Mundapalli

Silpa eats Oreos the same way American children do. Carefully, she pulls apart the respective sides of the cookie and begins licking the sugary coat of cream in the middle. She is about three years old, and is sitting on the cool, black floor of the KCM schoolhouse she visits in the morning--Monday through Friday--in the Mundapalli slum. Twenty other tiny children crowd the rest of the tiny room, some happily devouring their morning snack, others eagerly—but patiently—waiting with their wide eyes fixed on the cookie bag Mongal (a KCM worker) is carrying.

For many of them, this snack may be the only meal they have today. Just two years ago, KCM found the slum filled with children with bloated bellies, slowly starving from their one meal-a-day diet. That meal all too often takes the form of a bowl of popped rice, mixed with water and served cold. For years, infants and young children grow up on this cold bowl of Rice Krispies for their daily nutrition. When KCM came and began the school Silpa now sits in, children had an inability to focus and strained in the agony of hunger pains accorded to them by their rice diet and deformed bodies. Because of a limited budget, KCM is able to provide the children one healthy meal only every other day. Yet the impact has been tangible, as the school room is now filled with happy children singing songs about God.

Brespati stands off to the corner for most of the songs. She, too, is from the slum these children have grown up in. Through KCM, she is slowly coming to faith, while volunteering to teach the children basic school subjects to go with their new found diet. She is from the half of the slum that consists of Hindu villagers who are now displaced residents, many lured here by lies of a better life for a small sum of money. The other half hails from Bangladesh, bringing with them a Hindu/Muslim tension to the slum. Though their religions differ, their job opportunities do not. Most find work in the hard labor market, toting and hauling blocks of concrete or brick or metal tubing through the city streets for construction projects. Some invest this money in alcohol or gambling, like the group of men playing cards just outside the schoolhouse window.

Mongal is back in the slum for the first time in nearly a month. Every day, he bikes 45 minutes to an hour (one way) to care for and work with children like these. He knows all of them by name, as well as the teenagers he spends more one on one time with in the afternoon. On Fridays, he conducts Sunday school for the children, who are slowly coming to learn about Jesus, the main character of the songs they sing to us in the schoolhouse. When not with the children or teens, Mongal busies himself counseling adults in the slum with addiction problems while sharing about Jesus.

This all stopped a few weeks ago when Mongal’s wife Jaia woke up in the night to sounds of her husband having violent seizures. KCM staff rushed him to the hospital, where he awoke the next morning unaware of the night before. It took a week for the doctors to explain Mongal’s near death experience. When they did, Mongal discovered his body to be housing a tape worm. It laid at least one egg in his brain, cutting into central nervous functions that can cause seizures. In the West, we would hardly expect such a diagnosis; but here in Kolkata, Mongal’s experience is simply the result of a city, a slum, and a life Jesus has called him to--the same life the schoolhouse children enjoy as well. Jesus is here, but few others are, and that’s why Mongal’s smile at the children as they sing songs about Jesus is uniquely encouraging—because you know he loves them regardless of the cost.

The cost, this time, is that he must stay at home for the next two years, while his medication eradicates the parasite laying eggs in his body. The risk of more seizures is simply too great, especially for someone who bikes alone and ministers alone and shares about Jesus alone in a broken slum filled with beautiful children and people that God has made. He will stay in the office and do important administrative work from now on. Now there is no one left to go to the slum.

Though KCM requires only $3000 a month to minister effectively in several slums/rickshaw communities and pay its eight staff, it barely scrapes by with the $1750 that comes in every month. Accordingly, it is impossible to hire a new minister for the slum Silpa eats her cookies in for now. Or to buy the motor bike that could have replaced Mongal’s two hour bike ride each day with a 30 minute one. Yet still, these are but obstacles the devil sets up as stumbling blocks for KCM to step over as Jesus continues to expand into the lives and hearts of slum children and their families here.

Someone once told me that our Western gospel is often too small to engage with such things; but fortunately for KCM and us, Jesus is bigger than tapeworms or starving children or funding shortages. And that is Good News. He is the reason Mongal has built a life around this slum and its children, like Silpa, and why there is love in his smile for the kids he can no longer be with. It is hard to believe that death has any lasting hope when Jesus is living here through people like that.

Please pray for Mongal, the Mundapalli slum, and for the Lord’s provision for the ministry.