Action-Man, 5 July, Nepal

This is a long bus to Kathmandu. Our bus driver seems petulant, but I can't know for sure, because I haven't even seen his face He's behind a glass compartment. Three conductors stand in the doorway. One collects money and one is in charge of starting and stopping. He hits the side of the bus and presses a buzzer. The third looks like the apprentice. The doormen balance themselves on metal bars, and one of them pulled back a tottering old man from falling out of the open door.

Drew and I sprinted out of the door of our hotel at the Nepal border this morning across a puddled, muddied bus station parking lot and took hold of the bus as it pulled out. It rained for the first time on our trip last night. We've been driving for many hours, and we are stopping too much. It wouldn't be so bad, if it didn't get so hot and sticky as soon as the bus stops. The windows are small and I am wrestling with the passenger ahead to divide the glass evenly. These seats aren't designed for long legs and high heads. The ceiling is low and when the boy ahead of me reclines his seat, the back threatens to crack my knee-caps.

A comatose gentleman with pursed lips and a faint patch of mustache and fez is next to a forlorn man with a thick purple turban. The second man likes to stretch out on the floor of the aisle. Ahead of him is a blind man with a hooked wooden cane. Many of the men have long pinky nails and small pony tails that look like rodent tails. At the last stop, a group of boys my age swept the dirt on the shoulder of the road with the heads of push brooms. Drew and I wonder if it isn't totally useless work

The demographer across the aisle says that there are 25 million people in Nepal. Drew says the language is beginning to sound more like Chinese. Faces are changing. Our innkeeper last night looked distinctly Korean. I see some Asian faces, like the doorman apprentice ahead, and I see some Indian faces.

Action-Man, 4 July, northern India

East now by bus from Delhi, we draw near the mountains. The Himalayas promise to be unlike anything I’ve seen before. Our bus driver is a hoot. Before we took off from Delhi, he wrapped a royal red seat cover around his throne and instructed us in a strained Indian voice. Then, he pulled out his Bedouin bag and fingered through some dusty tapes inside. All the hits, I’m sure. On his tray table he stacked them one by one. From there, he chooses them knowingly and pops them into the deck.

Mammoth-like, our bus rumbles through the streets, packed with people. Frequent ructions break out on board when hawkers climb on without paying. One boy flourishes a pail of cucumbers. Another boy auctions off an anatomy book. A third has fresh coconut slices.

The Indians make the most of their two-lane roads, turning them into three, four, even five lanes. Motorcycles and bicycle rickshaws squeeze through any open holes. Three-wheeled “autotaxis” nose in from intersecting lanes. Holy cows wander aimlessly, untouched.

Our driver has many horns. He uses the standard honk with mopedders and other small fish. Other toots come from buttons and wires below the wheel—general warnings to bigger trucks and jeeps. Sometimes I think he sounds them for fun; no one is near. It’s a kind of game. But then there’s the regal alarm siren. It is saved for passing in the opposite lane. Two oncoming buses bear down on each other, careening closer and closer, each roaring forth in a polyphonic spree. Then they swerve at the last second, clearing each other by centimeters.

We’re passing straw huts and fields of crops now. Shirtless children squat by the roadside. Cows bathe in muddy waters. Big brick kilns rise across the horizon. The hawkers persist.

Drew

Color-man, 4 July, northern India

We're back on our bus after a ten minute break. The bus driver held up ten fingers and said through a gold-toothed grin, "Tea and toilet." So for 24 rupees, Drew and I bought two cokes, and for 25 rupees, a plate of gepato (flat bread) and two bowls of spicy sauce. One sauce was thin, one thick. A crowd of ten or fifteen watched intently from the first dip of gepato to the last sip of coke.

Most of you Americans, I suppose, are warming up for parades and barbeques and fireworks for the 4th of July. Truly, America is worthy of great praise and celebration. I am looking expectantly for some sign of the Himalayan Mountains, some dark outline at least. Seeing all the idle men on the roadside makes me think of Queequeg in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. He is a cannibal from a Pacific island, who tells his friend Ishamael about kings and chiefs in his own country who fatten lazy men of the "lower order" for ottomans and chairs. To furnish a house, they only had to "buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them around in the piers and alcoves."

Looking out the window, I wonder if the British cut through the jungle and layed this road from Delhi to Nepal. On the plane from Jordan to India, we met a professor from Calcutta, who boldly denounced British colonialism in India. They came under the pretence of giving to the people of India, he said, but came with ulterior motives. Britain bled the veins of India by taking laborers and material and giving little in return. National healthcare and education during Britain's rule, he noted, were appalling. When I was asked about British colonialism in West Africa, I began to answer by saying, "Well, Africa was primitive and the British . . ." but he interrupted me, saying, "Who defines primitive?" He also said the Africans were only becoming Christians for the soup kitchens and free food.

Gandhi admired Jesus and upheld much of Jesus' teachings, but he never received him as Lord. He couldn't separate Christ from the blood-shedding "Christian" British and their "fat steaks and big beers." After the atomic bombs in Japan, Gandhi decided that the West had completely forfeited their responsibility to lead the world. "Now we must look to the East," Gandhi said, because at every point, he decided, Hinduism was better than Christianity. But what I don't want is people to judge Jesus Christ the Son of God by hyocrites that take his name--not the British, not the American church, not me.

Sam

Thoughts after Europe, Part II

Most people in Europe don’t care about litter. In the past few weeks I’ve seen the thrones of great empires of old scattered with trash. It blows about like autumn leaves in London in Venice. It lies in piles in Rome. These aren’t even third world countries, but the people have lost interest in upkeep. Anyway, they say, other people are hired to pick up trash. Why should they do it?But that kind of mindset is death to a country. It says that as individuals, many of the citizens want little to do with the country’s welfare. “Let the system take care of it.”

In Citizen Soldiers, Stephen Ambrose says that America won WWII because of the efforts and courage of individual soldiers—each man doing the right thing. They won not because of a superior system or smarter leaders, but because each citizen soldier lead with individual initiative.

It takes that kind of mindset to sustain a country. Otherwise, empires decay and fall into ruin. They forget God and trust in a system. Will America follow the course of the world? Great men have lived and died to prevent it. Will death creep in, lulling her to sleep?

Christians should pray—pray for the welfare and preservation of faith in our country. God has blessed America. Will we turn and forget him like the Israelites? There are still millions of Christians in the States. That’s more than most countries can claim. If those millions would turn to God, daily, for his blessing, would he turn his face away? More than that, it is our duty to look to him to set up wise Christian leaders and to preserve his Word among us. Paul urges us in I Timothy that “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are high positions…This is good and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior.”

Drew