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Justice redefined

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          A few days ago, we found ourselves on a 16-hour train across the country.  We showed up to the train station around 4 am, feeling quite haggard and looking forward to our 5 am departure, when we would actually have bunk beds to ourselves instead of sleeping on an old sari spread out on the platform.  When the train finally arrived (late, as usual), we were discouraged to find that our so-called reservations were meaningless: our beds were already overflowing with other people; strangers crunched together shoulder to shoulder along the length of the narrow bunks.  We had a hard time even finding space to sit down.  It was unthinkable that we would spend the next 16 hours that way, and our frustration swelled into resentment as we discovered that there was about three times the number of people on the train car as there should have been.  Almost everyone in our berth had been waitlisted and weren’t supposed to have boarded the train!  These beds are ours.  We paid for them, I kept thinking.  Amazing how the most primal, territorial impulses come out in these kinds of situations.

          A few hours into the journey, an elderly woman walked through the train car, begging for change.  She looked frail and tired, and she had scabs on her arms.  Lots of people get on and off of Indian trains along the way, begging or selling things, but when I noticed her standing in the aisle after she had made her rounds, I realized that she had nowhere to sit until the next stop, and who knew when that might be.  I willingly offered her my seat.  She hesitantly accepted, but seemed grateful to sit down.  Over the next few minutes I learned a little about her life and tears welled up in her eyes as she talked about the plight of the four children she is trying to support by begging on the trains. 

          After she left, I turned to my companions with new eyes—those interlopers who were sitting where I was supposed to be laying down, making up for all the sleep I hadn’t gotten the night before.  Actually, their clothes were not much better than this old granny’s.  Some of them were pretty old.  They probably got “waitlisted” because they couldn’t scrape together enough money to purchase their tickets far in advance like us wealthier people can.  So why had I felt such compassion towards the elderly beggar, but only anger and indignation toward my fellow passengers?

          I think it came down to my sense of justice. 

          Justice.  Jesus told a story about justice.  It was a story about day laborers (Matthew 20:1-16).  A land owner goes out to the market early in the morning to hire some of them to work in his vineyard, and agrees upon a certain wage for the day.  Throughout the day he goes back to that same spot and hires more and more of the men who are still standing around waiting for a job.  By the end of the day, some of the men have been working outside through the heat of the day, while others have only been working for the last hour or two.  The land owner pays the latecomers first, and when the morning crew sees that he’s paying them the typical wages for a full day’s labor they start to get excited, because they assume that must mean that he is planning to pay them even more than what he originally agreed to!  When their turn comes and they receive the same amount as the last men who were hired, they feel that they have been wronged.  “That’s not fair!” they tell the boss.  “These guys got the same amount of money for an hour of work as we got for a full day of sweating out in the sun!”  The land owner’s response challenges their sense of injustice.  “Have I not compensated you fairly for a full day’s work? Why does it matter to you if I want to give these other workers a full day’s wages, too?” 

          The situation for day laborers in India and under highway overpasses across America today is similar: if a day laborer was still waiting for a job in the market at the end of the day, it meant that he wouldn’t able to feed himself and his family that night.  The land owner in Jesus’ parable wasn’t paying people what their labor deserved—he was paying them based on what they needed to survive that day.  This gives us a huge insight into God’s idea of justice. 

In His view, Justice is not people getting what they deserve.

                                          Justice is people being provided with what they need.

          Our companions on the train needed a seat just as much as we did.  God doesn’t care whether their tickets were waitlisted or not.  He didn’t care that the woman who was begging hadn’t bought a ticket at all.  And neither should we.  

Source: New feed

Snapshot of Daily Life

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      After three weeks, we feel like we’re really settling into our new home.  Of course, that initial victory hasn’t been won without some battle scars—namely, the swollen casualties suffered because of a hole-y mosquito net and an underestimation of how ferocious these little creatures can be!
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Good thing it isn’t malaria season. This was after the first night, we have since solved the mosquito problem.

     We’ve settled into a daily routine of waking up around 7, taking some quiet moments to prepare for the day, to talk with our Father, to take a “bucket shower” and start the day with the refreshment of a cold bath.  We join the family around 9 for a breakfast of chai, chapattis, and vegetable curry or whatever is left over from dinner the night before.  The morning is spent doing laundry and helping to prepare food and do chores around the house, and we’ve enjoyed re-learning all of those basic activities like small children.  “In America, you don’t clean the house?” our host sister asked the other day, confused by our apparent inexperience.  We try to explain that we do, but the process is so different that it hardly seems like the same thing!  Throughout the day, we practice Hindi, learn new words, study the things we’ve written in our notebooks, and struggle to spell things in the Hindi script.  When we show our attempts to our hosts, they often laugh and rewrite completely different words than we thought we heard.  We’re still learning how to hear the strange sounds of our new tongue.  Five times a day, the call to prayer rises from a loudspeaker.  Five or six times a day, we drink chai with the family.  In the afternoon, when it is hottest outside, most people take a nap, and usually, so do we.  In the evenings—now that we have a bit of basic language—we sometimes go out to talk with neighbors, and sometimes are invited over to their homes for more chai.  Dinner happens anytime between 8:30 and 10 o’clock at night, and after that we usually sit around talking with our host sisters and our host brother, who gets home from work just before dinner.  Throughout the day, we hang out on the front step to talk with people walking past, or to laugh at the water buffalo that lives in front of the house across the street.  Occasionally, we make a trip to the market with our host father to buy vegetables, or to the huge community milk vending machine called “Mother Dairy”.  At night, we head back to our room around 10 or 10:30, spend the next half hour mosquito-proofing ourselves for the night and go to sleep.  We’ve really enjoyed becoming part of the family’s daily rhythms of work and relaxation, and learning more from them each day.  It’s such a blessing to have a safe environment within their home to make our first cultural blunders, and we’re so thankful to have advocates and friends who can help to integrate us into the community.

      Up to this point, A. and I have been doing most of our long-distance travel on the modern, air-conditioned metro system, but most of our neighbors are limited to the un-air conditioned and less reliable bus system because it’s cheaper.   So last Wednesday we decided to take the bus to our friends’ place on the other side of the city.  We piled into a crowded little van (but van is a strong word… it implies full enclosure) for the first unpaved leg of the journey, out of our community to the highway.  Then we waited for nearly half an hour at the bus stop.  While we waited, a very crowded bus came by and a few people scrambled on, some still hanging outside the door and trying to force their way inside as the bus sped away.  Finally, ours showed up and we piled on.  It was crowded and hot, but we were excited to be above ground and able to see all of the street-level activity between point A and point B.  A few minutes down the road, a rhythmic, jolting, thudding starts under the floor of the bus.  We look behind us to where the last passenger aboard is standing in the doorway, clinging to the outside of the bus.  He is looking down at the tire, and seems somewhat amused.  The motorcycle and truck drivers passing us are all staring in that direction, too—apparently the tread is coming off the tire and flinging against the bottom of the bus with each rotation.  At the same time, we’re beginning to notice the grinding of the gears and the halting acceleration after each stop of the bus.  We aren’t sure which problem will take down the bus first.  As we’re sitting in a traffic jam at a huge, unregulated intersection with a cross flow of rickshaws, motorcycles, trucks, cars, and buses in front of us, we stare into the rooftops and inner rooms of the slum dwellings that line the highway, divided only by a canal of open sewage and huge pipes serving as walkways over the water.  A man repairs a power line standing on a bamboo ladder whose bottom rung is just a couple of feet away from our back tire.  Pedestrians and bicycles hurry past between the tire and the ladder.  A few minutes later, the transmission beats the tire to its demise and everyone moves from our bus to another one further ahead in the traffic jam.  This one runs on a slightly different route, but we manage to get off at approximately our desired destination and take another “van” to our friends’ community.  After all of that, we still manage to reach their front door in less than two hours!

Yes, life here is good.

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Source: New feed

Our own place

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So this weekend we moved from our host family’s home on the outskirts of the city into a more urban neighborhood.  We realized that this is the first time in 11 months that we’ve lived by ourselves (If you don’t count the shared bathroom…)!  Here are some photos:
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View from the roof of the house where we slept during our homestay

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Inside our current home: bedroom to the left, kitchen to the right. We’re especially thankful for that window during power outtages.

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Next to the kitchen– our landlord’s belongings are on the top shelf; ours are on the bottom two. We won’t be using his washing machine, but it does create some extra counter space.

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This is the view out our window. The white minaret in the background is one of the local Mosques. The black tank is our neighbors’ water supply, and the small structure beneath it is similar to the bathing area/toilet on our own roof.

Source: New feed

Growing Pains

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We’re in our second week at language school here in Mussoorie, a small mountain town in the foothills of the Himalayas.  By my estimation, these are already mountains, but seeing the snowcapped peaks of the bigger Himalayas just beyond us puts these “foothills” into perspective.  Taking the public bus up the narrow mountain road to get her was a hair-raising experience. As the driver flew around blind corners on the single-lane highway clinging to the edge of the mountain, sometimes blaring his horn and sometimes leaving the possibility of oncoming traffic to chance, we often found ourselves doubting the driver’s will to live.  At least gravity was working in our favor… we’re dreading the downhill return this coming weekend, now that we’ve seen the speed that’s possible even when working against the incline.  Upon arrival, however, we walked off our nausea during the mile-long uphill hike to where we’re staying.  We decided that the cool temperatures and stunning views of mist-shrouded hills and the Indian plains transformed into a placid sea spreading toward the horizon below were well-worth the train trip and the terrifying bus ride.  Through some friends, we were able to find a friendly Indian family to rent a small apartment from.  They live upstairs, and we enjoy a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and living room (with actual table and chairs!) for studying down below.  We weren’t prepared for the 50 degree drop in temperature, so we bought wool sweaters to throw over our summer clothes and now we’re enjoying being cozy instead of just cold :)  It’s monsoon here, so most days there is at least heavy fog if not heavy rain, and the humidity seeps through the walls and keeps clothes and dishes and towels from drying.  But when the dense cloud recedes, it looks like heaven come to earth when the sunlight plays across the sky, painting the clouds that ensconce the low rooftops of the the hillside town itself.  With all the shifting clouds and light, no two days look the same, even from the same vantage point on the mountain.  Walking along dirt footpaths through the massive, dripping, fern- and moss-covered trees to climb up to language school or down to the market to buy vegetables reminds us how much we’ve missed having exercise, silence, and space to breathe in the city.  Nature is rejuvenating.  

Of course it’s not all peace and quiet.  As usual, the monkeys are everywhere, both the aggressive and the space-suit variety, and we had a nasty run-in with a troop of them the other day when we came to a part of the road where they refused to let us pass.  A. wielded a water bottle and made aggressive noises, but the monkeys just leapt forward and bared their fangs.  We retreated to find stones to throw at them, and once we had pebbles in hand the monkeys fled– though not without indignation.  A momma picked up her baby just as I hurled a little rock in their general direction and turned to look at me with her mouth gaping open, as if to say, “Hey, this is a baby!  What do you think you’re doing, being so aggressive?”  The next day, we saw a local guy chasing a monkey troop away from the street in front of his shop with a flare gun, so I guess foreigners aren’t the only ones being monkeyed with around here.

We have two hours of one-on-one language instruction each day, which is really pushing us forward in our listening and speaking ability, and our time thus far has felt extremely productive.  We’re encouraged by our progress and thankful for the formal instruction and the change of scenery.  But there’s an element of being here that is difficult, too.  Having access to internet in our apartment (whenever the fog or thunderstorms aren’t knocking it out) means greater “connectedness” with the outside world– we can read online news, skype with a few people, send emails, check facebook.  But in another way having that connection shows us just how disconnected we really are.  We can digitally follow bits and pieces of hundreds’ of friends’ lives, but we aren’t part of the day-to-day substance of any of them.  The reality is that “back there” isn’t really home anymore, and “over here” isn’t quite home yet.  So this week, even as we take in the beauty of the Himalayas and the excitement of preparing for the next step of our journey here, we’re also feeling the loss of the life we left behind and missing the people who have journeyed with us up to now– people spread across the globe from China to California to Nashville to Peru, and lots of places in between.  A week from now, we’ll be on the move again, as we have been many times before.  Uprooting has become somewhat of a trademark for us, but we’re hoping soon to begin learning the patient art of settling in.

Source: New feed

Fair/Unfair

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Fairness was something Jesus spent a lot of time discussing (and changing people’s minds about).  The prevailing understanding of poverty and suffering in his day was that they were punishments for sin, while wealth and well-being were interpreted as divine rewards for a person’s righteousness.  Either way, your social position was duly earned and deserved.  Thus, the earnest question put to Jesus by his disciples in John chapter 9: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind (and doomed to destitution)?”  And thus Jesus’ rhetorical questions in Luke chapter 13– “Do you think that the people who were murdered by the Romans in the temple recently, or the people who were killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed on top of them suffered those fates because they were more evil than other people– because they did something to deserve it?”  Jesus goes on to answer all of these questions with a resounding “no.”

I read an intriguing opinion piece* recently about the concept of fairness.  The article centers around two competing means of evaluating the “fairness” of various laws and public policy: the “veil of opulence” and the “veil of ignorance”.  The veil of opulence, the author explains,  asks questions of fairness only from the perspective of “whether it is fair that a very fortunate person should shoulder the burdens of others.”  It seems that so often, we instinctively approach everything from tax laws to business practices to foreign policy from the perspective of the elite, regardless of whether or not we ourselves actually find ourselves within that privileged group!  This perspective ”assumes that the playing field is level, that all gains are fairly gotten, that there is no cosmic adversity. In doing so, it is partial to the fortunate” because it implies that whatever prosperity or failure a person encounters has been fully earned by their individual actions– i.e. the CEO got where he is solely because of his good business sense and hard work, the people in the inner city can’t seem to get ahead solely because they make poor decisions.  

Reality, as Jesus knew, is not so straightforward.  As I’ve been learning first-hand over the last several years, poverty (or prosperity) is usually a complex web of structural forces, uncontrollable factors and personal choices– unjust laws, illness, physical or mental disability, social stigma, and poor individual choices can all contribute to some people’s poverty; wealthy parents, elite social connections, good health, and– yes, unjust laws– can likewise contribute to others’ prosperity.  

Taking all of that into account, an alternative way to consider laws and policies is from behind the so-called “veil of ignorance”, which forces an individual to approach the issue at hand hypothetically assuming that they are completely ignorant about their own place in society– their own health, income, opportunities, talents, etc.  The necessary starting point from that direction is to ask, “What system would I want if I had no idea who I was going to be, or what talents and resources I was going to have?”  In other words, “If you were to start this world anew, unaware of who you would turn out to be, what sort of die would you be willing to cast?”  The author concludes that the “veil of ignorance” is necessary in order to escape the natural human tendency to think primarily about “what is fair for me” (whoever I am).   

Rather than attempting to craft fair policies for either people who are wealthy or poor, sick or healthy, fortunate or unlucky, our goal should be to create systems which are impartial toward everyone– which is the definition of fairness in the first place.

* “The Veil of Opulence” by Benjamin Hale, posted on the New York Times website

Source: New feed

The Village Diet

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The market

          The hospitality here has been incredible.  Most of the time, there’s no one around who speaks English, so we communicate with our host family in Hindi.  But Hindi is a third language for them, behind the local dialect they speak at home and the Nepali they learn at school.  Our situation is comparable to an American family taking in complete strangers for an extended period of time who speak no English and only a smattering of Spanish.  Several generations of an extended family live here, and many other neighbors and friends are frequently around, so the house is often a beehive of activity.  We’ve been struck by how generously everyone has accepted us into the flow of their lives and the limited space of their home.  Of course, along the way our stark cultural differences have made for some funny situations.
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Looking across the river (and the border) into India

          Especially when it comes to food.  On our first morning in the village, we were greeted by a blackened goat head on the floor when we walked into the main room of the house.  The old grandfather of the family was kneeling next to a dirty burlap sack on the concrete floor, butchering the head on top of it with what appeared to be a thick, dull knife.  We sat down nearby to observe the strange proceedings, but were forced to move further back after his enthusiastic hacking splattered some vitreous fluid or brains—I’m not sure which—onto my clothes.  The whole thing was strange but didn’t really surprise us, as we already knew we had no idea what to expect from a Nepali village—and since, in every culture, grandparents tend to be the most “villagey” of everyone.  But we WERE surprised when the butchered head was served up straight from the floor, without so much as a rinse or a minute in the fry pan!  They indicated to us that the raw matter in the small bowls they had handed us was the best part—the brain and the ears.  I knew right away I couldn’t stomach it; A. looked more uncertain.  A few years ago we probably would have both dug in, but by now we’ve each had our own round of Asian parasites and the novelty of eating raw goat brain just wasn’t worth repeating that experience!
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huge trees

          Throughout the week, there have been several reincarnations of that initial delicacy.  Yesterday, the family slaughtered another goat in the front yard, blackened the whole thing over a bed of hot coals, and then munched on some of the still-raw organs as they proceeded to chop up the carcass.  We aren’t sure what happened to the meaty parts, but we had a nice boney dish for lunch, and then at dinner time in the fading evening light, we slowly discerned that the bowls set before us were goat innard stew.  The gutsy smell tipped us off before we took a bite.  A. chowed down like a champ, but I decided to stick to the chapattis on my plate.  “What does it taste like?” I asked him.  “Spicy liver,” came the reply.  “I can’t believe you aren’t even going to try it,” he added ruefully.  We were being watched and I didn’t want to embarrass the cook by gagging in front of her.  However, my untouched bowl soon generated serious concern among the two grandmas who began hovering over me with furrowed brows, watching me eat my plain chapattis.  “Why?” they gestured.  I just gave an embarrassed laugh, unsure of how to explain myself.  Next to me, A. was nearing the bottom of his bowl.  “I’ve never eaten this before, so I feel afraid,” I said in simple Hindi. 

          One of the grandmothers seemed to understand, and hurried away to the kitchen.  She came back with a container full of ghee (clarified butter) and dropped a whopping glob onto the stack of chapattis on each of our plates—more butter than either of us has ever tried to consume at one time.  Next she brought out sugar, and encouraged us to douse the buttery chapattis with sugar, too.  “It’s so good!” both women told us excitedly.  They looked on with satisfaction as I took the first bite.  Just as I began to feel my stomach reaching full capacity with ghee, sugar, and chapattis, one of the old women went back to the kitchen and came back with a full bowl of cooked okra… and more chapattis.  By this time A. and I were laughing out loud at this comically oppressive hospitality.  “No really, we’re stuffed!”  We tried to communicate.  No use.  The grandmothers watched– intently, lovingly– from close range as we negotiated the pile of okra into our stomachs.

Source: New feed

Kathmandu

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           A week ago, we were in the village market, loading into a crowded, beat-up jeep bound for the nearest town.  We had decided to change our plans and head into the interior of the country earlier than planned.  Between the people riding on the roof, the men hanging onto the back, and the rest of us stuffed into the back, there were close to thirty passengers.  As we bumped along the unpaved road, crossing shallow river beds and charging over sudden drops, steep slopes and loose rocks, we were amazed that the jeep actually stopped for MORE passengers!  People lined up across the tailgate, children climbed onto the laps of people already crouching on the floor, and one woman made herself comfortable sitting nowhere in particular but leaning her full body weight against my chest.  Forty-five minutes in that rugged wagon brought us the same distance it had taken A. and I two hours to cover on foot a couple days before, and once we hopped down from the jeep we headed to the local bus station to buy tickets on the public bus to Kathmandu.  

          We loaded our backpack on top and settled into our seats at the front of the bus, right behind the driver.  We had a terrifying view of the windshield throughout most of the journey as our driver surged toward oncoming motorcycles and schoolchildren walking down the side of the road, and played chicken with buses and overloaded trucks which, like ours, were decorated with garlands of plastic flowers and painted in circus colors with slogans like, “slow drive, long life” and “speed control” written across the front as they hurtled toward us with alarming velocity.  Although the journey to Kathmandu took about 18 hours, our bus stopped along the way for just about anyone standing beside the road, bus stop or no bus stop, and served as local transport between villages and small towns along the way.  The longest stops, however, were at military road blocks and armed police checkpoints which we hit several times each hour.  We were never quite sure who or what the soldiers were looking for as they boarded the bus over and over again to look through luggage and shine their flashlights at people, but in spite of the frustration of waiting in lines of traffic at several of the checkpoints, we slowly came to appreciate the safety that these checks probably represented.  As we drove past a village gate crowned with a communist sickle and hammer, and past weathered farm women with actual sickles tucked into their saris as they walked home from their fields, we were reminded that this area has been known for Maoist insurgent activity over the past several years.

           By early the next morning, the scenery changed from fertile plains of wide, green rice fields and forests to more mountainous terrain.  The “highway” (narrower than two lanes and little more than a dirt road in some places) curved along the side of a mountain gorge with little waterfalls cascading down the sides here and there, feeding into a fast-moving river at the bottom.  The same driver had been at the wheel the whole time, without sleep, and if he felt as tired as we did from trying to sleep all night in our uncomfortable chairs, then we were worried.  But he managed to finish the journey, continuing to aggressively pass traffic along the winding road with the same ferocity as he had used on the straightaways the day before.  We arrived in Kathmandu mid-morning—exhausted and relieved to have survived the journey!  And that fascinating city did not disappoint.

Source: New feed

The Himalayas at last! (and some unexpected wildlife)

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          We won’t go into the details of the intense “microbus” ride from Kathmandu, but six hours and one flat tire later, we were in the mountain town of Pokhara, the lakeside base from which backpackers venture off into the Himalayas for trekking.  The Annapurna Himalayan range lies just beyond the lake, and on a clear day several of the tallest peaks in the world are visible from the shore.  We’ve spent the last week here hiking around the lake and exploring several of the villages on the lower mountains in front of the Annapurna.  Earlier this week we covered about 20 kilometers in one day!  

          For the most part, we’ve been soaking up the natural beauty of this place and enjoying the clean air and open space.  Yesterday, however, we were out hiking again when we had an unexpected encounter along the jungle path with some of the local residents– leeches.  Shaped like the stem of a leaf, these little guys release an anesthetic that keeps you from feeling them as they latch onto you and start sucking blood.  As long as they’re left undisturbed, they’re completely harmless and fall off on their own after they’ve had their fill.  Chinese medicine would tell us that our blood has been purified by these helpful creatures, but the anti-clotting agent they release into your blood keeps the extraction site bleeding for the next 20 minutes to half an hour after they’re gone… and there’s just something inherently creepy about little blood-sucking worms that can sense movement and hunt you down in the jungle.  Yuck.

          Below is a slideshow of some of our wanderings in the area:

Source: New feed

Masala Chai Weather

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          There’s a certain date after which all the chai stalls start putting ginger in the tea.  The introduction of that spicy tea—masala chai—signals the beginning of “winter”, because the ginger, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, and even black peppercorns which people boil into their chai are believed to possess heating properties that will  help keep your body warm.  On that first day, the weather was still uncomfortably hot during the day, but the evenings had begun to cool off.  This week, we had the first comfortable days that we’ve experienced in India since we arrived six months ago, and at night it’s cool enough to sleep under a sheet with thick socks on—which is almost miraculous, when we think back to the sweaty nights during the summer when we used to soak ourselves with water right before going to bed, so that it would cool us down long enough to fall asleep while it evaporated.

          This is also the beginning of the holiday season in India, and this week we attended two very different celebrations.  On Wednesday, we went with friends to watch the Hindu festival Dussehra, which is marked by a procession of camels, carriages, and heavily made-up people in sparkly robes who later act out an important scene in the life of the Hindu god Ram by sword fighting, wrestling, and eventually lighting a three-story tall, ten-headed effigy on fire.  We joined a crowd of several hundred people to watch this somewhat chaotic event unfold against a backdrop of fireworks exploding dangerously low to the ground and spraying fire into the crowd.  Meanwhile, police herded the masses with bamboo rods whose liberal application did little to improve the safety of the event, and smaller fireworks attached to wooden pinwheels spun feverishly and sometimes broke off, shooting rockets into onlookers. In spite of the apparent danger, however, everyone was in high spirits and we didn’t see anyone get seriously injured. On the contrary, the reckless abandon to danger seemed to merely heighten everyone’s excitement. 
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This photo isn’t ours, but it gives a good idea of what the grand finale looked like

          Then on Saturday, A. and I visited new friends in one of the slum communities here to celebrate Bakhra Eid, the festival in which Muslims remember the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son, and celebrate the last-minute provision of a goat to take the boy’s place.  We went from house to house, stuffing ourselves with traditional sweets and yogurt curry dishes along the way and chatting with our hosts.  An unschooled man who slowly taught himself to read and write carried on a lively discussion of world politics with us and spoke proudly of his oldest daughter, who is working on a bachelor’s degree.  Later, we looked through old pictures with a family whose husband/father left the house for work one day a few months ago and simply never came home, and we listened as they told us how the police have refused to help them search for their missing loved one. Talking with these families, we were confronted again with the richness and complexity of this place; with the hope and the pain that are mingled in these narrow alleyways.  Taking in their smiles and their stories, we were impressed by our friends’ ability to celebrate in the midst of hardship.  It seems that staring life in the face has taught them not only perseverance through grief and struggle, but also the true art of celebration.
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Goat: the main course at dinner on Bakhra Eid

Source: New feed