Sunday, May 20: The Children

Saturday is my normal day off. As most of you know, Mullings is sent out on Sunday night, Tuesday night, and Thursday night. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings are devoted to answer e-mails, explaining errors, and the like. From Friday afternoon to Sunday morning (when the Sunday shows get my attention) are the only times I am not writing, watching/reading, or dealing with the business side of Mullings.

I protect my Saturdays like a mama bear protects her cubs.

I take Saturday off. I spent the entire day reading, watching Indian music videos (which all look like they were directed by the same guy who directed Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon movies) and sleeping.

Most of the Tennessee Eight went out shopping and we had our first casualty. One of them succumbed to the heat, excitement, and who-knows-what-all and fainted in a bazaar, but not before throwing up in the van.

On Sunday I told him not to worry. No one will ever beat George H.W. Bush in that area. He threw up on a whole Prime Minister.

I think he felt better.

The Saturday night rally had easily twice the number of people who had been there on the night before including the Speaker of the Indian House of Representatives. I thought "If Newt were here and got a chance to speak to 50,000 people, he would do fifty minutes, easy.

After we returned to the hotel we ate at the same restaurant we had eaten at the night before which featured northern Indian cuisine. Northern Indian cuisine is what we, in the U.S. of A. generally think of as "Indian Food."

We liked it, and the Tennessee Eight recognized most of the dishes (after we got clear on the word "prawn" which some of them insisted on pronouncing "prawng" and explaining it is a large shrimp and then getting no response from the large-shrimp oxymoron joke) so we ate there again.

On Sunday we were scheduled to take a field trip to Charity City.

= = =

Dr. K.A. Paul, who was underwriting this adventure, is building what he calls a training center for orphans about 60 km outside of Hyderabad which is like saying he is building a training center on the far side of Saturn.

We all decide we will take a van out to the site and see the children. I tell the Tennessee Eight that the rallies are the show biz part of Dr. Paul's activities, but his work with orphans and widows is the guts of the thing.

At the crack of 9:30 we gather in the lobby for our immediate departure which occurs at 10:00 only because we finally gave up waiting for Jesus (pronounced in the Spanish way) and ordered the driver to take us out.

We travel about a half a kilometer (about a half hour) and the driver suddenly stops in the middle of the road and Jesus jumps on, having outflanked us in another of Dr. Paul's ministry vans to catch up with us.

We take off for the hour and a half trip out to Charity City during which nothing much happened.

Unless you count the left rear tire blowing out.

The van was air conditioned. The air conditioner did a pretty good job of keeping up, which is to say the van was not uncomfortable. However, when I get home if the Mullmobile's air conditioner isn't a VERY, VERY LOT BETTER I may drive it through the front window of the dealership.

We also had mosquitoes. We had enough mosquitoes (I admit it. I had to run spell check on mosquitoes to see if there was an "e" or not) to interest Carl Sagan: billions and billions.

There was generalized panic among the Tennessee Eight who have been, as you know, very attuned to the risks of dread diseases on this trip, about being bitten by a mosquito and getting malaria.

We passed around my bottle of "OFF!" which I had purchased at the Wal-Mart instead of the Glock-9 that I really wanted. Judging from the size of some of these mosquitoes, them versus a Glock would have been a pretty fair fight.

We celebrated with high fives when we wrestled the last of them to the floor of the van and made the vehicle safe for Christianity once again.

Anyway we're about an hour into our journey, exclaiming on the numbers of squatter's villages on the side of the road, the number of ox carts, the number of Indians generally, and just about anything else which was different from either life in Tennessee or, to be honest (for the first time in this entire report) Alexandria, Virginia.

The way driving is done on two-lane roads is this: You honk your horn in your underpowered vehicle to let the guy driving the underpowered vehicle in front of you that you want to pass. He ignores you. You move to your right (remember we are driving under British rules) and attempt to pass anyway.

If the vehicle coming at you is smaller (a motorcycle, a motor scooter, or a three-wheeled jitney) then you keep passing and the other guy has to move off the road if necessary to avoid you. If the vehicle approaching you is larger than you are (a bus or a truck) then you SHOULD pull back into your lane.

But you don't.

What you do is floor it and hope you can get past the guy in front of you before you become as a mosquito on the windshield of the vehicle approaching.

More than once I heard a member of the Tennessee Eight mutter "JEEZus Christ!" about which, I said they had an advantage because they could claim they were just muttering a prayer. I tried "Holy Moses" but it didn't give me the same feeling as some of the other, much more widely used phrases which include the word "holy" seem to do. "Holy Kamoley," would be an example.

Where was I? Oh yes, and suddenly there is a sound like gunfire against the side of the van and the driver begins to swerve dangerously - as opposing to the NON-dangerous swerving disguised as passing described above.

We slid to a halt next to a rice paddy and we got out to look at the damage. We were at once relieved that we had NOT been shot at, and disturbed that the tread had completely separated from the casing and was lying in the road some 50 yards behind us.

In the way of American males everywhere, the nine of us stood around, arms akimbo, talking tire stuff.

"Yep, she separated from the casing all right."

"Yep, lucky we weren't trying to pass one of those trucks." Actually that was NOT what the guy said. What he said was "God was really looking out for us for having this happen when we weren't trying to pass one of those trucks."

In this case I agreed with him. And Him.

Two young boys pulled up on a bicycle and immediately began to help get the jack out of the back, run back to pick up the tread, pull the hub cap off and the like.

They couldn't figure out where the jack went so one of the boys crawled under the van and put it directly under the axle. I couldn't watch.

One guy suggested they might be able to repair the tire. I said there wasn't enough Elmer's glue in all India to stick that tread back on the tire again. I had seen a lot of the coverage of the Firestone tire deal so I was a modified expert on tire construction.

To my absolute shock the spare tire had air in it and after a half our of tugging, pulling, jacking and dropping, the new - Now. The use of the adjective "new" in this instance is relative. Relative? Einstein couldn't get to the relativity of the word "new" to describe this tire - tire was in place, we loaded up and started on down the trail.

At one point someone asked Jesus what the building codes were with regard to earthquakes.

"Building codes?" I asked. "Here's the building code: If it doesn't fall down when people move in, it passes."

Another person asked we were south of the equator in this part of India.

"No," I said.

"What part of India IS south of the equator?" he asked.

"No part."

A third guy asked how close we were to China.

"Right next door if you include Tibet," I say.

"And are we close to Africa?"

"Yes, in the sense that it is closer to Africa than it is to, say, the Eagle Nebula. There is the Persian Gulf, all of the Middle East, and the Red Sea between us and Africa. And that's at the northern end."

Thus ended the geography lesson.

Nothing much else happened on the rest of the way to Charity City, if you don't count the SECOND tire blowing out.

Our driver was obviously not comfortable with the spare. That is to say, before the first flat he was passing, or trying to pass, anything not airborne. After we put on the spare he was barely going around ox carts.

Sure enough, another rifle shot, another swerve, and we took up our standard tire-looking-at position. Semi-circle, hands on hips, looking at the flat.

I should note that I was sitting directly over this left rear tire the whole time and there was SOME suggestion that if I had accepted Jesus as my personal savior this probably would not have happened and, indeed, might be a sign that I really should change my position on this matter.

I suppose, if you go on a trip with eight high school basketball coaches you are not likely to have lengthy discussions about the state of humanity in novels by Camus as opposed to the neo-classical theoreticians of the late 18th century. You are going to get a lot of discussions about … basketball.

If you travel with eight preachers, guess what all the discussion was about. Kee-rect.

Jesus.

Not only that, but these guys saw me much the same way a group of big cats looks upon a fat, middle aged gazelle. Easy pickings.

One by one they took their shot at me. One by one I explained they had about the same chance of converting me to Christianity as I had convincing James Carville that he should manage George W.'s re-election campaign.

I don't blame them for trying, but it did get a bit tiresome. More than a bit. By the end of our time together I had to explain to, I believe, four of the eight that they were getting on my nerves and they should just cut it out.

To my credit, I did that without swearing at them at all. I think.

Three of our number continued the final three-or-so kilometers to Charity City in a three-wheeled jitney and sent an old four-door sedan to rescue the remainder of us.

When we got to Charity City, I was elated. My faith in Dr. K.A. Paul was, it turned out, fully justified. They are building a center with classrooms, dormitories, an infirmary, play areas, a mess hall, assembly hall, and administration building which will, when it is completed in about 45 days, a thousand children. They had about 120 youngsters in-house on the day we visited. It is impossible to know how much was show biz, and how much is regular activities, but the children were all clean, their clothes were clean, they looked happy, they sang, and clapped, and smiled.

I, because I am SUCH a tough guy, went around the corner of a building and cried.

After we visited with the children the chief engineer took us on a tour. There are bars on the windows of the rooms which will be the dorms.

One of our number asked me why they needed bars to keep the kids in.

"I don't think they are there to keep the children in. They are there to keep bad guys out. People steal children here."

In fact there had been big news in the papers about the arrest of an upper class woman - actually the news was that she had been allowed to turn herself in - who is accused of running a child-theft ring.

When we got to the dining hall the children were sitting on the floor eating fairly large portions of food from metal plates. Again, this might have been show biz, but they didn't look undernourished so I suspect this was a typical meal.

After about an hour two SUVs from Hyderabad showed up to ferry us back to town. We said our thank you's and piled in.

By three-thirty we were back at the hotel, none the worse for wear, but greatly encouraged by our look at the orphanage.

= = =

That night I decided to skip the third rally. I could get the crowd estimate from the Tennessee Eight and I needed to write Monday's column (which didn't get sent until Wednesday, anyway.)

I offered to find a restaurant out of the hotel at which we could have dinner. After some discussion Chinese food was offered as a compromise and accepted by consensus.

They left, I got the name of a restaurant, the "Mainland China" not very far away and had the hotel manager book a table for 10:00 pm.

At 10:15 they pull up in front of the hotel and, in the end, only four of us made the trip. The only reason I make a point about this outing is the was the only time I had to cross a street.

First of all, being an American, my instinct is to look to my left first expecting to see cars coming from that direction. That is not a good thing to do.

Second of all, in most societies pedestrians have a reasonable expectation that motorists will go to great lengths to avoid hitting them. That is not a good thing to do, either.

The secret is to run the same way they drive. Darting in and out.

You have seen me. I wasn't that good a darter in my darting days. I don't do darting now, at all.

The other three guys navigated the four lane road pretty easily, I thought. Too easily. Maybe they had an angel on their shoulders or something. I don't know.

Anyway I got halfway across the street and got stuck in the middle. Of the street. There is no median strip. If there had been a median strip the drivers would have treated it just like another lane anyway.

I felt like I was in a Monty Python skit. Cars, bikes, and those damnable three-wheeled things honking at me and using me for target practice got pretty darned old pretty darned fast, I'll tell you.

My colleagues, expressing something less than Christian charity and something more like high school boys pointing and laughing did not help the situation.

Finally. FINALLY there was a break in the traffic coming from my right and I made it to the other side.

I may have mumbled something about getting over the River Jordan being easier, but I don't exactly remember now.

Next: Mahatma's Revenge and the trip home.