Learning and Growing

Learning and Growing!!
We have settled into a great routine and are so enjoying living here in India! We are having a great time running around the city, learning as much about it and the culture as we can! We just finished our last training for the day and are enjoying an afternoon fellowshipping with the office staff (and making them chocolate cake which they LOVE!) The trainings have been going so well, we are so thankful! Each couple is so enthusiastic about the new information we are giving them and ready to start their youth groups next week. We are happy to be a resource for them, especially in the next several months while we are still living here. They are such an encouragement and challenge to us as well. They each have amazing testimonies and it is a joy to hear of how so many came to know Christ. After talking with each couple and getting a good feel of their specific situation, we develop with them a youth program that will work best for their area. We give them an outline so they can take it home and follow it. They are so appreciative of the one-on-one training and the time we have to really encourage them in their ministry.
Tomorrow we are traveling to our first church to follow up and see how everything is running! We are very excited to be traveling out of Kolkata even for one day. We love living here but it is a very hard city to live in and we are excited for a day of fresh air! Kolkata is a very interesting place, and as we have explained to our families it is a very dark place as well. Even flying into Kolkata, we could just feel the oppression and darkness of the city. It is literally dark, due to DENSE smog all day and night; but also spiritually dark in that there is a very dark presence here. This is difficult to explain but very much a reality. It is a city in great need of Christ! We are saddened every day by the extravagant worship of the gods here. In the next week there will be the “god’s festivals”, which we are not looking forward to outside our window! It is a time where they worship the gods all day and night for many days, blast music and bring food and flower sacrifices to their gods. When we see the great needs around us we are even more challenged to continue on in our training and encouragement of the indigenous workers here. They are doing an amazing job in spreading the gospel with little to no support.
Coming up this week we are also meeting with the Christian youth students to plan the details of our Bible studies with them. We will have another outreach night the following week which will include mainly Hin.du students. The Christian youth are motivated to have a deep Bible study and we are very excited to be pouring into them so they can better reach their peers here in Kolkata!
Please pray for us as we begin to travel more in the coming week. We hope to visit each and every pastor next month but currently do not think that is possible (due to both funds and time). So please pray that God will guide us as we choose which couples we think we can impact the most by visiting. For some very basic prayer requests: As trivial as it may seem, each day it is getting hotter and hotter! To add to this, every afternoon for several hours the power goes out* which also cuts out the fans, so we tend to roast on the fourth floor in the middle of our trainings! Also, each day brings new challenges in just the basics of living here. Cooking, cleaning, and just getting around in the city is all difficult and we cannot begin to tell you how much we’ve grown in just the basic areas of life! Lastly, please pray for good health. We have been doing fairly well, I (Anne) tend to get sick easily and have gotten sick quite often!!! 
We thought we’d share some fun tips we’ve discovered about living here that apparently everyone else around us knows!!!
• When approaching a taxi, if you ask to go somewhere and you only receive a blank stare with no emotion, this means “Yes please get in I’ll take you!”
• Don’t feel awkward that there is a “bathroom helper” in each bathroom who will open the door for you, turn on the water, and then stand waiting for you! This is normal 
• If all the sudden the inside of your nose spells like sewer, don’t worry it’s just the air!
• Make sure you offer 1/5 of the original price told to you for anything! They still take the 1/5 price happily which means they’re still making profit! And we call this lovely thing “skin tax”. It happens everywhere you go!
• When you ask the taxi driver if they’ll take you to your location, they say yes but once in the taxi they stop to ask everyone where your location is.
This last fact is very true and sad. It is also on the U.S. Embassy website in case you are visiting India. If you are ever in a taxi and you hit a person and kill them (as crazy as this sounds it is NOT unlikely, almost happens several times a day!), get out of the car and run fast. There will instantly be a mob around the car and they will burn it and kill you.
Wow! Fun facts from Jeremy and Anne! We love it here and these are just fun things we’ve observed while living here! Please continue in your prayers for us and our passion to reach the youth in India!