty of the mountains was traded for the unwelcome mayhem of the city as the team and I rode back to civilazation. The final push through the airport was a little slice of hell.  As I will be spending a few days in Great Britain before going the rest of the way home, my flight left a few hours later than the rest of the team.  As such, I was just outside the window for regular check-in, and I was made to jump through extra hoops at every stage of security.  It was only through the efforts of one helpful young man from another department in the airport that I was able to get my boarding pass and get past the hands-off laziness of the first person I spoke to at the immigration check point.  By that time, the rest of my team had already boarded their flight and were on the way home.

I have to confess that this experience--two hours of red tape, smug apathy and rejection--left me angry.  No, not angry.  Furious.  Enraged.  Spiteful.  I have spent forty days traveling this subcontinent helping as many people as I could and documenting their lives to share abroad, and my only reward at the end of the trip was to be denied a final goodbye to a group of people whom I count as dear as family.  I cursed the beauracracy under my breath every time they turned me back.  Major cities and large crowds bring out the worst in me on the best of days, and to be stalled at every turn by self-important airport personell was simply the icing on the cake.

But I have no right to feel entitled to anything.  I offered my help freely in the places I went, and I never asked for anything in return.  I should not feel like I was denied something when nothing was promised me.  My rage was impotent and pointless; the primeval reaction of someone who was simply denied something he wanted.  What matters is that I made it through.  I have a few days of decompression in South England to look forward to, and after that, home and family.

The last six weeks have been a roller coaster.  As I unload the photos from my camera, I will be recapping the trip day by day, almost like a serialization of a story.  Don't stop reading the blog, because the adventure has yet to be fully shared.

Update from India

What's this? Wifi at a midrange Indian hotel? Wonders truly never cease. I'm in the home stretch of the trip now. The last week will be very busy, and I am taking a few days off before throwing myself back into the thick of things. My host and I are doing a quick tour of some tourist-type places before meeting the rest of the team in a few days. I'm taking photos and looking forward to my weekly sweet treat in the form of a lassi tomorrow afternoon. There's supposed to be a legendary place to get one near my hotel. Mango or banana, or both! That is the question. I suddenly have the luxury of choice after living in villages for most of the past thirty days, and I find that Barry Schwartz was on to something when he wrote that too many choices can lead to unhappiness.

Thirty days. As a concept, it sounds great. Thirty days on the road to travel and do truly meaningful work, meeting people and seeing incredibly unique things along the way. But when you are traveling without a steady companion and hindered by a language barrier at every turn, the trip feels long sometimes. This trip, as a whole, has flown by, but there have been individual days that felt like they would never end, if that makes any sense.

I'm grateful, though, that my traveling has been done with a definite purpose. Traveling for missions or humanitarian purposes is always more fulfilling than just shouldering a backpack and wandering for its own sake. I sit now in the breezeway of a hotel as clusters of free-spirited Europeans amble by with enormous backpacks and the ubiquitous male pony tail that instantly identifies a Bohemian on the road. They will go out today and visit palaces and forts, see museums and artwork, and if the boxes of empty Kingfisher beer bottles in the halls are any indication, they will return in the evening for rollicking good times of beer, spicy food and possibly some "liberating" herbs. They will get what they came for: a good time. But their purpose will not last beyond the trip.

That is what I realize now, as I reflect on the past month. 12,000 miles away from home, making a great circle through a subcontinent whose culture could not possibly be further from what I am used to, I have traveled with a purpose that will last. What I have seen here--the poverty transcended by strength of spirit, the Love that can override caste hatreds, the hospitality and care extended by so many people to the gora with the camera whose stomach can't handle their curries--it has all taught me so much. There are parts of the culture here that still drive me crazy; I still have a hard time extending human courtesy to pushy cab drivers, and the Indian use of the head-wiggle instead of plainly-spoken answers to simple questions always puts my knickers in a twist. When it comes to resources, the population has placed India at risk of collapsing under its own weight.

But the people of India, with very, very few exceptions, have beautiful souls. I am no "hero from the west" when I come here. As much as I help, I am very much a student of their humanity and character.

To close, some iPhoneage from the R&R of the past day or two. Most of the working shots are on my DSLR, and will begin to surface at the end of this month. I filled my travel journal a few days ago, and I was elated to be able to return to my favorite leather shop in The Lake City to purchase a new one, as pictured below. It's fun to be a repeat customer of an establishment so far from home. The staff was even kind enough to pretend to remember me, haha.

Update from India

Some notable experience thus far:- Meeting one of the oldest tribes in India and helping fit them with eyeglasses. - Riding a motorcycle through monsoon rain. - Being accosted by husky-voiced hermaphrodites on the trains. - Riding on India's iconic trains period. Every ride is like a field trip into bedlam. - Teaching English to orphan children (call it damage control after the less-than-perfect methods of the local English medium schools.) - Being stopped in marketplaces all over India by locals who wanted to get a picture with the visiting American. My complexion makes me a novelty. - Arriving just in time for the end of mango season. Delicious fruit in the markets for less than a dollar per kilo (usually 10 fruit per kilo!) - Driving over roads that would give Wolverine scoliosis during my trips to outlying villages. - Inadvertently eating an entire dried naga viper chili in one bite. I mistook it for the milder king chili, but I maintain that my tears at the dinner table were shed with manly stoicism.

Throughout the entire trip, I have been in and among some of the poorest, most backwards villages and communities I could never have imagined. The poverty and the squalor that so many people know as "normal" in some areas of the country is unbelievable. The ministry opportunities never end.

Even so, India never ceases to amaze me with its diversity. After the first half of the trip was spent giving aid to people who lived in utter depravity (in every sense of the word,) my journey took me across the subcontinent to visit a school in an area of India that is not only cosmopolitan, but extremely, one might say "comfortably" Western in its local culture. It's like benign in a totally different country, and it brings up feelings not unlike the verse culture shock I had the last time I returned home from India. Stepping off of the plane into Houston airport last time was like time traveling to the future. India, steeped in poverty on one hand and pop culture from the Reagan era on the other, was suddenly on the other side of the world, and I felt strangely alien to my home. To have similar feelings while still in India itself is very disconcerting.

This will likely be my last blog update for a couple of weeks. I begin my northward train ride to a new location tomorrow to return to village work with my next local contact. It's full steam ahead for the next few weeks, and I probably won't have wifi again until I fly to London, where I will decompress from India by spending some time with a few friends in the area before going the rest of the way home.