The Carson Center

February 26, 2009

110 years after my great, great uncle Jacob Andrew sailed from New York for India, I sat on the tarmac waiting for my plane to depart for India. As I sat waiting for the weather to clear up so we could take off for what would be a 14 hour trip to Delhi, I had Uncle JA’s two books, Stories From India(1916) and Lights and Shades from Hindu Land (1910), in my hands. Even though I had been to India before, I was a bit anxious. I was going to Dhamtari, a place I had never been to before. Dhamtari was the same place that JA Ressler, and Dr. William and Alice Page were headed a century and a decade earlier.

I wondered how many hours or days they had to wait for the weather to clear up as they waited to sail to Bombay, a sailing adventure that would take 33 days, or in terms of hours, 792. I grew impatient with 30 minutes we had to wait for what would be a half day flight.

My flight will take me 7,500 miles through the blue skies in a Boeing 777 that has every comfort needed except for leg room. Climate controlled and above any possible storms, the weather on the seas below is irrelevant. I already know that I will arrive at the airport in Delhi and take a taxi to the home of missionaries with the Mennonite Brethren Church. I plan to spend the night and half day in Delhi and then take a two hour flight south to Raipur, 700 miles south of Delhi on Kingfisher Airlines with electronic tickets I purchased on the internet weeks earlier. Through email and a free telephone call using Skype, I anticipate being met by representatives from the hospital and school that are a part of the “mission compound.” They will drive me 50 miles to Dhamtari.

Sixty hours from the time I left my house in central Kansas, I will be at the “mission compound” Uncle JA speaks of in his book, a place that took him months to reach under much more difficult circumstances. I know where I am going. He did not, only to respond to the terrible famine that was going on behalf of the Mennonite Church.

I am eager to see the compound. It was my uncle, I think with equal amount of pride and reservation, who selected Dhamtari as the place that the Mennonite Church would use to provide for the physical and spiritual needs of the India people in his day. It was he who purchased the three pieces of property referred to as Rudri, Balosgahan, and the Sundarganj Mango Orchard. The pictures in the books are black and white grainy photos of a few building on the property with thatched roofs, ox drawn carts, a mango orchard, people squatting down, many looking sick and impoverished. What will it look like in person 110 years later?

It was Uncle JA who worked with the government officials to provide work for the unemployed and starving masses. It was he who oversaw 9,000 people on government funded work relief projects. It was he who started an orphanage to care for abandoned children that reached 600 children at one point. All this seems honorable to me, his great, great, great nephew a century later. How will it be viewed from an Indian perspective a century later? What will the Indian principal of the Mennonite high school, the Indian doctors and nurses, and the leaders of the Indian Mennonite Church think of me? Since the 1960s, the India Mennonite Church and the programs at the compound have been independent from the Mennonite Church. Was Dhamtari a good choice? Were Uncle JA and Auntie Lina good people? What is their legacy I wonder as I head toward the place he left almost 100 years to the day that I am returning. I am about to find out.