Fieldwork
News
E-Mail Excerpts From Allen and Tara Laban,
India 2005
Allen and Tara Laben share their impressions,
adventures, Bible School experiences, and pastoral activities, all of
which were packed into their first month in India. Tara has a very engaging
writing style, so these e-mail extracts make for an easy read. You will
want to read all three!
October 10 | October 23 | November
5
Part One
Goodbye, Hyderabad—Oct 10, 2005
Hi, Dear Friends and Family!
Tara Laben here, typing on behalf of Allen and myself. I'm currently sitting in "I-Way"—a little Internet center just a hop, skip and a jump down the street from the Christadelphian Mission Flat in Hyderabad. You don't even have to cross the road to get there, which helps greatly, because the traffic here always resembles something like a herd of cattle 10 cows across, trying to squeeze through a one-cow door. We wonder how they fit so many vehicles on these roads.
Latest Plans
To explain the subject line of our update: we're leaving Hyderabad tonight!
An overnight train will take us to Visakhapatnam (people here call
it Visak for short), on the coast of the Bay of Bengal. Tim Galbraith
has asked us to stay in Visak and work with the local ecclesias there
for about 3 months. For years Ben Parsons, from the UK, lived in the
city, but that slot has been vacant for a several months now, and we'll
be filling in until January. Our roles there will include helping the
CYC and assisting the ecclesia with any contact or outreach work they
are doing. We'll be able to give more information once we're there—in fact, we've been told several times that we'll understand it much
better when we arrive. Please keep us in your prayers, as this work
will be new to us.
Initial Impressions
I'm sure you would love to know our first impressions of India, so I'll
try to summarize the last crazy week. It was a relief to arrive at
the mission compound, which is a gated-in semi-circle of buildings,
including the printing office (owned and operated by Christadelphians),
the Mission Flat, Tim and Sarah Galbraith's home, and the landlady's
home. It's quite peaceful inside, compared to the crazy traffic just
outside the gate. It's always a "Hooray, we're home!" kind
of feeling to step off the dirty, crowded road and through the gate.
India Is in Need of Repair
After venturing out into Hyderabad, Allen and I could see that the Mission
Flat is pretty good by Indian standards—nearly everything here seems
to be in need of repair! The sidewalks are either chewed up or nonexistent,
power outages happen all the time (we've had three or four since we
arrived, but most were during daylight and only lasted 30 minutes or
so), and daily we pass a building under construction where the scaffolding
is nothing but a grid of sticks and tree branches tied together! In
comparison to many buildings we've seen, the Mission Flat is quite
comfortable and always a nice place to come back to. With its stone
tile floors, old furniture, messy bathrooms and constant outdoor exposure,
the Flat strikes me as something of a cross between the facilities
at Youth Camp on Manitoulin Island and some places we stayed in Jamaica,
and I'm glad I have that schema to fit it into. "It's more comfortable
than camping" I can keep telling myself, and at least we have
a roof over our heads.
India Is a Lot to Absorb
Our "work" for this first week has basically consisted of getting
rested, oriented, and prepared for the two Bible Schools which will be
happening in October. It has also included buying Indian clothes for
me—Western clothes are not modest enough here, and being white, you
get stared at enough. Our first evening in India was spent weaving through
a bazaar packed with auto-rickshaws, bikes, salespeople, beggars and
shoppers, and we were entirely at the mercy of the tiny little Indian
sister who was leading our way. We must have been a funny sight. Whether
it's learning how to cross the road by ourselves, discovering which foods
are too spicy and which are okay, fleeing gracefully from a beggar who
just turned out to be making fun of us, or trying to figure out what
to do when our water (provided by the city) hasn't been replenished for
three days, it's always a lot to think about and take in.
India Is Crowded
India is busy, noisy, and sometimes it smells. But it's also endlessly
interesting. I could drive through Hyderabad for hours and never get
tired of watching all of the life going on around me. There's so much
to look at that Allen and I notice something new every time we walk
to our favorite bazaar. I'm sure that this huge, diverse, crazy and
complicated thing called "India" will hold my attention for
the entire time we're here.
We don't have much ecclesial-oriented news to tell yet, because this has just been our week for settling in—the real work begins once we arrive in Visak, and get settled in all over again (just when we were getting the hang of Hyderabad, too!). We'll be sending next week at a Bible School just south of Visak, where Allen and I will both be speaking—I'm giving sister's classes, and he's giving first principle lessons for the unbaptized visitors. Then we'll be back in Visak for a week, and then we'll be going up to Calcutta for another week of Bible School, where Allen will be giving some of the main classes, and I'll probably be teaching the Sunday School group (they haven't told me yet). Then it's back to Visak until Christmas!
With lots of love from very far away,
Allen and Tara
Newsletter Archive
Fieldworker Report–Winter 2007 (PDF)
Focus on P2P–Spring 2007 (PDF)
The Year in Review–Winter 2006 (PDF)
Outreach DVDs–Fall 2006 (PDF)
Sisters–Summer 2006 (DOC)
Fellow Workers–Spring 2006 (PDF)
Life Solutions–December 2005 (PDF)
30th Anniversary–Fall 2005 (PDF)
December 2004 (PDF)
December 2003
May 2003 (PDF)
December 2002 (PDF)
December 2001
January 2001
Fieldwork News Archive
Allen and Tara Laben – India–4
Allen and Tara Laben – India–3
Allen and Tara Laben – India–2
Allen and Tara Laben – India–1
Gospel of Peace–Hawaii
WCF Brethren Visit Romania and Turkey, March, 2005
Exploring Cambodia–Early Preaching Activities
Jamaica, December 2004–January 2005 [1.1 MB PDF]
Basic Bible Teaching in Joliet, Illinois
Bulletin Archive
August 2000
December 1999
July 1999
December 1998
April 1998
December 1997
November 1997
