Happy Thanksgiving!

We hope that you all had a blessed Thanksgiving celebration with your families.  Although we missed celebrating with our families, we had a wonderful time sharing Thanksgiving with some of our friends here.  I am not much of a cook...never have been and probably never will be...although all things are possible with God, right?!?!

Anyway, this is the first year we have hosted a Thanksgiving celebration in our own home.  I have always had the blessing of being able to go somewhere else and just bringing a dish to contribute to the buffet of delicious food.  This year, the responsibility fell on me...so of course I delegated it to the rest of my family!  Tony made the chicken...no turkey to be found in this country!  Dylan baked a homemade apple pie...something I have NEVER done in my entire life!  Delaney made deviled eggs and Desirae helped me make mashed potatoes.  We supplied some of our USA Thanksgiving favorites...the ones we could provide...minus the pumpkin pie, the turkey, the stuffing, and the cranberry sauce.  Doesn't sound much like a traditional Thanksgiving but nonetheless we had a wonderful meal with some delicious Indian food and wonderful friends.

We have so much for which to be thankful.  For one, we are so thankful for YOU...for your love, support, prayers, and encouragement.  We love you and thank God for you!

Tis the Season...

…For significant Hindu festivals.  Over the past thirty days there have been three major Hindi festivals celebrated in our region: Durga Puja, Diwali Puja, and Chhath Puja.  These festivals are each up to ten days long and include extravagant decorations, rituals, and customs.  I by no means fully understand what we have witnessed here but I am going to try to explain a little about what each festival means.  The word puja means worship.  During each puja, gifts of food and sweets are offered to the gods and then they are often given away to family and friends.

Durga Puja is a ten day festival to honor the Goddess Durga, also called the Mother Goddess or the goddess of power.  She has ten arms which represent her power and she is celebrated for defeating a buffalo demon.  She is worshipped by the building of huge, elaborate, temporary structures called pandals.  Each structure houses a Durga Goddess idol that has been made out of clay, preferably from the Ganges River.  In our town there is a huge competition to see who can build the most amazing pandal.  It is believed that worshippers can invoke the presence of the Durga Goddess on their statues and then after the festival, she returns to the heavens.  This is symbolized by immersing the idols in the river at the end of the festival. 

Durga Puja is followed by a four day Diwali Festival, which means Festival of Lights.  It is a celebration of the victory of light over darkness and good over evil.  Thus, Diwali is celebrated with many luminaries in homes.  Many houses and businesses are decked out in lights as well.  It looked a lot like Christmas around here during Diwali!  And, everyone sets off fireworks…for days and days.  We literally thought we were going to die in Delhi last year because the air was so bad! Another tradition of Diwali is decorating your home with a rangoli, which is artwork made of chalk and flowers.  This artwork is supposed to welcome the Goddess Lakshmi, who is the goddess of wealth and prosperity. 

After Diwali comes Chhath Puja.  This celebration is the most complicated in my understanding.  It lasts four days and the focus is on worshipping the Dala Chhath or Lord Sun.  River banks are adorned with bamboo and banana tree structures where worshippers will offer their sacrifices in the form of food and sweets to the Lord Sun.  There is so much ritual and symbolism involved in this puja, it would take me days to explain it all.  For one, this puja involves a significant amount of fasting and bathing by at least one appointed member of the household for the four days.  One thing that we witnessed during this festival, but do not yet understand the significance of was this…Many people proceeded from their homes to the river by lying flat on the ground, marking the ground above their head with a stick, standing up and walking to the stick mark and then lying back down again.  They repeated this process the entire way to the river as family members walked alongside them.

There is so much more to each of these festivals that I cannot even begin to understand or describe.  But, I thought even my poor attempt to describe the worship we have experienced this past month would be helpful to you.  Below are a few pictures for you to better visualize what I have tried to describe…

Petting Zoo

One of the fun and crazy things about living in our country is that we have our own free petting zoo wherever we go.  Cows, pigs, and goats are rarely if ever tied up or pinned up, they simply roam freely around.  The down side to this is that you can never take your eyes off the ground when you are walking, because the second you do you will step in a fresh pile of...

The entertaining side, however...especially if you are a child is that you have a petting zoo at your fingertips all day, every day.  Whenever we go on walks, Dylan loves to pet the goats and even pick them up.  Desirae loves to feed the cows.  

We burn our trash here.  So everyone in our little corner of the neighborhood, burns their trash in one central location.  The cows, pigs, goats and stray dogs make trash piles their feeding ground.  They even rummage through the trash pile while it is burning to get the choicest treats before they are consumed by the flames.

This morning, my little princess, Desirae, in her beautiful pink dress and matching high heels, fed the cows some moldy bread.  After she fed them, the cows followed her back to our compound.  We hope you enjoy these pictures from our free petting zoo...

Goodbye Max...

Well, Paul Harvey, here's the rest of the story...we stayed by his side day and night for nine days.  During that time it became increasingly clear that Max was not going to make it.  His appetite came back and for a few days he ate and drank on his own.  But, his muscle spasms worsened until they were constant and were attacking his entire body.  He lost his ability to stand or even to hold his head up.  The last two days of his life, Max was on high doses of pain medication, but even still he was crying constantly from the pain.

We decided it was best to put Max down but of course that was not as easy as it might sound.  We called the two vets that we had dealt with; one was out of town and the other said he could not euthanize animals.  The vet that was out of town told Tony how the process should be done.

So, after the pain and exhaustion of watching Max suffer for nine days, we had the added pain of having to euthanize him ourselves.  This was one of the hardest things Tony has ever had to do.  Even so, Max went to sleep peacefully.  During the process, Tony had a vision of Max getting up off the table, shaking off the disease, and running through fields licking cow noses and chasing goats...I'm not sure if "All Dogs Go to Heaven" but we believe Dylan's Max is there!

I have a confession to make to all the dog lovers in the world...I generally don't like dogs.  But Max was one in a million...he taught me that I could actually learn to love a dog.  Dylan still cries every day because he misses his "best friend."  But, just like I said last week...we praise God for his unfailing love and faithfulness and for the gift He has given our family, and especially Dylan, in this special dog!