Waldron Mission Fund

 

Under the oversight of the elders of the Crossville church of Christ, PO Box 211, Crossville, TN 38557

 

Vol. 41                                                                        June 2007                                                                                   No. 6

A cyclone opens doors

 

FRIDAY, May 18 thru SATURDAY, May 26

 

In mid-May a vicious storm came off the Bay of Bengal, swept over Bangladesh and slammed into the hills of Meghalaya and destroyed or partially damaged 139 houses in an area where the Bo-rim-bong church of Christ is located.  The local brethren wanted to help and they were encouraged by the church at Chestnut Mountain, GA where Billy Simmons is an elder.  The church did so by sending $1,200.  From our work fund in Crossville we added $1,000 to that.  Billy was at the time in Shillong teaching in the Bible School, where he had been for a month having come over at the beginning of April.  When the funds came the brethren bought 139 sacks of rice and an equal number of sacks of other food and household needs; and the student preachers literally scaled mountain tops to deliver them.  At the same time they were passing out tracts and teaching the people.

 

It had been my intention to be in Shillong before brother Simmons left, but I was not able to leave the States until Friday, May 18th.  In the meantime he returned to the States on May the 14th.  My own purpose for going to Shillong was to teach the selection class for the new students.  On the evening of the 18th when I flew out of Atlanta, Harrison, a grandson, who is fourteen, accompanied me.  His parents are our son, Philip and his wife, Donna.  Harrison stayed with me until June 1st.  We were in Delhi by Saturday evening (19th) and worshipped with the church where brother Sunny David preaches on the Lord’s Day.

 

From Delhi we flew on Sunday afternoon (20th) about 900 miles east to the city of Guwahati, in the state of Assam, where we spent the night in a very nice hotel, the Atithi, for $50.  On Monday the 21st a car picked us up at 5:50 a.m.; we ate breakfast at a small roadside restaurant enroute and were in Shillong by 8:50 a.m.  There were fifteen new students.  These I combined with the ten students presently enrolled and spent the week  teaching them the study book: Introduction To Faith, which is the course on Biblical fundamentals that is taught to all our incoming students around the country.  We covered 50 questions per day with three memory verses and a daily quiz, which was followed by a final exam over all two hundred questions on Saturday the 26th.  All but one student passed.  Of the 24 now enrolled in the school there are twenty different languages among them.  Had we counted English and Spanish that number would have been 22.  Harrison speaks Spanish as well as English.  He also took the course and made 85 on his final.

 

On Saturday afternoon the 26th he and I went with four students about thirty miles from Shillong to the district where the cyclone had struck.  The reason we did not take all the students is that they do not speak the local people’s languages, which are two:  Kasi and Karbi.  Two of the new students  speak the latter tongue thus Harrison and I went with them to visit among their people.  The people are extremely poor and literally live on hillsides and mountain tops, yet I can say after working with foreign people for forty years in a dozen countries that I have never met such friendly people.  They have beautiful brown skin and round faces with open and happy smiles.  Often they would walk out onto the pathway to meet and greet us.

 

The older of the two Karbi students, Jiting, was able to preach in two places.  At one he taught a man who serves the community as a school teacher.  The lesson, which was about the Lord’s church from Matthew 16:18-19, was delivered in the open air in front of the school teacher’s home.  After a half hour of preaching the teacher walked with us as we went further up the mountain to other homes, one of which was that of an elderly Hindu man.  When we arrived at his house the school teacher said to Jiting, “Are you going to preach to him what you preached to me?”  He did, along with speaking of salvation in Christ.  You would have been amazed as I was to hear the old man exclaim as he heard the gospel message.  You might have thought that someone was saying “amen” to a preacher in the old south.  The students are to go back each Saturday.  Garry Jones of Clinton, TN was at the building when we returned to Shillong that evening.  This brother, who has been a great help in this work of training preachers in time past in Nepal and Northeast India, as he was able, has now committed himself to work fulltime with us.

 

SUNDAY, May 27 thru SATURDAY, June 2

 

On this Sunday morning I preached for the church (English) that meets in the school building, then at 1:00 p.m. I preached for the church that uses Hindi in its services.  My interpreter was brother Prakash, who is one of the students.  It was he who began this congregation about three months ago after baptizing nineteen people.  Others have obeyed the gospel since.

 

Harrison and I were scheduled to leave Shillong on Monday (28th) in order to fly to upstate Assam where the Assam Bible School (ABS) is located in the city of Dibrugarh.  The week of May 14-19 brothers Tifusa and Tang Kam, who conduct ABS, held a selection class in Hindi and had 17 brothers to pass.  My purpose in going there was to interview them.  But our plans had to be changed due to a “bundh” being declared for the 28th in the area by a militant faction, which seeks to harass and embarrass the government.  There is much violence and unrest in the Northeast even to the extent that the army bearing rifles and submachine guns has to be very visible in the cities and towns.  The word “bundh” is pronounced “bun” and means “ban.”  The groups which call them do so to frustrate the government by frightening owners of shops and businesses into closing and to keep every car and other means of transportation off the road.  Thus we were forced to return to Guwahati on Sunday afternoon and again got a room at the Atithi; where we spent Monday due to the “bundh.”  This meant we lost a day on our planned trip to Dibrugarh.

 

We were able to fly on Tuesday the four hundred miles to upper Assam where we met the eighteen new students that had sat for the selection class in Hindi.  This school is actually made up of brethren from another state, Arunachal.  The reason ABS is in Assam is due to the unrest caused by militants in that state, which makes it very difficult for me to get permission to go there as a foreigner.

 

Of the eighteen new students thirteen of them speak the same language, Lisu, and come from one congregation in Arunachal.  Lisu has many words that sound like Chinese and, in fact, the state joins hard to China.  To get to Dibrugarh these brothers had to walk for four days.  There are very few roads in the state and these brethren live many miles from even a jeep road.  Thus after consulting with brothers Tifusa and Tang Kam it was decide that we would simply supply two teachers to the church in that village and let them conduct the school of preaching in their own building.

 

There are many more things that I would like to say but space restrains me, but I will mention that I put Harrison in the hands of the KLM (airlines) staff on Friday the 1st and he was met in Atlanta on Saturday afternoon by Phil, Donna and his sister, Laura.  On the same day I met brother Miguel Arroyo of Mexico, who came over to teach for us in Tamil Nadu.

 

By God’s grace and through your zeal for the cause of His Son we now have twelve intensive Bible Training Schools in four states.  They are: 1. Chennai, Tamil Nadu (TN) - 32 (a night school in a city of nine million).  2.  Arakkonam, TN—66 (a three-year school of preaching (SOP) for married men).  3.  Pudukkottai, TN—68 (A Bible training school and home for the blind and deaf).  4.  Trichy, TN—9 ( a one-year SOP for married men).  5.  Madurai, TN - 20 (a one-year SOP for married men).  6.  Dindigul, TN—54 (a three-year SOP for married men).  7.  Coimbatore, TN  - 40 (a two-year SOP for single men).  8.  Coimbatore, TN—75  (an intensive Bible training school for single women).  9.  Palakad, Kerala—84 (a three-year SOP for married men).  10.  Shillong, Meghalaya—24 (a two-year SOP).  11.  Dibrugarh, Assam—10 (a two-year SOP).  12.  There are another 13 brothers from Ghandigram, Arunachal.  These brothers have qualified, but details await the actual place they will be studying.  Total enrollment—495.  It takes on average $60 a month to support a student, so you can see the work that is cut out for us in this school year.  May God ever bless you for your part in this work of faith and labor of love.

 

With love to all,

 

 

 

Jim E. Waldron