26 July 2007

From Dani Beekman

Hello everyone. We had quite the eventful day yesterday, I thought it was worth sharing. We are in Tirupati and we traveled to Sri Kalahasti for classes. We were hanging out in someone's house working on our craft. We of course gathered a crowd. There were about 8 women outside of the door just watching us. They motioned to Danielle and were pointing to their sarees. We didn't have sarrees. They giggled. They left and came back with pink sparkly bangles. Yes, pink AND sparkly. They told us to put them on our hands. So I did. Danielle couldn't get them on. They found some that fit Danielle and they were very excited. They came back a little bit later and they put jasmine in our hair it was so great. I think they felt bad for us. I must admit we probably do look kind of sad. At VBS that afternoon, everything was going as well as it could. We finished our lessons and the song and we just handed out the pens. We had VBS in the back street. There was a cow that had been wandering around during the whole thing. He wasn't a huge cow, but he had big horns. The cow got spooked and decided that he needed to go through the children. So he did. I had no idea what was going on. Children were jumping and screaming. There was a little girl that was stuck in between the cow's horns. A guy plucked her out. Lee, out of instinct, grabbed the bull by the horns. About 5 men also jumped on the cow and they got it out of there. I'm pretty sure that I witnessed a miracle last night. No one got hurt from the cow. One girl was crying because her foot hurt, but she was walking at the end. It was pretty much chaos after the cow. We decided it would be best if we just left. We got in the vehicle and we were discussing what had just happened.

We got stuck in traffic because there was a political demonstration. Some men were protesting congress. They had flags and were shouting and they were burning effigies. It was pretty intense. They marched past our car and Pastor chanted, "Congress, congress." Our driver was very concerned for our well being and told him, "No, no." There was an article in the paper this morning saying that they arrested some of those men. Like I said, it really is a miracle that we are all doing so well. We have definitely been able to see the hand of the Lord in everything that has happened.

Thank you all for your continued prayers.