A Day to Remember
The site of our picnic on the banks of the Relli River
One of the benefits of traveling to India in January is that all the primary and secondary schools are closed for winter break. Which means that we can spend all day, every day, hanging out and connecting with our kids and staff.
So why not have a picnic on a Monday? Who’s gonna stop us?
Amber, Radha and Anita met us at our hotel after breakfast and we bundled into Amber’s trusty Mahindra Bolero and headed out of Kalimpong, down a steep and bumpy incline toward the banks of the nearby Relli River.
The kids in their rusty buses got a head start, but we caught up with them about halfway down the mountain. As we passed them on the narrow berm, they cheered and we continued on our way with squeals of “John Unclllllllle…” trailing behind. We finally crossed the old steel bridge spanning the Relli, its sheet metal driving surface thundering and bucking under our wheels.
We did proper off-roading for the final approach: boulders, gravel, mud: the whole nine. And when Radha indicated the picnic and cooking site, I had to stifle a laugh. Literally a field of rocks.
Totally India. Totally not like any picnic you’d ever see back home.
Some of the staff and older kids had already arrived, and were setting up the kitchen – washing the dented aluminum stock pots and giant copper wok in the river, chopping firewood with the same kukris we’d later use to cut meat, selecting rocks that could be used as makeshift mortars and pestles for grinding ginger and garlic.
We spread some blankets on a relatively flat section of ground covered in rocks that had been rounded by years of rising and falling water levels. When the kids’ buses arrived, the boys leapt out toward the nearly-freezing river, stripped to their shorts and dived in. Eventually a number of girls joined as well.
“John Uncle! Why aren’t you swimming with us?”
“Because I’m not…uh, what’s the Nepali word for ‘insane?’”
Kori made herself passably comfortable on the blankets with a group of high school girls. I tried my hand at chopping vegetables, but my 12-inch European chef’s knife was pretty useless with no cutting board. All of the local cooks are adept with paring knives, carefully – but with alarming speed – dismantling ingredients pulling the razor-sharp blades toward their hands, pulling back at the last instant to avoid cutting their fingers. So I surrendered the mise en place to the experts and spent the next hour or so carefully clambering over sharp boulders and slippery stepstones to take pictures of the kids swimming and those laughing at their shivering siblings from the shoreline.
Eventually I made my way back toward the blanket and eased myself to the lumpy ground, settling in to chat with the kids who had gathered. “John Uncle, do you have photos of little me?”
Thankful for decent cell service by the river, I pulled up Amazon Photos, where I have literally tens of thousands of images from my dozens of trips to Asia. One by one, I asked the kids what year they came to Asia’s Hope, and began searching for the earliest pic I could find. To my relief, I had already tagged some of the kids’ faces. For some of the girls – like Ruth and Samiksha – there were hundreds of photos, stretching back more than a decade. And I was able to find at least a few photos of each of the girls who had gathered.
Naturally, this exercise provoked a deep sense of reflection over the journeys that brought each child into our care.
One girl shared about her life before Asia’s Hope — a drunken, abusive father, now deceased, succeeded by a drunken, abusive stepfather who forced her out of the home as a tiny child. “I don’t miss my mother,” she said. “I have all of my family here.”
Another girl said, “I miss my mom every day. I love my sisters and brothers here, and I love my Asia’s Hope mom and dad, but I wish I could have seen my mom just one more time,” and she turned her back, and wiped away tears as her sisters leaned in to embrace her.
“We can stop,” I said. But they all wanted to continue. So I sat and listened. So many stories, so much heartbreak. And such deep healing, thanks to the love they’ve received at Asia’s Hope
Soon it was time for lunch. Kori and I and the most of the girls enjoyed a modest portion of dal, chicken and rice. The teenaged boys, however, fueled by youth and a couple of hours’ roughhousing in the river ate astonishing amounts – plates mounded high with rice, soaked in lentils, overflowing with meat. We laughed at them, and I gently teased Samuel — a round-headed boy with a shy-but-crafty smile and a truly prodigious appetite — as he ladled on what must have been his second kilo of rice.
As the day grew warm and the boys finished off the provisions, something like a sacred glow settled on various groups of kids scattered around the picnic site. Kids who had exhausted themselves swimming, huddled together as their hair dried messily. Boys walked together with arms around each others’ shoulders. Girls leaned into each other, fingers intertwined, smiling as the afternoon drew to a close.
I put my camera away and just watched. Listened. Tried to engrave on my heart the memories that my pictures could never capture.
The older boys and most of the staff tore down the kitchen, washed the dishes in the river, and loaded up the Boleros for the return home. “Reverend John,” Amber inquired, “Shall we move?”
Yeah, I guess we shall.
As the kids loaded the bus, we packed our backpacks into the Bolero and headed back to Kalimpong. As I sit on the bed in my hotel room, I’m still glowing just a little bit. I’m also aching – kind of like I sat on rocks for a couple of hours.
Truly a day to remember.