Elizabeth Ann Carpenter - Precious Children of India: Giving Voice to Destitute Children of the World

Preface

Destination India

W hile walking through the exhibition hall at the International Conference on Missions, wondering where God would send us next to work with His precious children, Bruce and I were invited to have a seat at a booth featuring India. Here we met John from Life Light. He pulled out two chairs for us and asked about our church, and how we were enjoying the conference. He gave me a brochure and a calendar to look at as he explained the childrens home that Life Light runs in India. While he talked, I looked at the pictures of the children in the calendar. One little girl, in the middle of a picture of girls, jumped off the page at me and I asked, John, what is this little girls story?

He shared that this young lady smiling in the picture, and surrounded by her friends, had a very sad story. What he told us stirred our emotions to the point where we felt we had to take action. We left John telling him we would be praying for her.

As the day wore on, she stayed on our hearts. We left the conference and returned home, praying to God for His will on our next story-sharing mission trip, and if India was where He desired for us to go. When this story remained on our hearts, we decided to reach out to Life Light to see if they would be interested in working with us. The team at Life Light prayerfully considered our request and thought we should come to India to learn about the lives of these children.

We have been on mission trips to Haiti, Kenya, St. Vincent, and many within the United States. This would be our first trip to a restricted and unreached nation. Looking back, it is hard to describe the differences between unreached India and the Christian countries we worked in with people just as poor and destitute, although not as great in number, but I will attempt it. The people in the Christian nations had hope and joy in the midst of extreme suffering. For example, a starving woman in Kenya told us she had faith that God would provide, and showed us a small pile of nuts that would feed her family for the day. She had a light in her eyes and hope found in Jesus Christ. However, that same hope could not be found in the people in India. We did see it in the Life Light staff, but to the greater population of poor in India the hope found in Jesus was missing, making the situation seem more hopeless and destitute.

In preparation for the trip, we studied many materials on India and its culture. We learned from the Joshua Projects study on Unreached People Groups that Indias primary religion is Hinduism, with 80.6 percent of the people groups practicing. We also learned that only 2.2 percent of the population is considered Christian.

India has a population of over 1.2 billion people with one third of the worlds poor living there, or an estimated 269 million below poverty level, with another 414 million considered vulnerable. Women are burned to death over dowry issues by their spouses or their spouses families. The list continues and the numbers are staggering just due to the massive population in India.

One year later, after our initial meeting at Life Light, armed by God and with all we had learned, we boarded a plane for India. The plan was for us to meet and travel with Johns wife, Heather, a Life Light missionary. We would meet her in Chicago where the three of us would all travel to India together, then, we would meet up with John who was already over in India. Due to a storm, all of our flights were cancelled, so we quickly rerouted. We flew through Germany to Mumbai, while Heather flew another route. As a result, we were without Heathers traveling experience. When our plane landed, we said a quick prayer thanking God for travel mercies and asked not to encounter any issues in customs with the bags of toys we brought for the children. The toys are critical to our missions success. We use them to help interact and build relationships with the children we meet.

From our studies about India, we knew that the airport in Mumbai is next to one of the biggest slums in the world. The haze from the slum fires hung heavy in the air and the smell of human waste struck us immediately as we exited to the tarmac. However, we did not have time to focus on this because we were pushed forward by the crowd into buses that took us to the baggage claim area. Once there, we gathered our things but had trouble getting luggage carts. Every time the empty luggage carts came, there was a rush of people and they were grabbed up before we could get one. Some people were paying staff to go past customs and bring back a cart for them. We were just about agreed on how much we should offer, when a delivery of luggage carts was brought right next to us. We secured a cart for all the bags we brought, thankfully, because most of the other travelers had already gotten carts of their own.

With luggage on carts, and carts in hand, we joined our next line for bag inspection. We quickly learned that people in India get excited and push in line. It is not meant to be rude, it simply means they are excited, or so the man that kept pushing us along explained to us. We had practiced what we were going to say to customs (as close to the truth as we could), that the toys were gifts for the children our friends, who were teachers at an English school in India, worked with. Never once were we asked about our large duffel bags of toys, nor why we were in the country.

We made it through customs and then onto another bus. This bus took us to the area in the airport where we would meet Heather for the final leg of our trip. We were grateful that the man who kept pushing us through the first line actually ended up in the line for this bus, too. He helped us get our things loaded onto the bus without expecting payment for the assistance, and he told us what we needed to do. Since Heather was not with us to speak Hindi, his ability to speak fluent English was very helpful. After a long exhaustive trip, we were truly thankful God sent someone who could help us the way he did.