My husband and I are sneaking away for a couple days...

We'll be in touch soon.

Maybe...


While we are gone, you have an assignment. Check out this photo and make up your own version of what is going on. When we get back we will post the real story.

They say it's because I kiss kids. I say they're from the Devil.













Moments after asking Savita (a local hero at head lice) to check my head for lice, she parted my hair and these were the words I heard from come from her lips, "Oh, this is very bad."


For the following five hours I have had my hair combed though, oiled up and washed out. Our bed sheets and matress have all been changed as well as all of the clothes I have worn since moving here (good thing I really only wear 7-10 shirts and two pairs of pants). Nasty little living, breathing things they are. Nasty.

Not that I am usurping Jess, but she is in bed sleeping so she can't stop me. Here is the run-down on what happened, what is happening, and what will happen (or at least we hope so).

1. What happened:
So the Delhi Government branch that deals with snatching and destroying other people's land (Delhi Development Authority) issued orders that will acquire this whole neighborhood, level it, and turn it into a strip mall, high rise apartments, and other such nonsense. The truth is, we are loosing this land. This haven will be a parking lot. Now the question is when. The reason we were in such a state of panic the past few weeks is that we thought the bulldozers were going to be rolling through our front door any day. That was not totally unfounded, but it was based on some less than perfect information. (Requests for security help posted in the police office, bulldozers wrecking walls directly behind our Ashram, on and on...).

2. What is happening:
All kinds of things are buzzing now. A local tabloid ran this AWESOME little inflammatory story on us here in Delhi, making Jessica 2nd page news in India's capital city. (Not bad for a Michigan girl who had never been overseas before, huh?)

In other news (laugh), a Delhi branch of CNN is looking into doing a story on us as well. Not too shabby.

UNAIDS, with whom we are working on some case studies, got us a great meeting with the right people to help us fix our problems with the land. At this point, God willing, we have a 1 year stay to keep the bulldozers at bay until we can come up with a solution to get out of here.

What is that solution you might be asking you self, well the solution is actually #3 on the list, in chronological order, of course.

3. What will happen:
We don't know.

But we have an idea of what we would like to have happen. We need, in the next week, about $250,000 USD to put a down payment on the land. Now about $150,000 of that is already raised for that down payment, so we need just $100k more in one week.

After we have that, we need the rest of the $750,000 to purchase the land pretty soon, probably within a few months. Then we will need another huge sum to start putting buildings on the land. A clinic, Tuberculosis wards, living quarters, meeting hall, vocational training area, physical rehabilitation area, etc... But all of that can come with time.

...

But in the mean time, people are still dying. On the way to an important meeting on Saturday Ton spotted, in the high rise and high life part of town, a 16 year old boy laying on the sidewalk next to the road. Naked, totally emaciated, sick with TB, had drug himself across the pavement to come to rest at that spot to wait to die or be rescued. They picked him up, rushed him to the hospital, and today he died.

A 16 year old boy died because thousands of people who passed him on the sidewalk looked the other way.

A 16 year old boy died.

But death is commonplace here. We respect its limited power, choose life instead, make a face like this and say...
Boogeda! Boogeda!

Life goes on. Some make it to tomorrow, others don't. But today is what counts.

My main area of stretching these past few weeks: how do I make today count more. That's it. Today, the moment, right now, what can I do (or not do) to make this moment have real value.

Just thoughts...

My hair may be full of lice and my head full of green snot, but at least I'm famous in Delhi. This photo was published in "Metro Now," a new metro magazine who put the story of Sewa Ashram on the front page.

P.S. I think we may have received a year stay order!

I'm married to an Alpha.

But he has one heck of a Beta if I say so myself.

- Jess

P.S. I'm still planning to write more one day. Thanks for praying with us, laughing beside us and enjoying the beauty surrounding us. We are grateful!

A really great article from a really great magazine.

I'll write more later...

Jessica and I are busy today, like normal.

But we all send greetings.



Our brothers send wishes of Peace.


Our brothers send wishes of Love.


Our brothers send wishes of Valentines greetings if you like, but what meaning does that really have?


None.



Jake

Appeal to Delay the Demolition of Destitute Sanctuary

The future of a haven that grants refuge to New Delhi's destitute is at stake. Due to new land developments by the Delhi Development Authority, there is a possibility that Sewa Ashram Rehabilitation Centre and its buildings will be demolished.

The unique community of Sewa Ashram, located in Narela, offers free health care and long-term rehabilitation for those who cannot access services offered through the public health system. The centre is staffed by a team of ex-patients who are guided, trained and facilitated by on-site professionals; offering hospitality to the sick, poor, mentally ill and those abandoned on the roadsides of Delhi.

Sewa Ashram has been notified that the demolition process could begin anywhere between today and two months from now. The new city development put on by the DDA is said to include developments such as high-rise dwellings and a shopping district, while 120 of Delhi’s poorest will end up homeless and stripped of basic human privileges such as receiving free medical care and living in an atmosphere geared toward enriching others' lives with compassion and hope.

Professional partners and lawyers representing the property rights of the residential community have teamed up with Sewa Ashram staff in the quest for an extension of time to allow for a suitable transition off their current land. Out of all potential sites scouted, the management claims that the most suitable land for relocation is in the district of Burari, which is 30 minutes away from Yamuna Bazaar, one of New Delhi's most poverty-stricken areas.

Sewa Ashram will receive insufficient re-imbursement from the DDA due to sky-rocketing land prices over the past years. Therefore, Sewa Ashram is in the process of submitting appeals to Delhi government officials in the hope of obtaining a sufficient delay of the demolition, giving them time to raise funds to purchase new land and begin building a new home for the destitute of Delhi.

Regardless of the final outcome of this process those who will either benefit or suffer the most by these decisions will be Delhis’ most vulnerable citizens, the destitute.

For more information on the centre and its fight to delay the demolition project or to request Sewa Ashrams financial information, please contact Jessica at 98 106 204 52 or go to Sewa Ashram.

Sewa Ashram is registered as a charitable society under the name ‘Delhi House Society’, which is a registered charitable society under the government of N.C.T Delhi, Reg. No. S-35565. Delhi House was the name of the original house for the destitute founded in 1997.

the good news is that feet are still ticklish, smiles are still present, bandages are still being changed, the onions in the garden are still growing, chai still is served two times a day, laughter is still being heard all over, old men are still crazy, children are still even more insane and the men... well, they're still men.

the bad news is, there isn't any yet.

Faithfulness.

Daniel, Jake and I are getting a press release ready and making numerous numerous contacts with various media outlets. Up-dating the web-site with New Ashram info. Tomorrow the rubber will hit the road. Will publish press release on here tomorrow.

Ton is doing what he does best and is caring for the patients.

Court is tomorrow. We'll see.

Does anyone know any powerful people? How about high rollin' philanthropists?

Faithfulness.

I need to remind myself.

destruction has begun.
tearing down surrounding walls.
i don't know what to do.
i'm tired of watching.
we are His alone.

Well, here it is, the moment I have been dreading for 3 years. Ever since my first visit to the Ashram I knew that there had been an ongoing struggle with the legal authorities over the ownership of the land on which the Ashram sits. There have been struggles and legal action, lawyers and community action meetings, on and on and on.

For years there has been the threat of demolition, bulldozers coming through this garden, this place of healing, to make way for shopping malls and apartment high rises. They want to level this verdant land of healing to make room for a place of glass and steel and money.

That day is today. Sneakily and underhandedly, the DDA (land development people) have issued the decree that tomorrow we shall be bulldozed. Tomorrow will be the end of this Ashram.

Or will it. Two things come to mind.

The first is that these threats have come before, this is only more serious because we have a date and a court order. More paperwork, more officialness, more chance it will actually happen.

The second is a common theme among angry-ex-church goers. The church is a building. The Church is the people, collectively, as a creative, loving, compassionate body. That is the Church, and what the church should be. Not cathedrals and paintings, buildings and alters, but living people.

The Ashram is much in the same. It is not this compound, these luscious gardens, the beds, medical wards, or medicines. It is the people. We will be homeless, but still and Ashram of healing. We will move away from this quiet environment, but still be the Ashram of peace.

So what are our other options?

• Someone very high up could intervene on our behalf and get a "stay of execution" from the high courts.


• One of our lawyers efforts could be effective and receive the same "stay".


• We could miraculously receive all $718,000 we need to purchase new land that we have been eyeing. While perfect and permanent, it is very expensive.

Right now we just don't know.

But someone just came into the office and handed me a $50 bill. One time my Grandma gave me a $50 bill and told me to "keep it hidden in your wallet. You just never know when you will need it in an emergency."

That memory lifts my heart. Help always comes in time of need.


Jake and Jess

Mohammed dies this morning.
Three small children are now without a father.

Salma & Roxanna, along with their little brother showed up this morning with clean shaven heads. What else is one to do with three children who have lice and live in a one room home.

The DDA issued us papers yesterday saying that we have one day until our home is to be demolished for city development. This is not the first threat, but it is the first one which has come with papers. We're waiting for the lawyer to call us back this morning. Waiting to take action. Feel helpless once again.

Tonight I took two girls to kiss their dad for the last time. We anticipate that Mohammed will die tomorrow.

A note from the past...

Some of you were propositioned by Jessica and I a few months ago about shipping some English reading materials to some schools in Midelt, Morocco where we were previously living. Well, a few of you (specifically BLynn that I know of) came through BIG TIME on that request, and to see the results of your efforts, please visit the blog of Cory Driver who acted as courier, organizer, distributor, and muscle-man for this venture.

Thanks to everyone who made this happen.

Jake and Jess

My heart is ushered into transparent beauty and awe when I look into their eyes and touch their hands, truly listening to the voice within each one which speaks volumes of mercy, divinity and pain.

I wish I could somehow explain what it feels like to experience the touch of ones callous, dry hands to the breathing flesh which designs my face... a synergistic pulse between two people - restored. A united understanding resurrected. A trust which can only be communicated through the willingness and desire to become one with each other... to search out the light and life of God in each others soft tissues... to be willing to look beyond missing legs, dirty hair, clothes speckled with holes, voices with an auditory wave... between the labored gasps of painful longing memories and the steady breath of accepted loss, he touches my face, his fingers move through my hair, our lips culing upward with delight... we are becoming one. We receive life from one another... we are able to love from the energy transfered between our no longer foreign eyes...

For the first time in my life, I don't struggle here. I don't feel as though I am compromising that which I feel God has asked me to do and be. I feel as though I am free to look forward with hope and excitement. These men, women, and children are my family. Greeted each morning as their sister, they have become my brothers and sisters. It would be faulty of me to not speak of the hardships which occur here on a daily basis. But for some reason, they don't hold as much weight here as I have experienced in the past. What matters here is that synergistic pulse... the pulse which speaks love, acceptance, and truth of heaven on earth.

Thank you for being willing to come alongside us and experience this pulse of life with us... we are so grateful.

Tonight, for the second time, a local woman who lives in the surrounding slum told me that I am very good with her kids. Nice. Yet, she goes on to share that she has no money to care for herself, let alone her kids and that I should take her two oldest (Selma & Roxanna) with me when I leave.

Right in front of both Slema & Roxanna she tells me this, for the second time. Both times I play it off as though she were joking. I don't know how much longer I can do that without screaming.

I've been taking bages of carrots and sometimes cookies or chipiti's (a flat bread) to their home when they are away. Often I go over and see their mom eatting and not them, maybe I'm just stopping over at the wrong times. I hope they get this food before their mom does though. I think sometimes they do, Roxanna was eatting a clean carrot this afternoon.

The other day when I stopped by Selma was complaining of a stomach ache while her mom was hitting her with her flip-flop. I did an intervention of sorts to stop the hitting and asked her mom why she was hitting her. She said that she caught Selma peeling off the top layel of their manure based floor and was eatting it. I guess the flip-flop hitting was a punishment of sorts. Wouldn't the horrible stomach ache be enough?

What can I do?
Why do I have such non-loving thoughts toward Selma & Roxanna's mom?
Is she not a child of God as well?
Why is it increasingly difficult to find beauty in her although the color of her eyes are brillant green?
Why am I such a jerk?

Where are we?

From their one-room rural mud homes found in the depths of decade old slums, young men and women often have no choice but to make their way into the circle of survival inside the walls of Delhi, India, more specifically Yamuna Bazaar. Illiterate, uneducated, and unaware, with poverty at their heels and little opportunity for upward mobility, many of these young men and women are unable to find adequate employment to support a healthy lifestyle. As a result, many eventually find themselves stepping closer into unknowing ways of self-destruction for support which often lead to homelessness and a continual worsening state of living.

After years of personal neglect, abuse and disregard for not only their life but for the life of all creation, those who were once considered simply poor now live in a constant state of high-risk poverty, disease, malnourishment, exploitation and negligence. Heartbroken by abuse and society; they are dismissed as worthless, ignored by all while slowly dying on the roadside.

Under bridges and in gutters, in a state of rapid deterioration, at the door-step of an undignified death is where we often find these sacred souls. Engulfed in tuberculosis, infected with HIV, bleeding with open gaping wounds deep with maggots, skin pulled tightly across the face, showing off the curvatures of the facial bones, waiting to die, they are found and brought into Sewa Ashram to rest their weary, sometimes missing feet.

Here at Sewa Ashram, life is a celebration. To live and survive is a celebration we daily take part in. Watching the young HIV infected artist look into sky and contemplate the beauty in the form of each cloud. Celebrating in the developing round cheeks of the abandoned, malnourished child found in the gutter two months ago. Celebration in the joys of newly discovered gifts expressed best by those who have experienced life’s hardships and are now crippled by TB, have lost limbs or the ability to live self-sufficiently. A celebration of life together. Yet, woven throughout the celebration of lives resurrected, we celebrate the sacred souls of lives lost.

Many beautiful faces imprint the soil of the Ashram yearly. Many of these footprints make their way around the grounds where current patients rest, receive treatment, and are cared for as one would care for his brother. Some footprints make their way out of the Ashram with shoes strapped to their feet, awaiting with anticipation a life of full recovery and unending opportunities to make right what once went so unnaturally wrong.

Yet, many times patients enter Sewa Ashram with irreversible damage for their bodies to heal. It is in these specific cases where we celebrate the exceedingly beautiful life we came to know during their short, precious time here. These are the lives which never leave the Ashram independently, but rather are carried out with dignity by their brothers and sisters, wrapped in fresh, white, beautiful cloth scattered with orange, yellow, and red flowers from the surrounding gardens. Their ashes will return to the earth and the cycle of life appreciation will continue in those who remain.

On Friday we handed the lives of Rumi and Reshma over to Hope Foundation. It's a strange place I am finding myself in. To see the faces of those I have grown to love be taken into the arms of a strangers. And for no reason should I be experiencing grief after only knowing them for such a short time. Yet, I am not sure what else I would name all that I am experiencing since my arms parted their skin.

I have worked with adults and adolescents alike. I have grieved for lives lost to alcohol, drugs, abuse, etc. I have witnessed distress, depression, hopelessness, despair. Even here, at the Ashram, the experience of loss is a daily encounter I have learned over the years to embrace with celebration, peace, and rest. I have worked diligently not to attach myself to those I serve, which I have come to recognize as a gift as well as a fault. Yet, I have never had to work through the loss of children. Children engulfed in grief, deprivation, starvation, lack of attention as well as healthy stimulation. Children, whose bodies feel like silk but speak helplessness. Children whose faces shine with natural beauty but demonstrate negligence. This weekend I grieved for the touch of silk, the natural beauty of their eyes and lips.


Yet, during such a time as this I have found peace and healing like I would have never anticipated receiving. Peace in the hope which lies in the tough callous hands of old junkies who work together in communion, peeling pea pods for tonight's supper (P.S. The man on the far right with the blue pants, his feet are ticklish).

I find hope in the future of those who were once hopeless, like Renu & Ramesh. After over eight months of TB treatment at the Ashram, left last week to start their life together down south, both rehabilitated of the disease which once threatened to take their lives, TB.

I find joy in the daily jabs and jostles that occur between staff and patients alike. Playing, I have found, has become a lost art. A lost art often rediscovered and practiced here on a moment by moment basis.

I find laughter in the hugeness of these carrots and the little teeth and hands which work diligently to demolish them. Murari (on the left) has been here for the last year and a half, after being rescued from the road-side. He has acute juveinle onset arthritis and is quite an instigator but is also locally known as the boy who can get anything out of anyone. Kamal has been here for a number of years. Found abandoned, he has made himself a staple at the Kid's House and is quite sneaky is getting a couple other kids to do his daily homework... such beloved stinkers.

Forgive me for being so horrible at remembering names, it's a gift I really hope I am anointed with someday, but... the man on the left I call Mr. 20kg, because that is what he weighed upon arrival at the Ashram. His body taken captive by TB, for the first two+ weeks he would simply lie in bed, laboring for each breath. At that time we worked out a deal through broken language and began a cookie/sandwich black market between the both of us. His weight is increasing ever slowly and the last four days he has been independently sitting up and walking around the Ashram with only the help of a walker.

The boy of the right, Ramier (I think, I hope) came to us with his father two mornings ago. Him and his dad had traveled four days to come to the Ashram after his father had fallen into a camp fire during a seizure. Covered with 3rd degree burns on his chest, arms, hands, and face this beautiful dirty boy checks on his dad frequently; helping his dad go to the bathroom and when others aren't looking, helping him smoke bidi's...

I can't imagine a place better than this to grieve. Surrounded by hope, love, laughter, peace, resiliance, joy, and amazingly huge carrots for healthy teeth.

Failure to Thrive

Yes, I cut my hair.

No, we have not adopted them.

Yeah, they are amazing.

The children of the woman we wrote about yesterday. They have ear infections. The youngest is probably a month old, but barely knows how to suckle. The oldest is probably just over 1 year old, but doesn't know how to chew solid food. I think he has been fed only dal (stewed lentils) and chai his whole life. We are trying to teach him to eat.



BBC News - Child Nutrition Program Failing in India. Why? Because every one of the programs is created from the top down by "experts" who wouldn't know a real idea that might work if it jumped up and bit them. This type of education MUST be done from the ground up, based on personal relationships among peers, by people who are dedicated and integrated into the community. Otherwise, they will fail. And they do.

Jake and Jess