Tag: Missionaries Mercenaries and Misfits

Posted on

My Missionary Family: Part 1

There is no generic missionary.  There is no single description that all missionaries would agree on.  Missionaries were/are as diverse as any other group of humans. They had a variety of motivations for being in India, vastly differing theologies and lifestyles.  Many didn’t like each other, even when they worked for the same ‘mission board’. Some were world class historians and biologists and linguists. Some developed new nutritious products for the emerging middle class. Some led the world in the treatment of blindness and leprosy. Some ‘went native’. Others went mad and had to be shipped back to Ohio. Some believed every word of the Bible was historically accurate and spiritually true. Others could not find their way to 2 Chronicles. One even became a leading White Supremacist. 

What follows is what my missionary world looked like.  

My parents came to India in 1952.  Dad was 27. Mom 30.  Dad had been appointed by ‘the Mission’ to teach in a small Bible college in a not-very-significant district town in what was then Bombay Province but which, in 1956, was included within the freshly minted Mysore State that was renamed again in 1973 as Karnataka State. 

Home for both Mom and Dad was the upper Midwest: Minnesota and the Dakotas.  Both families were of German extract and both were equally poor.  And both families belonged to the ultra-small, ultra-conservative Holiness Methodist denomination. 

Mom was older than Dad by three years. She had grown up a farmer’s daughter and harbored the suspicion that she was an ‘afterthought’.  She always claimed to have enjoyed a loving childhood but one that was lonely and isolated. Her siblings were 10-15 years older and the farms she grew up on, first outside the northern Minnesota town of Detroit Lakes and later near Paynesville, in Stearns Country–heavy German immigrant territory– were several miles from civilisation.  She loved (and dreamed of) sharp clothes, baking and reading.  

Going on to High School was a major aspiration for most of her social network. Though her father lost his farm in Detroit Lakes during the early days of the Depression, forcing him to become a sharecropping dirt farmer, mom did graduate high school and went on to Business College in Minneapolis just as WWII began.  She admitted to having a few boys from the community make eyes at her, even a few handsome lads, but she never made eyes back. Mainly because it was clear to her that they had no desire to go to High School.   Or they smoked. Had no real prospects. One boy, however, did stand out–Melvin Finger. She liked the look of him and noted with approval that he was ‘serious-minded and read TIME magazine’. 

She grew up loved, she said. She also said, she felt as if her mother, a devout and extremely soft-spoken woman, had hoped she would be a boy because she confessed to hoping that her final child would be a ‘preacher or missionary’.  To mom, these were clear signals that she had disappointed her mother by being a woman. I think she carried that feeling of being ‘second best’ with her throughout life. 

Her dad, a tall and toothless man with a hearty laugh and a 19th century outlook, was not particularly religious. He’d go to church occasionally but did nothing to encourage Christian faith in his children. That was their mother’s role. He was too busy scraping enough sustenance together from the tiny Minnesota plots he farmed.  

Her upbringing was stifling. Though she accepted the conservative Christian values and faith of her family and neighbors she knew early on that she needed to escape rural Minnesota.  In later years she would cackle over the thought of her being a Minnesota farmer’s wife, something that bemused and terrified her.  When a recruiter from Minneapolis Business College laid out brochures of a nine-month secretarial course in the Big Smoke, she didn’t hesitate.  Minneapolis was a ‘magical city’ for her. Shops full of wonderful dresses and shoes and a place where she could be surrounded by people but still keep to herself.  

In their memoir Mom wrote:  

Though I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do or be, I was SURE I did not want to spend my life on a farm! Dad and mom had worked their fingers to the bone for years, and what did they have to show for it?  I wanted to have a nice home and some stylish clothes—admittedly I was ‘materially’ minded. Attending business college offered me a way out of Paynesville and an escape from the farm.  What could be better? I was excited! 

** 

Dad’s family were more recent German immigrants. Grandpa had arrived with his mother and siblings from what is now western Poland in 1903.  They settled in Guelph, North Dakota, a speck on the prairie not too far from the South Dakota border. The Great Northern Railway that linked St. Paul with Seattle in far west Washington State ran through Guelph and provided jobs for grandpa and his brother Julius. But the hard physical labor didn’t do it for Grandpa, Rudolph Senior, who was still a couple years shy of fifteen. Around that time he was dragged to a ‘revival meeting’, had a spiritual conversion and dedicated himself to ‘full time Christian ministry’. He committed himself to a Holiness theology, serving as a preacher (who often had to move from parish to parish filling in for small rural communities) and eventually General Secretary of the denomination.  Here’s how Dad summed him up in the memoir he wrote with Mom in 2011. 

The Holiness Methodists were a small, struggling denomination with never more than 30-35 churches and preaching points. But they established a small Bible school (Holiness Methodist School of Theology) in Minneapolis. A year or so after his conversion. Rudolph felt God was calling him to the ministry, so went to Minneapolis and enrolled at HMST. After just a year’s study, the church assigned him as a pioneering evangelist to a remote area way out in northern Montana. 

For a year and a half—April 1915 to October 1916—he lived in a small mountain cabin in close proximity to the Pinkham Creek and Fortine lumber camps located a few miles from the town of Eureka. Life in those Rocky Mountain woods was primitive, ultra simple, far from being as romantic as one might think. 

He married a feisty woman named Leona and together produced a large family of 9 children of which Dad was number four.  Grandpa struggled with depression throughout his life (Dad brushed it aside as nothing more than ‘the winter blues’) which is probably one of the reasons he returned to Minneapolis and HMST.  The family could barely put food on the table, especially as Rudolph Senior’s body began to break down with the stress of scraping a living together in the Depression. 

Dad spent most of his youth moving between small towns in South Dakota and Minnesota before completing his high school in Duluth. Like his soon-to-be girlfriend, Eleanore Naugle, that older, lonesome, beautiful farm girl he met at the annual Watson Camp Meeting, Dad knew from a young age that he had to escape this small, loving but culturally isolated world of poor Midwestern farmers and laborers for something more hopeful and spacious. 

Both Mom and Dad spoke fondly of the annual Holiness camp meetings they attended in the tiny Christian enclave of Watson (pop. 290) in south central Chippewa County. A regular feature of rural American Christianity, the camp meeting tradition had its roots in the so-called Second Great Awakening of the late 18th century. The meetings were ten days of hallelujahs, hymns, fire and brimstone preaching and sanctification under a tent in the woods. They were an opportunity for socially isolated people to meet their co-religionists and for preachers and hucksters to reach tens of thousands of people in one place.  And as ever, camp meetings were places for young people to meet up, fall in love and probably do all sorts of unsanctified and sinful things like smooching. 

[Listen to Brother Claude Ely singing at a camp meeting ca. late 1940s] 

Dad’s favorite part of the meetings were the sermons of visiting missionaries who told stories of the exotic, colorful and spiritually benighted Hindoos and Mohammadans of India.  

In 1946, now married to Mom, they once more attended the Watson camp meetings.  

There, the camp’s missionary speaker was…China missionary Roland [Rollie] Rice…. I had been thinking quite a bit about India during our last months in Fort Robinson, remarking more than once that I had wished the army had sent me there instead of one of my Camp Dodge buddies.  This friend, Carl, and I corresponded during our Fort time. In one letter he was complaining about some of India’s negatives and wrote ‘You’d be crazy Rabe, to ever want to come to this place!’ 

My interest in India had been kindled years earlier and only kept growing. The stories of India that Rev. F.B. Whistler told [in previous years at Watson camp] had ignited that early-on ‘India interest’. That interest was reinforced (admittedly in a fanciful way) through reading about the country—particularly in the adventure books of Richard Halliburton who wrote about snake charmers, tiger hunting, maharajas with jewel encrusted turbans and other exotic minutia. In one of those ‘I plan to be’ talks in a Denfield high school class, I informed my classmates I planned to join the US Foreign Service. Around that time I also made up a fictitious address in Bombay, gave it to my mother saying, ‘Some day you will be writing to me in Bombay where I’ll be serving as US Ambassador or as some officer for the US Government.’ She smiled and said, ‘Yes, Rudy, I think I’ll be writing to you in India one day, but you’ll be there as an Ambassador for Jesus Christ, not the US government.’  I always thought it interesting that 10 years later when we got to India, our first mailing address included the name Bombay: Gadag, Dharwar District, Bombay Presidency. 

And so it became family history. Dad was the one who had been inspired to be a missionary as a young boy. Eleanore fell in love with him and ‘accepted as part of the deal’ that her commitment to him meant a life far from her family in what must have seemed to her a hostile and harsh environment on the other side of the world. 

But re-reading their joint memoir, I have a much stronger sense of Mom’s agency in this.  She knew exactly who she was marrying.  Rudy had many of the qualities she admitted to liking in men. He was a Christian. He was good looking. He didn’t smoke or drink. He was ‘serious minded and read TIME magazine’ like one of her early crushes Melvin Finger did.  And like him she shared a desire to get away from the stifling atmosphere of rural Minnesota and have a bit of adventure.  And similar to Dad, her mother had already committed her last child to God to be one of His missionaries.  

On the last night of 1946 camp, Dad and Mom both publicly declared their desire to move to India to ‘serve the Lord’.  

The reality, in fact, seems to be, contrary to family oral history, that a career in India was something they both consciously chose. Maybe Dad’s interest in the country was deeper and more longstanding than Mom’s, who probably had zero curiosity about the place, but both of them were excited about the prospect of leaving America in search of adventure and souls to save. 

Years later after attending her high school class’s 50th reunion she commented with obvious, if well-controlled glee: “Although I had been such a shy and unassuming little girl, I probably traveled farther and had a more exciting life than most anyone else. It’s safe to say that Rudy, the man I married, was the secret of my out-of-the-ordinary’ life.”  

Posted on

Exit and Entry

33 years 2 months and 2 days ago Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as leader of the Soviet Union. The next day, 26 January 1991, the world learned that the Soviet Union itself, had ceased to exist as a political entity.

I watched Gorbachev on American TV. The enormity of his resignation and the dissolution of USSR silenced the room. The consequences of it were unclear but generally I think everyone felt lighter; things were bound to get better.

Today, I watched President Trump and VP Vance go on TV and announce their desire to join a new USSR, led by their buddy Vlad Putin. The enormity of this decision was lost in a squabble of hectoring and scolding more akin to a WWE extravangza than a diplomatic photo opp.

Just as Gorbachev’s announcement stunned the world, so too the Dynamic Duo’s performance on live TV today, has left the world immobile with shock. Only instead of hope we watch in horror, knowing for sure that only worse lies ahead.

A few months earlier I had watched Boris Yeltsin jump onto a tank in the middle of Moscow and rally his fellow Russians to resist the coup that had been launched by hardline Communists against Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s ballsy!’ And the people rallied, the coup was put down and Big Boris led them into a new era.

I don’t watch TV or read much news anymore. But I find it interesting that Yeltsin’s demonstration of leadership and purpose is apparently so uninspiring to the politicians of the Greatest Country in the History of Humanity. Our leaders, our so-called Yeltsins’, our hardcore anti-Putin hawks, now flap their wings and coo quietly in harmony with the two assholes at the top.

DJT is leading us into a new era too.

Posted on

Historical Fiction and the Saviour of the World

All religions are rife with factions. And in that way, they are a manifestation of the most primitive and base of human instincts.  Group think. Tribalism. Belief regardless of a lack of evidence. Even evidence to the contrary.     

I was born and nurtured within the ‘Bible is the inerrant Word of God’ tribe.  The people who insist that every word, every story, every miracle found within the Christian/Jewish Bible is cent per cent pure and untainted by any contradiction or human failing.  The Universe was created in six 24-hour days. Elijah ascended to ‘heaven’ in a burning chariot. The Supreme Lord of Everything addressed Abraham through a burning bush. Wine to water. 2 pieces of bread and 5 sardines fed 5000 people.   You get the picture. 

I should clarify. My father, our clan leader, actually felt most comfortable in a sub-faction of this larger tribe.  I would call it ‘the Bible is the actual reflection of God’s mind but not 100% historically or scientifically accurate’.   He argued that science and learning were needed to understand the mysteries of such a revered set of writings as the old and new testaments. He would acknowledge (later in life) that humans did not have the capacity to understand ‘God’  and so, ultimately, whether or not Jesus did turn a cistern of water into Merlot at the wedding party, it was not worth starting a war over. He liked to believe it, but he and others in the sub-faction allowed space for individual interpretation. 

I have no personal faith or belief in Jesus, Yahweh, God or any other such divine creature. But I had a good childhood and my 25 years of practicing Christianity has made an indelible imprint on my mind.  I cannot and do not want to excise that part of me.  I find great comfort in many passages of the Bible (OT and NT).  I still love and sing along to the hymns and choruses I learned from countless Bible Clubs, camps and revival services.  And throughout my adult years I have enjoyed reading academic and true-believer debates about all manner of Biblical studies and archaeology.    

I recently read a book titled Jesus Interrupted. I didn’t finish it because it was a bit too elementary for me. The author, is an ex-believer like myself, but a scholar of the Bible. His audience seems to be those of the ‘Bible is the inerrant Word of God’ tribe who are looking for encouragement to use their minds rather than practice blind faith.  I can hear him whispering to them ‘It’s ok. Jump. You won’t be crushed by what you find.’  

He spends a lot of time talking about ‘contradictions’ and ‘inconsistencies’ within the 4 Gospels and other books of the New Testament.  Of which there are many. And which should be sufficient for any unbiased reader to understand that what they are reading is not History.  For those who have come to believe that the God of the Bible is a distinct and discrete being, separate from the Universe, and who’s wont is to stick his hand into the petri dish called Earth and mess things up or direct action in a particular way, the notion that the story of the 3 wise men or the resurrection is not the accurate tale of an actual event, is a hard concept to embrace. 

I have published two novels, the first of which is what bookstores label, ‘historical fiction’.  It is set in mid-20th century Iraq and as such the narrative refers to and is framed by actual events. And people who are historical figures, the most prominent of which is Saddam Hussain.  But there are many others who pop up, mostly in very minor and insignificant roles.  The main characters are entirely fictional and most of the happenings that the book describes are real only to the characters. They have no basis in history.  

If you used my book to prepare for a trip to Iraq you might get a EXTREMELY HIGH LEVEL  glimpse of the turbulent political history of modern Iraq up to about 1985. But I hope no one would ascribe the words I put in the mouth of real historical figures as ‘accurate’ or historical.  The point of my book, what got me going, was to explore and try to understand the idea of politically-motivated violence against people who think differently.  Torture.  What goes on in the mind of the man who willingly and knowingly inflicts physical pain upon those who have been captured and have no way to fight back? 

I was not writing and didn’t set out to write a description of the Ba’ath party or Iraqi politics.  It was my way of unpacking an issue I was confronted with on a daily basis when I worked with the UN refugee agency. 

As I read Jesus, Interrupted it dawned on me that the best way to describe the Gospels and other Biblical stories is as “historical fiction”.   They are historic in the sense that they describe a society and historical figures that really did exist. But they are like tent poles or stakes that hold the story up but which are really supportive rather than central to the action.  Yes, there was a tough guy named Pontius Pilate. And there were a group of Jews known as Pharisees. Nazareth and Bethlehem can be found on a map. But anything beyond this sort of thing is historically iffy. Even the historic reality of the central hero, Jesus. 

The gospels, written decades after Jesus was allegedly crucified, by unknown writers, were composed to tell a specific story to a specific audience. The story was one of spiritual and moral guidance not a biography of the Nazarene. 

None of this is fresh insight. It’s as old as the hills.  But it does help me understand these essential texts of my life.  They are not history. But they are not fiction, either. They are historical fiction. 

Posted on

Two films I recommend

One is Civil War. Here is a piece I thought I had shared one of my other blogs (C90 Lounge) but may have not. Apologies if you’ve read this before.

I saw Civil War yesterday. My companion, an emotionally hard-boiled Aussie of the 80s, was sceptical. He expected a ‘made for TV’ type production and groaned at the poster’s depiction of a gunner’s nest in the flame of the Statue of Liberty. 

I’m invested in this, I said.  

Years ago, in the era of ‘W’, my brother and I half-seriously agreed that should ever there be a revolution in America, we would return (he was living in Canada, me in Australia) and fight for the good guys.   So, I’ve been seeing armed rebellion in the heartland for decades. In the intervening years I’ve worked in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia and Tajikistan. Each of those countries, in their own space and time, were places where citizens believed, ‘it will never happen here’.  

Of course, it did happen there. Half a century of state building and brutal imposition of power by an ultimate stable, seemingly intractable family or party structure crumbled faster than anyone could have imagined leaving once proud capital cities and rural hamlets alike pockmarked with the imprints of thousands of shells, collapsed roofs, burned out vehicles and bands of uniformed heavily armed men with trembling trigger fingers in attack or perhaps in retreat. 

The picturisation of the road trip from NYC to DC depicted in Civil War gets full marks from me. The mayhem and the menace were completely believable. The Americanisation of the scene, for an initial moment seemed unreal, but quickly the recollection of similar road trips I’ve made through Bosnia and Kosovo, Central Asia and Angola, made me appreciate the truism, local context is everything.  This is exactly what civil war and the collapse of a national superstructure looks like. It just so happens that McDonalds dot the landscape instead of mosques.  

The film is not edifying. I left scratching my head what it said about the media. Villian or simply the least-worst group in a land full of horrible people?  The scene with the red-headed militia man with his red sunglasses was completely real and believable.  Appropos to the storyline I left the theatre wondering, ‘who were the good guys?’. Maybe my brother and I would have fighting each other, not side by side. It was depressing. 

Much better than I expected, said my hardboiled friend. Neither of us had much to say for a long time. 

**

The second film is Shatranj ke khiladi (The Chess Players). It came out in 1977 and is a brilliant picturisation of Indian writer, Munshi Prem Chand’s, beloved short story of the same name.

Set in 1856 it recounts the final days of nawabi 1Lucknow, the most important ‘successor’ kingdom to emerge in the years following the severe collapse of Mughal political authority in north and central India, beginning in the early 18th century.

Satyajit Ray directed the all star cast which includes Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed Jaffrey, Sir Richard Attenborough, Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi, Amjad Khan, Victor Bannerji and Tom Alter, with whom I share a personal connection and whom I knew as an ‘upperclassman’ at boarding school. Each actor gives a generous and pitch perfect performance.

I love the sound of this film which is told in Urdu. Lucknow was accepted as the center of the Urdu speaking world and Urdu, with a Sanskrit grammar base but Persianised vocabulary, is among the most beautiful languages ever devised by us humans. The atmosphere (mise-en-scène?) of the film is authentic to my imagined 19th century nawabi Hindustan, 2 and captures the dust-layered pale clay and brushy landscape of that part of India perfectly.

The story is both hilarious and deeply sad. It is a tale of self delusion in a time of political chaos and confusion. A story about the passing of one era and the forceful, violent birth of a new order. A story perfect for this notorious American moment. The copy that is on You Tube is high quality with English sub titles, though significant parts of the story are told in English. Highly recommended!

  1. Nawabi is an Urdu term meaning ‘royal’ but which over time has become shorthand for a particular culture and lifestyle of Muslim (mainly) elites, centered in Lucknow but prevalent across much of the Gangetic plains of north India. Nawabi is a way to signal decadence, hedonism and a self indulgent ruling class of land owners and pleasure seekers. ↩︎
  2. Hindustan is often used to refer to India as a whole, but historically and culturally it refers to the area of northern India the is watered by the Yamuna and Ganga (Ganges) rivers, also known as the doab (two waters.) More broadly it refers to the heartland of Muslim India that stretches from Lahore in Pakistan to Dhaka in Bangladesh. ↩︎

Posted on

Were the Dark Ages really that bad? W(h)ither Aidland?

I’ve been scanning a few articles and posts on LinkedIn about the crash&burn approach to USAID of the new Trusk administration.  There are two broad schools of thought being advocated. 

The Insider School: this is the worst possible and most unfair action taken against an agency that strives to do only good. The hardship faced by many tens of thousands employee, contractors and implementing partners down the food chain is the main objection, with many expressing solidarity with this newly and unexpectedly large cohort of jobless humanitarians.  Suddenly everyone has the green halo around their profile picture; I’m Open to Work.  

Indeed, this is a shitful way to begin a new year.  I am not directly impacted by Trusk’s actions but suddenly my already slim chances of finding employment within the sector I’ve worked in my entire career are as close to nil as they can possibly be.   

Imagine a series of ponds connected by a stream.  The one at the top is full with just a few fish in it. The middle pond has lots of water but also a huge number of fish.  The stream has been silting up for time and some fish have been struggling to breathe for years. Yet, for the most part the pond has just enough water and oxygen to maintain the status quo.  In the third pond, the water levels are really low but the fish are smaller and seem to be able to do ok though they are constantly aware that the stream from the middle pond is getting dammed and blocked.  

Overnight the top pond is drained of all its water. In a panic, the fish there move into the middle pond. But this is not a solution because the largest feeder stream is dry and the pond’s water supply has dropped by nearly 50%. But there are a huge number of new fish to accommodate. 

In the third pond, fish are dying fast.  Not to mention the many animals surrounding the ponds that depend on the water to survive.  

It’s easy to understand the solution demanded by this group school of thought. Reinstate USAID and all its funding immediately. Turn the tap back on and let the water flow once more.  

The Opportunity School of Thought: This is advocated mainly by (many) fish in the middle and lower ponds. And fisheries experts who work at think tanks and write blogs. The basic argument is: the structure of the ponds and streams was inherently unfair and broken.  The top fish have always determined the quantity and quality of the water flowing to the lower ponds and for the fish in the lower ponds and the animals who depend on the water in the pond, the emptying of the top pond is probably an opportunity to rebuild the system so that it is more equitable. 

No one has yet articulated what a new system might look. The prescriptions are finely articulated statements of principle that have been echoing around Aid-Land forever. They all appear to ignore the cruel reality that we fish, and the animals we support, need water. And if we are going to support a lot of animals and really attack the problems that the animals face, we need lots of water for a long, long time.   

Ok, enough already of this silly analogy. 

The point is that large scale development and humanitarian responses require large volumes of money. And on a steady basis. Governments are generally the only source of such largesse.  Sure, there are billionaires and rich corporations but their interests are extremely narrow and self-serving.  The private sector will never be a reliable source of base funding for humanitarian or development work. 

So, I’m sceptical of the Opportunity school. Of course, if USAID is gone for good NGOs will adjust. Many will cease to exist altogether (not bad in itself); almost all will downsize, shrink their ambition and keep their heads down even lower.  But I’m not holding my breath for a new government led aid infrastructure and financing system to emerge that will be better than the one we love to hate currently. 

And there is a lot to hate. Bureaucracy. Hypocrisy. Conditionality. Compliance over assistance. Risk transfer. Salaries. Bad CEOs with no accountability. Lack of diversity at the top. Recycled thinking. Opaque transparency. Salaries. Sexual harassment and abuse. Baked-in white middle-class privilege.  Over-weening earnestness. Commerical firms who market themselves as humanitarian but are profit making machines for shareholders. 

But the one thing, above all other things, that sucks about the aid business is the donor-implementing partner (be they big hairy international behemoths or a local disabled persons NGO in the south Pacific) relationship. Governments are not just the only viable source of sustainable financing for aid but they call the shots. Their Congresses and Parliaments put so many ridiculous conditions on the receipt of and spending of their funds that many NGOs spend as much time, if not more, filling out reports for donors to ensure they are not violating an ever-growing number of conditions, as they do actually helping actual people.  

For all our claims to be innovative and independent, we have always been beholden to what the State Department or Foreign Office wants.  

This doesn’t put me in the Insider’s camp. I sympathize with those who lost their jobs. Doing away overnight with such a major pillar of the Aidland superstructure will be nothing but disastrous.  And given how most countries take signals from the White House the impact on Aidland is going to be widespread and indefinite.  

I don’t have a solution but frankly I cannot think of any group that can replace government funded aid agencies. 100 Soros’ can’t compete.  I don’t see new scalable financing models emerging. Innovation will happen but at the local level only.  Like democracy, government funded aid is the best of many flawed systems.

The Golden Age of International NGOs and AID is well and truly over. Maybe the Dark Ages weren’t really so bad.