Anna and Akka and my Tambis

I was staying in India as a guest of the Saviour Jesus Christ Mission. The Mission, at this point, includes a school, an orphanage, and about 200 churches all told. It was started years ago by a pastor named Benjamin, and is now mostly run by his son and daughter-in-law, David and Susan.

David and Susan were actually in the U.S. when I arrived in India. My family actually ran into them about a week later at an Indian restaurant. As I told you in my last post, when they were over here Auntie took care of me. However, when they did eventually make it back to India they took over responsibility of me.

Susan is the vice principal of the school, and she takes care of the girls orphanage. The girls have a warden who lives with them of course (I'll tell you about her later), but any major problems come to Susan. She is also a mother of two high energy boys, and manages her own household. She's a busy woman.

David spends most of his time visiting those of the branch churches that are having problems and need some help. Every few months he goes north with some of the other pastors to evangelize one of the northern provinces. It is never a given that he will come back. The Hindu fanatics are very strong in that region. But he goes anyway, and his family lets him.

David and Susan have two sons, Philip and Timothy. Philip is twelve and Timothy is eight. They are my little brothers. They both made it their responsibility to expose me to the culture, so they were always dragging me this way and that saying, "Look at this!..This is how we do this over here!...You'd better take several pictures of that!...Taste this!" They loved to bring me Indian snacks and sweets and try to force-feed me the entire box. Everyone over there was convinced that I didn't eat anywhere near enough.

I miss all of my family in India, but I probably miss my little brothers the most.

One more note-you may have noticed that the title of this post includes somebody named Anna, and what looks like an Indian name and some other word. Those are actually Tamil words. Akka means older sister and is what all the kids there, including me, called Susan. And Anna actually means older brother, and is what we all called David. Tambi means younger brother, so I am referring to the boys with that one. Both of the boys called me Akka.