Somewhere Over The Rainbow - or right in the middle.

It’s not often we think about what a blessing colour is. It really is everywhere, so it’s easy to take it for granted. And if I have given it more than a moments’ thought, I sound like I’m giving myself a Sunday School lesson “God made rainbows and pretty flowers.” Living in Dhaka and my short time in India has given me a whole new appreciation for the wonder of colour. Colour is flaunted here in free abandon. It is splashed across anything and everything and it is incredibly beautiful. My favourites are the clothes and the rickshaws. Rickshaws are elaborately hand painted with scenes of gardens, waterfalls or a handrawn portrait of a Bollywood actor. Yesterday I bought an anklet made of little coloured beads and tinkling multi-colour bells. I appreciated the little tag attached – “ The people and culture of Bangladesh are vibrant. Our journey is to keep that alive and to bring back the beauty of human touch to our lives... Let’s walk in harmony towards a colourful, beautiful Bangladesh”.

To wear jewellery here is to ‘adorn yourself’ with ‘ornaments’. I love that you can jingle from your wrists, ankles and/or ears and no-one bats an eyelid. If I see a woman outfitted in a sari, with all her jewellery on, I admire her like a 3 year old admires a bride and aspires to one day be a princess herself. Similarly, if I see a lady who has been working hard all day, her sari is old, faded, torn, yet to me it is stunning. It speaks of who she is and where she has been.

Imagine for a minute a world without colour. But not for too long or you might throw up. It’s monochromatic, horrible and immediately depressing. There is little room for expression and creativity. Being green with envy, feeling blue or being tickled pink is much more descriptive than being jealous, sad or happy. Imagine not having freedom to express your taste by choosing the colours you wear. It would be like wearing a uniform everyday of your life!

Of course there is potential for tension here. We are clearly warned against beauty coming from our outward adornments. And with outward beauty defined and worshipped by media and society we absolutely need to guard against placing value on people and ourselves according to perceived ‘beauty’. But to cherish and value the inner beauty that God adorns us with is not to dismiss colour and beauty and pleasing asthetic. After all, God did make rainbows and pretty flowers. Let’s remember that we are made in the image of our creator. Let us create!

Who do you think you are?

I have a memory of a little girl, maybe about 7 years old, begging from us as we walked down a relatively quite Kolkata street. She walked along beside us for a little while. As I thought about her afterwards, I wondered if she knew that there were other boys and girls that didn’t grow up begging, that although it is the norm, it is not normal. It’s not the way the world is supposed to be. And then I realised, of course she knew that, she was looking at their parents.


She knew who to ask for money and who was worth chasing down the street. The white skinned couple. The “bideshis” (foreigners.) So often I question myself – why am I even bothering? Who am I to relocate into a poor neighbourhood with grandiose, idealistic, vague notions of helping? What do I know about community development, poverty relief, articulating my faith in a King who will restore His earth and His people. But as I see myself more as a citizen of His, having global neighbours, I begin to understand that the real question is ‘who am I not to help?’

The buzz words in community development, poverty relief and cross cultural servanthood are things like ‘contextualisation’, ‘empowerment’ with concepts reeling from mistakes made in the past by foreigners coming into a community, emparting their ‘knowledge’ and all-powerful dollar and creating a group of people, who by the end of the process look just like them, quite often with no real long term solution. This of course is a good thing. We must battle against old-school ways of thinking. But when I begin to realise the complexity of what lies ahead of me, I find myself shrinking back. Surely I will make a thousand mistakes. Step on cultural toes. Perhaps leave my neighbours even worse off than when I came? Even as we get so close to heading into India, I am plagued by questions. ‘What is the role of a foreigner in a country like India?’ ‘Shouldn’t development and gospel application be done by those who know it best – Indians?” “What about the extremely poor in my home country?” The conditions of some of the Aboriginal Settlements are often compared to the slums of India. The obvious answer is ‘yes, of course Bengalis need to be attending to their own neighbours .’ Ideally, bideshis wouldn’t be needed at all. However, we live in this age where God has begun a great work to restore His earth and this work is not yet complete. The world is not an ideal place. It is within my physical, emotional and spiritual means to provide immediate relief, at least to that one beggar girl if that is what is truly needed. It is within my means to be used within a longer term solution. I’m not exactly sure what is needed yet. What I do know is that I don’t have a right not to be involved.