Church at Semmadu

Relief Society in Semmadu, India.

Joseph Raju and family: Sister Raju is R.S. President. Joseph was India's first Indian missionary -they have a son serving in India on a mission now.

The couple under the umbrella is India's oldest members of the church in India!!!--and yes, they are husband and wife. This tiny branch has had many General Authorities visit. The primary children came to church 1/2 hour early. They sat with their arms folded in the Chapel for the 1/2 hour and were very reverant. Sister Eichelberger played the keyboard for Sac. Mtg, and the Branch President asked her to bear her testimony and he translated in Tamil.

Baptisms

Maria Sumathi Kristy was baptized by her husband Emmanual Kristy. We were able to help the Elders teach the discussions to Sister Sumathi. She dressed in her very best sari and jewelry for her baptism. The Kristy's were married right after we came to Bangalore. They attended our Family Relations Class and then we were asked to help teach her the discussions.

This is the Baptism of Mark- 16 year and his Mother Maria, Dad-Harry was not baptized that day but he has had the discussions and gave his permission for the baptism of his Wife and Son. The Elders are Garcia and Singh; both elders are from US but Elder Singh is Indian. His grandparents came from India. These are two of the Elders that came to our home on Sundays for lunch. Elder Singh is a Zone leader. We helped teach a couple of the discussions to Mark and Maria. Mark gave his first sacrament meeting talk with a member of the Area Presidency visiting! Maria is taking english lessons from the missionaries and keyboarding from us.

Jayaraj & Srilatha's Wedding reception

For special occasions the women decorate their hands and usually paint up their arms-don't know what it means.

This gal wearing white was i am guesssing like a maid of honor---she escorted through the whole affair, and just us!! treated us like we were extra ordinary guests--or it could have been the looks on our faces of what do we do so we don't do anything wrong :) She was a very wonderful hostess.

Our first wedding reception-Jayaraj is from our branch and he married a girl from Hyderabad 3rd branch. They were married in the church in Hyderabad, then traveled to Hong Kong to be sealed in the temple. Here in India, this is the only way the nation allows the temple marriages to take place. The couple has only 1 week to go after their wedding or they must wait a full year before they can go. Jayaraj is also a Returned Missionary and one of our PEF students. He is studing Hotel Managment/Chef at a very high end school.

The women dressed up big time for the party, but the men did not. At this reception it was all about having a picture with the couple and eating and eating and eating :) Our auto driver said

he knew where the place was---NOT, we drove around and around and around for an hour--oh, well....just another adventure.

This is the bride and groom Jayaraj & Srilatha Muthu

wild boars by river

wild boars

the second time the elephant pretended to attack the jeep. He's so cute and makes the funniest noises.

one massive crocidile. The boat
driver kept moving the boat close to it until it finally got mad and walked off into the water. You can see that he is almost the size of the island he is sunning himself on.

This is the "reason" for a safari--to catch a glimpse of a tiger. It took a boat safari to find this one. Very old momma tiger soaking in the river. Our boat stayed close by until we could flag down all the other tour boats so their people could see this too. On the river safari, we also saw, large siberian cranes, amongst other birds.

mock elephant attack

this was our second day, another jeep safari. This was the excitement on that trip. This teenage male elephant pretended to attack the jeep. Just came close enough to make it exciting. I'm sure he got in trouble that morning and was sent to a different part of the forest to "cool off" and we invaded his privacy.

hello from the forest of Cicada, India। E/S Eichelberger, E/S Asplund, E/S Fairbanks took off for a 3 day adventure to take in a safari. We hired a van and driver and headed south 5 hours from Bangalore. The first day there we took a jeep safari. We drove around the forest looking for any type of wildlife. The first day we saw lots of monkeys, many elephants, spotted & samba deer, penhen & peacocks (India's national bird), mongoose, brain fever bird, ground & wood pecker, wild boars.

hey, everybody i am going to try to keep up with our blog myself. I took 6 tries to get the first picture and tiny paragraph done. Not a lot of things to write the past two weeks. We were mostly stuck in the apt-most of you know that two sundays ago we came home from church to find that the ceiling in the guest bedroom had fallen off and broke all over the room and down the hall. It was 1/8-1 inch thick cement - very heavy-if we had been in that bed we would not be here to tell the tale. Our landlord was very sick (physically!) from this--he couldn't get out of bed for two days it upset him so much. He lives there with his wife and daughter, two married sons and their children also, and one of the original contractors also live there-they worried that this could happen throughout the building-which is only 2 years old. He said they paid extra money to build the building with better materials since it was the family home. We had an independent engineer come (and they had one also). Both engineers felt the other bedroom ceiling could fall also. We had to decide to move or stay and let the bedrooms get repaired. It is soo much work to find a new place, a safe place, decent place, close to church, etc..we like the Muslim owners and they have always been very kind so we chose to stay. They moved us into an adj. apt-so we lived in one, slept in the other (the safest place was to sleep directly under where the ceiling had already fallen). The landlord asked us to stay and watch our belongings during the construction. That put me there 24/7 for over a week. To get all this done in a week is a true miracle in India!!! the owners were in/out of the apt constantly making sure things were done correctly-if not they made the workers start over. Afterwards they said they wised they had done all the ceilings this way-put up false ceilings with sheetrock. Plus we got new paint jobs in the bedrooms-everything got repainted. I was worried how we were going to be unable to help people with employment for so long. Well...that kind of took care of itself also. During this whole time, the internet service was down at the church house. The service center, jack, and SLC worked on it everyday but no success. The minute that the apt was completed and the painters were leaving, jack called from the office and said the internet was working all of a sudden-still do not really know what went wrong there and what worked to fix it!
Yesterday, jack was asked to "bless" a home for a part-member family. She got an "auto" and picked us up at the church house. We rode out into the unknown part of the city-and stopped along the way at one of the roadside stands (where we really shouldn't be eating-for lack of cleanliness :) and tried rice pancakes for breakfast-yum, NO--but...the warm coconut/almond milk is very good. Got to her place and first visited in the neighbor's home, then blessed Sister Chandra's house, then went back to the neighbor's for watermelon (tradition is that on a 1st visit you must get a treat). then we got the auto and rode back to the church. It was an interesting morning. Good experience.

Inside Buddist Temple

hey i'm blogging-only the 6th try and i don't think this is going right. Going to publish it anyway just so i can see what i am doing. stay turn for more. going to write I'm blogging in Tamil. इं ब्लॉग्गिंग.

more of Sri Lanka

ஹே எவேர்யோனே இ அம் ப்லோக்கிங்.

march madness

spent most of the last week stuck in our apt-making sure our stuff was safe. This is what our bedroom ceiling looked like after the concrete feel and the contractor started putting in a false celing. Inside of putting up more concrete they put up this metel

learning to blog

Sri Lanka

For those of you haven't given up hope on Elder and Sister Eichelberger's mission blog...I (Erin) am posting something new for them. I will try to be better at doing this, I promise. Lots has happened in the past five or so months, so I'm not going to try and play catch up...I'm just going to start where they are now. Before we get to the mission news....Nikki and Eric had their baby girl on February 26 at 1:34 am. She weighed 6lbs 6 oz and is 19 inches long. They named her Alivia Ashley...no pictures yet, but stay tuned. Now on to the mission. Here is a letter from Elder and Sister Eichelberger:

We have been working for a month trying to see if we can do a PEF loan for a young man from Ivory Coast who is studying in India--today was sooooo funny--i e-mailed his Bishop in IC for answers to some questions--i was soo excited to get a fast response--til i opened up the letter--it was in FRENCH!!!--duh! the youngman's native language is in french. but, i could decipher enough words that it appears the Bishop must have been able to read english as it seems he probably answered all my questions :) every day is an adventure. We had a wonderful pef committee meeting the other day with a General Authority from Hong Kong who listened to all the information we had to share about India and how the loans need to be changed to fit the requirments...he was really humble and we learned a lot and we are excited about the possibilities for pef.

Did i tell you about "our" elder giving me a costco size book of pancake mix for a present?? we finally have 4 elders back in our branch and living in our area, which means i cook for 4 again on sundays. yesterday, i made breakfast-pancakes-yes, i used the whole box-they were not going to stop eating until i stopped cooking!!!

Do you want to hear about Sri Lanka?? all senior couples left monday-came back sat. - for senior conference/vacation/rest-we stayed in the hilton hotel close to indian ocean (though you could only see it early early or late late-during day time it is closed to public because of security issues). This part of ocean is like oregon coast--too rough to play it, but pretty to see. Luckily, the hotel had nice swimming pool (only me and one other sister were brave enough to put on suits :)--but, it was soooo hot that i had too!). Found a great book, The Legacy, the history of Sri Lanka plus fictional character story line--it was very very good and i enjoyed learning about the places we were visiting. One day jack and i visited a large Buddist temple-feed a baby elephant, toured the temple, saw all the Budda statues including the world's smallest pure gold statue-maybe 1/8th inch tall, and an ancient necklace with very very large blue gem-it had been cut in half and one part given to queen elizabeth-the other part into necklace and the Sri L. president holds it for 14 minutes for good luck...then a monk put a holder of Budda's tooth on our heads and in some language gave us a blessing (or curse, who knows :)-and then put a string of color string on our wrist for good luck (or i think probably more like their way to "mark" who had been there!). anyway, it was very interesting to learn more of what i had been reading in the book. another day, all couples went by bus (if you can call the sandwich press a bus) 3 hours north to elephant rescue. started out by meeting some elephants, for picture taking as we petted them, then down to the river to watch them come down in a group to bath, it was scary one time when we did not know the men were bringing a few of them back up, and we were kind of in the way, then over to an area for riding the elephant..notice no saddle, just a thin blanket. It was way fun -and a little scary, but the elephant was barely walking!!--only us and one other couple chose to ride "down" to the river and let the elephant spray us with his trunk. The conference part was just two days for 4 1/2 hours each day, training by the mission president and stories of spiritual experiences by all the couples, and the SL District President came and told his conversion story-we really should be taking a tape recorder everywhere we go, everyone has stories to tell that we would love to remember.

just for those who are still "enjoying" the snow, summer has now arrived in bangalore-winter is over-it was dec-feb-sleeping with the fans going and fighting mesquitos-soon it will be turn on air condition. Just thought i would share that with you :) and torment those of you who are snow birds still. going to go to bed now....been waiting up in case nikki called to say Alivia was arriving but...no such luck, so going to go to sleep...happy "snake God" holiday!!!--noises outside, the hindus are supposed to stay up all night celebrating and praying--they are not tooo noisy yet anyway.