Sari Time

Up late this morning which was rather nice, we went first to Frederick and Susie's house to hand over my piece for the Cathedral so Frederick could prepare a translation. I was pleased when he said 'Oh good you have used Matthew's Gospel, I have used John.' he seemed happy with what I had done which is a relief. Maggie then went over a song to teach tomorrow. The rain continues! The picture of a cow and her calf is outside our house, she seems to like lying in the centre of the crossroads of which we stand on one corner. the calf is the smallest I have ever seen here or in the UK. It has been about for a week now and the cow is just so loving towards it, tending it really carefully. She enjoyed the apple core I took to her yesterday and hand fed her she is very placid. I know the second picture is not great, but you can see the size of the calf next to one of the local dogs which are much smaller than a lab. We were home in time to get ready to go out with our auto boy, Raja, he is an English speaker which is great and has recently (10 months ago) become Christian, he is extremely nice and I had arranged that he take us out for the afternoon in his Auto to show Maggie all the sights of Tirunelvelli. The river is in flood again and even higher than last time, even the locals are commenting on it. Those temples are almost fully under water now.. The weather was not really suitable for sight seeing though and so we went shopping.Maggie had a great time in Pothy's, the picture shows the entrance hall and a statue of Ganesh. A reminder that if you click on the pictures, a full screen version will open in a separate window.

I bought some fabric to have made into blouses for back home. We next went to the Temple and spent 2 hours wandering around, no guide which actually made it easier to enjoy the atmosphere. We wandered very freely, the Temple here covers 14 acres It is not as majestic as Madurai, but very old. Sadly no photos allowed. We bumped into the German group we met at Bishop Sargent the other day too. We were blessed by the elephant, then when we rounded a corner it was having its feed, a man was positioned underneath the elephant with a bucket and was catching its pee. Another man then transferred some of the urine to a utensil, put on the lid and left the building. We didn't have the nerve to ask what he was going to do with it! As the elephant was there though as an earthly representation of Ganesh, I presume that the stuff has some special qualities. The whole temple was a very worshipful place today, every so often we would hear chants from speakers which filled the place with sound. There were worshippers of all ages making Puja and showing respect to various images and statues. We met a proud grandmother bearing her 20 day old grandson accompanied by grandfather and the proud parents, taking the baby to be presented for the first time, young girls and boys with newly shaven heads and several monks and priests. One hall had musical pillars, if you rapped on the pillars with your knuckles, and put your ear to them, they had a musical note, there were enough of them to make a pipe organ. We were heading for the entrance, when we heard some wonderful music, a man beckoned us and we were allowed into Siva's shrine which is normally closed to non-Hindus. The sound came from a drummer and a player of a reed wind instrument which had wonderful tone. After the obligatory anointing with scented ash...which closely resembled talcum powder, we left. Because of the rain, the temple was ankle deep in water in places, by the time we got back to our shoes which were left outside our feet were filthy! Back to the auto - a quick visit to the tank to see the pelicans. The pictures are a view of the temple entrance from the road into town and then a beautiful cloud formation over the town tank, which is a lake sadly beginning to fill with water hyacinth. If you look closely in the enlarged version you'll see a pelican gliding on the water.

On next to the government shop which sells local made craft goods and is infested with mosquitoes as I soon found out. A little shopping then back home, we had been out for 6 and a half hours. When we asked Raja how much we owed him, he asked for 250 rupees, about £3. We doubled that and thanked him very much. He is coming to pick us up for Church tomorrow evening and I asked him if he would like to come to the service, I offered to pay for his waiting time in the auto, so that he didn't feel he was losing money. Waiting time is 35 paise (100 paise to the rupee) per 10 minutes. To which he replied that he had already planned to come with us to the service which was nice. He'll have to sit on the mens side of the church, while we will be the honoured guests at the front I'm afraid.
We have an early Easter service tomorrow at 7.45am so it's an early night for us tonight we hope.

Well Maggie and I were up at 6.30am for our Good Friday service at 7.45, auto came on time too so that was good. We had 3 hours with 7 different people speaking on the last words, each a little longer than the one before although the pastor at the end thanked them for staying within their allotted time slots. One of the difficult things here is that when Indian people are speaking English, or reading from a script then punctuation goes out of the window... in fact any sort of pause and that combined with the dodgy, high volume sound system distorted by the constant whirr of ceiling fans (there are about 50 in church) can make them virtually unintelligible! Some were good and clear others less so. We got back home through the continuing torrential rain, not much fun in an open sided auto when the puddles come up almost to the edge of the doors.
This afternoon we went to visit Revd Frederick at the Cathedral,he is the new provost. He has asked us if we will go to evensong on Easter Sunday at the cathedral and has asked Maggie to play her flute and me to give the Easter message (preach) which is an incredible honour and rather daunting they expect 3-400 people. Frederick will do a simultaneous translation into Tamil, which will probably take at least half as much time again as the English version as Tamil is rather a long winded language.
From the Cathedral we braved the weather again and went into Junction for our dinner to MH restaurant, we had Biryani which was very nice too! Coming home the rain picked up again and our usual auto was busy so we got one from by the bus stand. A very young boy who didn't seem to know the way to where we were going - it is rather a long way out to Perumalpuram!
All went well till we got just over half way, the rain was very bad and visibility poor. The road surface is breaking up badly under the weather conditions and huge pot holes appearing. All of a sudden there was a loud bang and the auto swayed from side to side and came to a halt in the middle of the road. I thought at first we had hit a vehicle, but it had been a pot hole, as autos have a single front wheel, when it had gone into the hole (about 10 inches deep), it had damaged the axle, our speed had taken us out of the hole again. The auto had rocked violently side to side and the boy did really well to have kept control and stopped it rolling over which would have been really serious form our point of view, as it was we were just shaken. The boy hopped out and tried to push us to the side of the road, he was really unhappy about us getting out in the traffic, but we actually felt safer once we had got ourselves out of the auto and to the side of the road. A 4 by 4 pulled along side and the driver wound down his window to get a better look, so I asked him if he would help and he said 'No' and drove off! Obviously disappointed that there were no casualties we thought. Another auto came and helped get ours to the verge, he then managed to start up again and tried to drive but it was obvious all was not well so we asked him to stop, gave him double the fare and got into an auto which was passing. I felt so very sorry for the boy, he was only young and did really well, but obviously was going to have a hefty repair bill as well as being at the wrong end of town. I think he was ready to cry. We made it home safely and after a cup of tea, I spent the evening writing my message for the cathedral service.