Thank you all for your prayers. We thought you might enjoy hearing a bit from Heidi and Benjamin. These are excerpts from a few letters they have sent us from China and India.

Hey y'all! I'm in India! It’s amazing. It was really strange getting off the plane after eight hours and when I got off, I was hit by this really hot, humid, smelly air. It was a far cry from Vienna earlier that morning with a foot of snow on the ground.

I was able to talk to a very nice Swedish guy on the plane for about three hours of the trip. We talked about India for a while. He'd been working here for a year and was coming back to work for another year and I gleaned a lot of interesting info from him. Then we talked about God and what my beliefs are for the other two hours. I read some from the Bible to him and it seemed like he was really listening. When we got off the plane he showed me where to go through passport control--not with the foreigners. There were a couple of hundred people in the "foreigner’s" line and just a few Indians in the two lines open for Indians only. He told me that India's laws are quite flexible and so we just hopped into the "Indians only" line and they let us go through just fine. 

Then I split up from him and as I walked through the sliding doors, I was immediately surrounded by hundreds of dark, smiling faces offering me taxis, hotels, money exchange, food, help, etc. It was a bit overwhelming, but it was so exciting. I loved just looking around at all their shiny white teeth smiles.

The drive to the school took all night. I was so tired, but /way too excited to sleep. It was sooo strange, exciting, and amazing that I was actually in India. The driving also kept me awake. It's on the wrong side of the road here and there are no driving rules. So everybody just...well, drives how it seems right to them. We were dodging oncoming traffic, carts, rickshaws, and old tractor trailers the whole way here. It's been crazy watching ladies carry pots on their heads and seeing guys walking around in skirts.

Our little hut, where Joel (a British chap my age) and I are staying, is one room--just enough for our two beds and a place to put our bags plus a toilet and sink. I feel like a "real" missionary in there. I even found a snake hanging above my bed yesterday afternoon and I must be becoming pretty Indian already because it didn't even bother me.

It's jungle here with lots of geckos that sing love songs to each other at night. It's really loud and could be quite disturbing if I didn't know what it was. Our geckos in Louisiana never sang like that.

We're in a hilly region surrounded by tribal villages. Most of the kids at the home  and school come from tribal families. Lots of coconut and magnolia trees are around here and it's very nice to walk around in flip flops or barefoot.           

Yesterday I met the kids at the home and school. The kids are precious and I'm looking forward to working with them.  They call me either Uncle Ben or just "Brother". I'm always slipping into Romanian with them.

We had our orientation and found out about our different tasks. I'm not sure how it will change or fill up as the weeks go by, but I'll let you know. They say that everything over here works on IST--Indian Standard Time--but they say it must really  stand for India Stretchable Time. So we'll be flexible.

Thank you for your prayers. I really appreciate them. It was an adventure coming over here, but it wasn't difficult at all really. It was very good how God worked all that out. This really feels like a place (not necessarily here at the school, but in India) where I fit in. I think that God's got lots to teach me.

Benjamin

Well, it’s Christmas Eve, and where does it find me? I’m sitting in front of the computer trying to gather my thoughts after a busy day. I left cabbage in the kitchen to get sour. Somehow I was voted to prepare dinner for the girls I live with and have finished for tonight. We will have a Romanian Christmas dinner. I spent the morning in the kitchen getting the sarmole (Romanian cabbage rolls) on to cook. I had only fresh cabbage. A friend told me how to make it acrid. It had to sit overnight in water and vinegar and this morning the kitchen smelled like the corner of the market where they sell it back home in Romania! The girls in the apartment kept coming in to see what smelled. I prepared a pot of maybe thirty of them. That tasted like home. Dill is not available here, so they tasted a bit different, but the cabbage was the same. I bought a kilo of ground pork for 2$; that wasn’t too bad.

We went out and got gifts for the kids in the village where we will be going. It doesn’t feel like Christmas. In China, they do not celebrate Christmas at all. Yeah there are some lights in a few stores and pictures of Santa. They were even playing carols in Spanish...”unde esta santa claus?” That got annoying after a while.

The group of people from Hong Kong who are coming up with a team from d and c's church is led by the Dad of the home- schooling family whom I have gone to visit several times in Hong Kong. So far I have never met the dad though because he was always at work.

We are going to the orphanage this afternoon and over the next few days we will be going out to villages to present the true meaning of Christmas.

Church last night was good. The people were so happy and they were enjoying themselves which couldn’t be said about many of the people around here. The way people stare at me on the street makes me feel strange. They really aren’t used to seeing foreigners in these parts, but last night in church, it was different. I found myself smiling at the children when they would pull on their parents’ hands and point at me. They would shyly smile back as well. They would sneak looks at me the whole service long.

I have just come from a gathering of Christians where the people had come to sing carols. It was so refreshing to hear them and to see their faces shining as they sang. So many people on the street look so forlorn.

It is very different here. There are few lights and carols. The weather is warm by Romanian standards. It is unlike any Christmas I have ever had before, yet it just confirms that the celebration must start in our hearts. It is officially Christmas now-- its four minutes past midnight. I miss you.  

P.S. Sometimes when I get in the middle of a crowd and they are all pushing and shoving, I just want to knock their heads together (not very Jesus like), but I really do. I get tired of their elbows.