The next day we wake up at about 8:00AM. We are well rested from the long and exhausting day the night before and ready to begin our journey back to Kolkata. Shaji tells us that we will make a few stops at neighboring villages first, and so begins our second journey. The morning air is much cooler than the night we left behind, and I feel excited as Shaji, Kyle, Rajit (a CSSI teacher), Sahadeb, and myself pile into Shaji’s van. The village we are going to begged CSSI to build a school in their community. The parents of the dozens of local children understand that there is no hope or future for them or their children without the benefits of education, so they offered space if CSSI would come and build them a school. As we enter the village, this school proceeds to come into view. Children are already racing on foot toward the schoolhouse over a dusty red road hugged by huts on the left and hundreds of acres of rice patties on the right. The school is made of mud with a tin roof attached to the top. It is crumbling due to the toll of monsoon rains on its soil-composed walls.
With education and Christianity comes a myriad of cultural and societal transformations, Shaji informs us. Often, girls in these villages are married off at the age of 13 or 14. Occasionally, strange men visit from far away towns and court the village’s daughters, taking them away with them once married. They are then sold into sex trafficking rings for as much as $10,000, as Kolkata is a “training ground” for the industry’s “new products”. Once this happens, many of their lives are effectively over, as their futures are now muddied and predetermined to be filled with pain and the most obscene forms of abuse humanity can think up. For their efforts, these “suitors” are paid by the already impoverished villagers for taking their daughters. In other cases, women, men, and families alike are promised jobs in the city if they can afford to pay those offering them a new start a sum of money. They are transported to Kolkata and dumped there with the job offers that lured them away from their homes and families having suddenly evaporated. These now displaced villagers become slum residents and squatters, a statistic amidst the sea of the some 16-18 million people in the city. In still other cases, women and men simply stay home as is. Here, the men become hard, manual laborers whom often struggle to eek by a living for their families. Women become house servants and child rearers for the rest of their lives, working for their husbands. They will continue the subsistance lifestyle that heir ancestors before them lived, hoping to navigate the trials of life and provide for a family as the rest of the world passes them by.
The gospel and education change these realities. CSSI has gone to dwell among these villages, as Jesus certainly would, to bring hope over time to local communities. As we park in front of the mud school house and see the room filled with dozens of children learning about the Word and various school subjects, I think about how great is the love and Kingdom of God, which now gradually encroaches upon the death and destruction of life for these villages. Strangely enough, I reflect on the beauty of the Levitical laws that YAHWEH gave the Israelites—a new people in a new land with a new and uncertain future without preestablished foundations. God so graciously guided them not only to a land of provision flowing with milk and honey, but also to a culture and society defined by structure and laws that brought life, light and thriving in the land. Even in the West, the foundations of everything we enjoy are based upon a history of God’s structuring and cultural guidance through the Church and its influences. Its made plenty of mistakes along the way, but the Lord’s hand is gracious in comparison to the pathetic vacuum of human wisdom we otherwise try to guide ourselves by. Indian village culture, by contrast, is founded upon and guided by Hinduism, which has left its marks as well, both in the form of broken structures as well as in the “untouchable” status of the beautiful children we were watching sing to us in that school house. Through CSSI, God is giving them a hope and a foundation founded in the Good News, along with an ethic of self sacrifice, love, and recognition that all people are made in the image of God Himself. This changes the way people behave and, coupled with education, produces health in a society marked by death. He did this for the Israelites 3,500 years ago and He is doing it for the dalit people of the villages of West Bengal now. It is a privilege to see His gracious hand at work.
Please pray that these villages would not only receive Jesus spiritually, but that the culture, scoiety, and lifestyle of the villages would be transformed for the better with it. Neither CSSI nor myself desire that change to look "western", but that it simply would reflect the beauty of Jesus within Indian culture, which is easy to see amongst the believers we have met so far. Praise God that, despite our own problems, the mark of Christ has been felt in our own culture and society, and we are the better for it. Also praise God that He is sending workers to the fields (literally) to bring Good News to places no one else will go! CSSI is severely underfunded and understaffed, so please also pray that the Lord would bring provision for the ministry while they use what He has already given in the Spirit's wisdom.
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