After Reverend Axel Gehrmann’s visit to India in 2003 we became interested in supporting a church in the Khasi Hills, India. The town is called Nongtalang and is located in Meghalaya in Eastern India, neighboring the Indian state of Assam and bordering Bangladesh. Many people in this area of India were neither firmly Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist on their first contact with Unitarianism, which thus took root there. Our partner church in Hungary was working on unimaginably bare-bones support when we first started working with them, and the situation is just starting to improve a bit. The needs of the church in India are even more stark.
The partnership with Nongtalang is going very well, and the congregation there is very appreciative of our efforts. We are exchanging songs, letters, and photographs. At our partner church Sunday in December 2006 we sang “Spirit of Life” in the the tribal language of the Khasi Hills, which was a spiritual experience. The congregation also admired a beautiful Indian dance presented by Lalita Kalita. For Christmas last year, the committee send cards with pictures of our R.E. children to both partner churches. The cards were signed by the members of our congregation. For the upcoming Easter, the committee is sending cards and pictures of the committee members to both partner churches.
Lalita Kalita’s Visit to our UU Partner Church in Nongtalang, India:
Recently Lalita went to visit her family in Assam, a state in the northeast corner of India. While she was there she made a trip to our partner church in the small village of Nongtalang which is located in the nearby mountainous state of Meghalaya. She started out in Shillong, the capitol of Meghalaya, and went with a driver to the Unitarian Church District Headquarters in Jowai. Helpme Mohrmen, our primary UU contact in India, and his family live in Jowai which has a beautiful Unitarian church and a Unitarian high school. Lalita visited both the church and the school. She met Helpme’s daughter who attends the Unitarian school.
From Jowai, Lalita and her driver continued on to Nongtalang, a distance of about 30 kilometers. The road they took is also the main route to the Bangladesh border so it was in good condition. The landscape was beautiful. In this area there are operating gold mines and uranium mines.
Although we think of Nongtalang as being in the Khasi Hills it is actually in the neighboring district known as the Jaintia Hills. The people of Nongtalang are ethnically part of the Jaintia tribes. Jaintia people have a matrilineal line of descent and inheritance. While in Nongtalang, Lalita visited the most prominent person in the village who was a Unitarian and a woman. Nongtalang is a small village of about 1,000 people. There are no stores there. Villagers travel about half an hour to another village for a store. There is public transportation called Dawki that connects the villages.
Lalita visited the small Unitarian school in Nongtalang. It has grades 1 through 5 and is open to all children in the village, not just Unitarians. The younger kids do not know English, but the older ones do. All the kids wear uniforms which is a tradition throughout India. The children seem very interested in learning, but the families lack the funds to send them to better schools. Lalita noted that there is an extra room in the school where they could start a library, possibly a project that our congregation could support. We could also sponsor an educational trip to Shillong for the village children at a cost of less than $200.
The next stop was the small Unitarian church.There are about 20 families in the congregation. Right now they have only simple benches in the church, but they are working on building pews using funds provided by our congregation. Lalita noticed that the tin roof was leaking and was really in such bad shape that it should be replaced. The concrete fence around the church was also in need of repair. Churches in this part of India do not have western style bell towers, but the Unitarian churches do have the chalice symbol painted in gold on the exterior. Helpme visits the Nongtalang congregation once a month for a church service.The rest of the time the services are lay-led. Helpme initiated an interfaith dialogue in Nongtalang, but members from the Presbyterian Church and the Mosque did not attend.
Lalita discovered that the local hospital is actually a small clinic without nursing staff. Sometimes there is a visiting nurse or doctor. A donation of $200 would support training at the nursing school in Jowai for a person from Nongtalang. In Nongtalang, breakfast is usually white bread and butter. A good meal is rice with fried pork. Villagers keep pigs, but vegetables are purchased. They do not grow well in this area where there is very little topsoil.
Village farmers do grow beetle vines and harvest the nuts and leaves. This seems to be the only plant that will grow here. Beetle nuts are fermented, then cut and dried for export to the rest of India. Offering beetle nuts and leaves is also a tradition of the Jaintias. Members of the Nongtalang congregation could use a concrete tank to ferment beetle nuts. They would use the tank themselves and rent it to others in the village, which would give them more income.