Namaste! नमस्ते

(Hindi Greeting)

Next Saturday is the big day.  We fly out of London Heathrow to Patna, India and travel from there to a small village to the site where we will be designing an outreach center.  Our team is made up of five professionals and three interns from the US and the UK.

Bihar (in red), where our site is located, is the district of India, sort of like a US state, that is one of the poorest areas of india.  It is located in the Northeast of India, not far from Bangladesh and Nepal. The Ganges River runs through it and life revolves around the rainy flood season and the dry season. With 5 percent of India's total land area, it contains 10 percent of the total population. Only about one-eighth of Bihar's population lives in urban areas, making the state one of the least urbanized in India. Most of the population is engaged in agriculture.   Bihar has one of the lowest literacy rates among Indian states (below 40 percent).  The native language to 4/5 of the people is Hindi. The predominant religion is Hinduism, accounting for 83 percent of the popluation, while Islam accounts for about 17 percent.  Bihar also claims the birthplace of Buddhism and is an important site for the religion of Jainism.  Less than 1 percent of Bihar's population is Christian.

The ministry we are designing this outreach center for has the vision of bringing a church plant to each village in the Bihar district! Which is quite an undertaking knowing that most the population is rural.  However, they are having great success and are now in need of a big space in which to hold training for their leaders and a small bible school and short term housing for missionaries.  That is where eMi comes in! We are going to design an outreach center for them that will give them a home base for the amazing work they are doing throughout all of Bihar.  Our hope is that we can do most of the conceptual design work in the two weeks that we are there in India with the ministry at hand.  Then when we come back to the UK it will be hammering out details and construction drawings.

Bihar has traditionally been known as the graveyard of missions since the arrival of the first Baptist missionaries in 1792. Despite over 200 years of missionary endeavors, Bihar's 90 million people are living in over 40,000 villages without a church. The most recent movement of God through BORN (Bihar Out Reach Network) which is a network of mission agencies and churches to penetrate Bihar with the gospel and to plant churches is slowly turning the graveyard into a vineyard. But much remains to be done.

 http://www.bornbihar.net/

So off I go. 

I am super excited to be designing rather just messing with CAD drawings! also excited for Chai! and to experience a Diwali celebration (the festival of lights and the triumph of good over evil)!

Alvida!   अलविदा।

If you could please pray for health and safety of our project team as well as for the completion of a functional and affordable design for the BORN Ministry while we are away that would be most appreciated!