Finding Oasis: Powerful Stories from the Slums of Mumbai

Finding Oasis

Previously published books by

Clare Nonhebel

Fiction:

Cold Showers (Betty Trask Award co-winner)

The Partisan

Popcorn, novella in Winter’s Tales anthology Incentives

Child’s Play

Eldred Jones, Lulubelle and the Most High

Non-Fiction:

Healed and Souled

Don’t Ask Me To Believe

Far From Home

Healing for Life

Finding Oasis

Powerful stories from the slums

of Mumbai

Clare Nonhebel

Copyright © 2010 Clare Nonhebel

16  15  14  13  12  11  10   7  6  5  4  3  2  1

First published 2010 by Authentic Media

Milton Keynes

www.authenticmedia.co.uk

The right of Clare Nonhebel to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-1-85078-925-3

Unless otherwise stated Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover Design by Rachel Myatt

Contents

1. In Suspense

2. Home from Home

3. In Training

4. Childhood Lost and Found

5. Searching for Oasis

6. Seeking a Ray of Sunlight

7. Mother and Child

8. Schoolchildren and Street Children

9. Restoring the Lost

10. Meeting the Doorkeepers

11. Meeting a Career Man

12. House of Wholeness

13. The Breadwinner

14. Visionaries and Missionaries

15. On Eagle’s Wings

16. Finding Angels

17. Sailing Through Storms

18. Finding Oasis

Endnotes

Chapter 1

In Suspense

Being suspended thirty-five thousand feet above the earth’s surface has the effect of detaching a person from their usual context.

In my case, I’m being detached from the context of UK culture: a multi-ethnic community on the border of Southall in west London, which I hope has gone some way towards preparing me for my destination – Mumbai (or Bombay) in India, where my nephew and his family live. Because John works for a charity, I’ll be meeting some of the poorest people in the world, and I’m guessing that nothing in my Western experience has prepared me for that.

I’m not really the adventuring type. In my teens and twenties when many young people go travelling I was struggling with serious illness, and now, half a century old and married to Robin who doesn’t like travelling, it doesn’t seem the most obvious time to go globe-trotting. My health is fine now but physical stamina is not my strong point and I haven’t accumulated the kind of useful skills and work experience that make people in later life helpful to charitable agencies overseas.

Being on my way to India now came about – like many unscheduled events in life – through one of those conversations that don’t seem highly significant at the time but keep on repeating themselves in your mind.

I’d attended a seminar at church about mission. The minister challenged everyone to give their ‘excuses’ for not volunteering for short-term mission.

I didn’t need excuses, having a valid reason: I would be useless, a burden. He said he felt the same but added, ‘But it’s still a cop-out, isn’t it? If God calls you, he uses you; it’s nothing to do with how useful you think you could be.’ A retired missionary confirmed this. ‘The only volunteers who were a burden were the ones who thought they knew it all!’

Walking home, I asked God for an indication if he wanted me to do anything. At the same time, I asked him to take me out of any comfort zones I was in.

It felt like one of those dangerous prayers I might later regret, but the answer I heard was not anticipated: ‘How comfortable is your life?’

My response was instant and equally unpremeditated: ‘It isn’t.’ It certainly looks like a comfortable life, from the outside. My husband’s regular and my sporadic income, several episodes of financial help from living and deceased relatives, and no children of our own, have ensured enough to live on and some to put aside. But the majority of the world’s family constantly hunger and thirst, sicken and die, in the backyard of my mind. How can it be comfortable to live comfortably, in such circumstances? How can it be comfortable for any of us, unless we live in denial?

I didn’t know if it was a response from God but what came to mind on that walk home was that our nephew John and his Indian wife Charmaine had invited me once to visit them in Bombay, and I hadn’t done so.

So I prayed, ‘God, if you want me to do this, let them invite me again.’ It didn’t seem very likely: we rarely saw them.

Brought up in Scotland, the youngest of Robin’s eldest brother’s three children, John went out to Bombay originally for three months, leaving a well-paid graduate job – electronics engineering – in the south-east of England, where he had bought his own home. He went in response to an inner nudge to do something for the poor, who haunted him.

He was part of a three-man team from a UK charity, Oasis Trust, set up by a Baptist minister of British/Indian parentage, Steve Chalke. Oasis set out to empower the poorest and most ignored people to improve their own lives, with whatever help was needed but always including and arising from the workers’ own faith in Jesus Christ.

John and the other two stayed with local church families in Bombay, ate what they ate and lived on pocket money while helping out with church projects to reach the unreachable poor – starting with street children. At the end of three months, it didn’t seem long enough, so he decided to stay on a bit.

That was fifteen years ago and he never came back, except on visits – alone at first, then for eight months with Charmaine, who is from Bombay, to do a mission course at an international Bible college in the UK, and then on leave, first with one child, then two and now three.

People warned them about the difficulties of crosscultural marriage, and about trying to ‘go native’, especially when John was promoted to executive director of Oasis India. But as Charmaine said, ‘At least we’re prepared for differences between us; some couples from the same culture aren’t, and find it harder to make adjustments!’And when John’s father, Derek, asked one of John’s Indian colleagues if his boss was resented for not being Indian, the man laughed and said, ‘But John is Indian!’

As a charity worker, John and family return on leave to the UK every two years. Sometimes we get to see them when they’re here; other years not. The summer I attended the mission seminar and prayed, they phoned to say they were near and came for the day. We planned to take them to the beach – but they brought the monsoon with them! The only day of the summer it rained in sheets all day.

Around tea-time, John got out the laptop and showed us photos of Oasis India’s projects with street children, slum dwellers, women trapped in prostitution, people with HIV and children orphaned by AIDS. I asked a lot of questions. And he and Charmaine repeated their invitation, ‘Come and see.’

I explained I didn’t want to come as a tourist, looking at people as an interesting project. It wasn’t as if I could do anything useful, like build classrooms as another nephew had just been doing in Brazil.

‘Actually,’ John said, ‘our staff are always being asked to write about people we’ve helped, and writing doesn’t come easily to all of us. I was wondering if you’d write some case histories.’ He paused, then added casually, ‘And maybe a book.’

Telling people I’m going to India has aroused varying reactions. Some people warn me against the shock of poverty; others talk poetically about colours, spices and vibrancy of life; those with unfocused spiritual yearnings envisage it as a fount of eastern wisdom, while the materially minded talk about sightseeing, out-of-season suntans and cheap shopping.

I feel so unprepared and unsuitable for this trip, acutely aware of my age, ignorance and tiredness. My shorthand is sometimes slower than longhand and I can’t always read it back, and I’ll have to rely on interpreters in interviewing Hindi-speakers.

But on the plane I find that what is troubling my mind the most is the culture I’ve left behind, especially something I read a week ago – a magazine article about life coaching, a growing trend in our Western society’s selffulfilment industry. I don’t know why it’s nagging at me, on the way to Mumbai, but it is.

The article outlined the starting point of life coaching: inviting the participant to draw a pie-chart of ‘my life’, dividing it into segments representing elements such as ‘my work’, ‘my ambitions’, ‘my relationships’, and giving each segment a score out of ten for its satisfaction value, then aiming to improve the score in one segment at a time. This seems to me a fragmented and unrealistic view of the rich complexities of life, which is shared with all humanity and can’t attain completeness in some individual life plan. It’s such a poor alternative to Jesus’ offer of ‘life in all its fullness’ and his purpose for everyone ‘to be one, as the Father and I are one.’

I’m wondering whether people born in the very different cultures I’m about to visit – most without knowledge of Jesus but perhaps with more emphasis on life in community rather than ‘my life’ – rate and react to the stresses of life in the same way.

Are the very poor in India aiming for similar goals to comfortable westerners, and harbouring similar dreams of fulfilling their individual potential? Is the universal longing for peace and happiness experienced and expressed in similar ways, and are the same remedies for human heartache applied in the slums of Mumbai?

And, in such a short visit – eleven days – can a foreigner learn something that may change her own perspective on life?

I’m about to find out.

In London, in preparation for the trip, I queued for six hours for a visa outside the Indian High Commission and talked to an Indian man who now had British citizenship and so was also forced to apply for a visa before going back for a visit. He was retired, having first come to England to work in the 1960s. I asked how he had coped with the racism at that time.

He said matter-of-factly that he had lived on a rough estate, had been called names, denied jobs because of his colour, had windows broken in his flat and rubbish pushed through the letterbox. He had finally got a factory job, where he was injured so badly he couldn’t return to work for nine months. The first three years had been the worst, he said, before his wife and children could come and join him.

I told him I was sorry he had been treated so badly in our country, and asked why he had stayed – was it worth it?

‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘My three sons have all had a good education. The older two have good jobs and the youngest one is at college.’

‘Couldn’t that have happened in India?’ I asked him.

‘No. The class system is still very rigid. They wouldn’t have had the opportunities.’

I think about him now. All that abuse and being treated like a second-class citizen and he felt satisfied with his choice, and his sacrifice. His purpose was fulfilled, not in his life but in the next generation’s lives. I don’t think a life-coach would have much to say about that. Who decides what fulfils a life, or even what qualifies as ‘my life’, distinct from others’ lives?

The plane has been losing altitude and now begins circling over Mumbai – a vast undefined cluster of buildings, water and hills studded with lights in the predawn darkness.

For most of the occupants of the plane, this is home. For me, it might as well be another planet. I have everything to learn. I feel that none of the UK-dwelling Asians I know, nothing of the Indian community living on our west London doorstep, nothing I’ve seen, heard, read or viewed on television, is going to prepare me for this experience.

I have no idea what it will be like. God knows every single life of the millions of people living in this city, is the thought that crosses my mind. He has been the context in which each person has been born and lives and will die. Not a single one takes their first breath or their last breath or any breath during the whole of their life, without him knowing it. Each one is held in the palm of his hand and is rooted in the core of his heart.

And not only in Mumbai but among the billion inhabitants of this Indian subcontinent, from the most opulently wealthy to the heart-crushingly destitute, he knows every single person. And I know five: my Scottish nephew, his Indian wife, and their two little girls and one boy. I can’t wait for the plane to land.

Chapter 2

Home from Home

The plane arrives late, having missed its landing slot and risen and circled around and around Mumbai a few more times. It would have been a great overview of the city if it had been light. What I see is enough to show me that it’s massive, and that there are more high-rises and also more forests and expanses of water than I had realised. Impenetrable jungle meets impenetrable urban jungle – or that’s how it looks from a height and in semipenetrable light.

Out in the arrivals area there is a sea of faces. I scan the crowd for a white one, and John appears suddenly. We exchange hugs, he seizes the luggage, and I follow him through the crowds. He seems very much at home here.

I didn’t quite believe it was going to happen, even while I was having all the injections, queuing for a lifetime outside the embassy for a visa stamp on my passport, buying supplies of sunscreen and insect repellent and anti-malaria tablets, choosing presents for children I didn’t know very well, and for slum children I couldn’t imagine.

But it has happened, and I’m here, and as soon as we’re outside the airport entrance, two barefooted little girls with matted hair have come up either side of me, holding their hands out and miming hungry mouths.

I try to explain I have no rupees yet – no money. I was surprised to find out that our local post office, on the borders of one of the biggest Indian communities in Britain, supplied virtually every currency except Indian rupees. I didn’t know it was a restricted currency, unavailable outside the country itself.

‘But don’t worry,’ the cashier said with a smile. ‘You’ll have no trouble changing your money when you arrive. We love sterling!’

These little girls don’t love sterling and they don’t love me, arriving with my big suitcase and nice clean clothes and not giving them anything. By way of apology, as they don’t understand my ‘No-rupee,’ refrain, I stroke the head of the older girl. She flinches and glares at me. Not on. I say ‘Sorry’ again. I borrowed a book and a tape of Hindi from the library before I came, but I don’t remember anything that might cover this eventuality. Nahi – no – seems a bit abrupt. They can hear that anyway.

The drive home from the airport – and from the Oasis India office where John works, which is not far from the airport – can take up to two and a half hours, he warns, depending on traffic. It’s early, not seven am yet, so I guess the traffic won’t be that bad at this hour. I really do have a lot to learn about Mumbai.

I’m used to London rush hours but London traffic has lanes. Here, there are as many lanes of traffic as there is width of road, so it veers from four to eight without much warning. There are cars that look as though they may fall apart if someone leans against them, exhaling clouds of black exhaust. There are trucks packed with workmen. Motor rickshaws, with passengers keeping their elbows and knees tucked in as they sit in the door-less back seat, nudge their way between other vehicles, with centimetres to spare. Whole families cling to each other on the back of motorbikes, the women riding pillion, sitting sideways and clutching the smallest child, while the older one is sandwiched between the father’s arms, holding the handlebars.

Everyone leans on the horn every few minutes, to avoid applying the brakes. After a while I see it’s a signalling system, not a sign of annoyance. It’s the way a vehicle indicates that it’s creating another lane and overtaking, either inside or outside the vehicle just ahead of it. The system seems to work. Schoolchildren try to edge their way across the road and the traffic makes no way for them.

After I return home, John and Charmaine’s younger daughter, crossing the road with her sister to go to school, steps out into the traffic and is hit by a truck whose driver has no chance of stopping in time. He runs for his life, not waiting to find out that she will be OK, because he knows onlookers will enforce their own ‘justice’. A man comes to tell John, ‘We’ll find him and beat him for you,’ and John has to be very insistent that he is a Christian and