Preface

This blog documents the trip to India my daughter, Sarah, and I took in February 2012. We were traveling with Friends of Christ of India (FOCI) which was founded by David Rowe, one of the ministers of Greenfield Hill Congregational Church, the church we have attended for about 15 years. David's wife and co-pastor, Alida Ward, made her first trip to India on behalf of FOCI 10 years ago and for the past 7 or so years, she has been bringing a team of interested youth and adults along with her on these trips. Sarah and I have been talking about making this trip together for some time and this year we decided to take the leap - and that's what it was - a leap of faith, a leap into the unfamiliar, a leap into the uncomfortable, a leap into the amazing.

We traveled from February 12th through February 24th. There were 13 of us traveling together - 5 adults and 8 teens. Three of the teens had parents on the trip and the rest of them were embarking on this journey alone. For some of them, it was their first trip abroad; the longest amount of time they had been away from family; and/or their first experience in shared living quarters. There was no way they were coming back unchanged.

Our days were jam-packed and, despite my best intentions, I got little chance to document our activities and my impressions. I jotted down bullets in my journal each evening or couple of evenings, but they don't begin to convey the journey. I'm hoping that this blog will provide a more complete description of our experience.

A wise colleague advised me this week not to let too much time go by before I wrote up my impressions. "Don't worry about the writing," he advised, "just get it down." So that's what I'm going to try to do. If my words don't succeed in conveying it, you'll just have to believe me that the experience was eye-opening, inspirational, depressing, uplifting, stimulating, exhausting and life-changing.

Fasten your seat belt. We're headed  to India.