Chapter Eleven, Section *** V
The one-day during the week when we fed all the blind, the lame, the leprosy and TB sufferers etc., was just too much for some of our foreign volunteers to take. Some broke down and wept. One young Englishman, a professing Christian who was nick-named" Angel", because of his fair skin and blonde hair, was very upset by the bedraggled human wrecks that turned up for a glass of milk, porridge and Multi Purpose Food. He was such a dedicated volunteer while with us but, soon after his return to Britain, completely lost his faith.
Human suffering can have a two-fold effect on those who are overwhelmed by it. If you keep your eyes always fixed on Jesus and remember that he has been through it all before and even far more fiery trials, you will come out of that experience with a much deeper faith.
If you allow Jesus, through your own concerns, to "get involved", you will actually come into a more intimate relationship with the Lord for having endured the trauma.
On the other hand, if Jesus is not given the pre-eminence, bitterness and resentment will take over and faith will be destroyed. Even the toughest of humans and those with the deepest faith, are at risk when body, mind and spirit are exhausted beyond their limits of endurance.
And that is what made me afraid for Keith. He was so exhausted, both physically and mentally, that he hated to come home. As soon as it was known that he was on the way back from town or the inspection of a FFW project, crowds of desperate people would gather. Keith was met with a barrage of questions, even before he could get into the house.
"Sahib, what will I do with this or that?"
"Sahib, three bags of wheat are under-weight; how will I make up the short-fall in the records?" "Sahib, the roof of one of the grain-stores is leaking; we need more tiles." "Where will we store these damaged grains?"
"Why? How? When? Where?”
One of the major problems was how to maintain the monthly schedule of records constantly required by CFRA and Indian Port Customs? That is what really troubled him, for there were just not enough hours in a day to get all the book-work and accounting done, even with the staff doing the basic entries of food distribution. And the days were too hot to concentrate much on mental work. Sweat would drip from his chin and elbows to spoil the CFRA inventory and distribution books.
At night, when office work was possible, the truck-drivers chose to haul in the wheat and other relief commodities. The cooler night air may have been easier on their engines and tires, but it took a heavy toll of our health. Desperately, we would be trying to sleep, after a most exhausting day when, in the distance, could be heard one of the ten-ton TATA Mercedes food trucks, creating a roar that could be heard reverberating through the valley from up to five miles away.
For a full half-hour, on and off, we could hear that incessant gear-changing that made sleep impossible. And when the truck finally did arrive, it meant taking delivery of the consignment, generally one hundred bags, all of which had to be checked, stored and entered in the records, with special notice taken of any losses. Often, one truck had only just been unloaded and sent off back to Daulatapur, when the next truck could be heard in the distance. During the peak of the relief program, up to three trucks would arrive during the "cool" of each night. And what we were suffering at the front-line, "Moussie", helped by her nephews, Premchand and Ardan, was enduring at the supply base in Daulatapur where, at the same time, she had to teach and administer the Girls High school, with its six-hundred students.
How to get that work done - the reams and reams of records, covering up to thirty-two thousand beneficiaries? There seemed to be no solution until Keith decided to take it all to Ranitola, a distance of about one hundred and eighty miles. He hid away in an air-conditioned room at the "Ratdin Hotel" and remained in seclusion for four days, with meals delivered to his bedside, until the books balanced. But at times they did not balance, and registered letters would be received from Customs, with copies to CFRA, worded in the most vitriolic manner
GOVERNMENT OF INDIA - CALCUTTA CUSTOMS
"On such and such a date, you took delivery of one full railway wagonload of wheat, viz.: 430 bags, being allotment No. S 56-75862-X, from SS. Vishnu Raja, records for which have not been received by Indian Customs, Calcutta. You are hereby advised that, failing to produce the necessary certification of impartial distribution by such and such a date, legal action will be taken against you!"
That was a sample of one such letter. We know that that particular wagonload of wheat did arrive at Daulatapur, but neither Keith nor Shantibe Dube took delivery. Did someone forge his signature? During the course of the whole program, a total of four railway wagonloads of our wheat "went astray"! Discrepancies like this nearly drove him crazy, and I feared for his mental health. While he was in such a predicament, Dr. Rae W. Dunhill, en route to Europe, paid us another visit, near the end of the famine. He said to me, "Keith keeps running away, doesn't he?"
When I told him the whole story, the doctor prescribed the necessary medicine and said, "If US President Johnson can have a private physician to advise, why shouldn't Keith have his?" The good doctor ordered Keith to get right away for a rest in a completely different environment - Madras, Vellore and Karigiri. How about that? He knew that if Keith were to survive, he had to be freed for a while of the pressure of the program.
Once again, this dear friend paid for the airfare and also covered the cost of further treatment for Keith's "tennis elbows." The latter were a source of constant, nagging pain, which prevented sleep. His elbows had become progressively worse and extremely painful since he fell heavily on the Dharmapuri Junction rail station platform, when he tripped on a piece of rail line as he ran beside the school party coach, bringing home our children for Christmas vacation.
The elbows needed rest for healing, but having to keep driving to haul in the wheat only exacerbated the problem. And then, to add insult to injury, he further bruised both elbows while working on a pump down a well. During that week at Karigiri, seeing more of the work of The Hansen Institute, Keith was given Hydrocortisone injections, which completely healed those painful joints. That trip south was a Godsend.
His recovery came just in time because he was about to face another heavy program, this one of a different type. Before the break of the second monsoon, during the famine period, much early preparation was necessary to conduct a program in mud, slush and pouring rain, as contrasted with that in dust and blistering, dry heat. Months would have to pass, following the initial showers, before there would be a harvest to produce the first food - "Gundhli" a small grain, the size of canary seed.
Rice, the main crop, was harvested four months later, with corn (maize) coming in between. As a result of the famine, the only possibility of our area realizing a main crop of rice, lay in our ability to secure large quantities of paddy seed and, somehow, transporting it in.
At the beginning of the rains each year, with the rivers and roads impassable between Surgapam, Bhavnagar and Daulatapur, we would surrender the Jeep's registration to the police and put the vehicle up on blocks. However, this year, it was of vital importance to keep the roads open to maintain a steady flow of relief wheat and, hopefully, seed.
As a FFW scheme, Keith engaged about one hundred men to work full-time on the stretch of jungle track between Charnpapur and Bundi. From there to Bhavnagar, Lionel Burton and Geoff Saunders deputized an equal number of beneficiaries to keep that part of the road open.
The road workers' job was constantly to patrol that 20 miles stretch of track to fill in all the pot- holes with rocks available in the jungle. Also, they were responsible for digging out all relief food trucks that bogged down on the road or in the rivers.
Two rivers, the Khulaban near Bundi and the Cherrobana, near Nawapara, were particularly troublesome and posed a serious threat to our monsoon program. These two rivers had to be prepared well in advance of the first flash flood. I had seen so many river crossings between Ramanupurl and Aranchalganj washed away because of bad design. Some of our earlier crossings had the same fault because they were constructed above the level of the riverbed.
The usual practice was to place heavy logs across the riverbed, staking them on the downward side to hold back layers of stone. However, when the floodwaters came, they cascaded over the logs to dig deep trenches into which logs and stones fell, gradually to tumble down stream.
What to do? If ever you have seen the violent, turbulent nature of our Indian rivers during a monsoon downpour and flash-flood, you would agree that nothing less than a Miracle would enable a fully loaded ten-ton Mercedes, with only rear wheel drive, to traverse such roaring torrents, with water up to the cab floor!
I had a brain wave in the realization that, if people were not to die, even during the "rains", those trucks had to keep rolling. The secret to such an all-weather movement of relief vehicles was to have the crossing made BELOW the level of the river bed!. I asked myself, "Why not dig out the river bed before the "rains" to a depth of three feet and as wide as ten and fill in the whole trench with stones to the level of the river bed?"
We had ample labour for such a colossal job, and stone, in abundance, could be gathered in the jungle, with Forest Dept. approval.
When the monsoon eventually broke with force, it was so exciting to see our big trucks making history, with water flowing over the cab floors and guided from bank to bank, crossing the roaring torrent between two rows of bamboo posts and marker flags, which identified both sides of the burled stone causeway.
Our type of river crossing was so successful that, although it could not be seen, once the river had started to flow, covering it with a thin layer of sand, it supported those heavy trucks and, to this day, keeps heavy vehicles moving right through the year.
Word of these causeways spread as far as Patna, probably through visiting CFRA officers.
Chapter Eleven, Section *** VI
During the early period of the monsoon, the work on the dams and wells tapered off to be replaced by other projects. These included the provision of gravel-surfaced paths, with side drainage, in those villages which, each year during the rains, became a quagmire and public health hazard. The project served the dual purpose also of clearing the fields of stones, which were used in the paving. But by far, the major project during the monsoon was the transplantation of rice. Acquiring the seed for this massive undertaking gave Keith an enormous problem. How he finally secured that rice paddy seed was another Miracle.
On one of his trips to Bhopal, via New Delhi, as already mentioned, Keith secured a small amount of seed which was enough only for a few demonstration plots to teach the" Japanese Method" of rice cultivation. This method uses about half the amount of seed and, if watered, fertilized and cultivated in the proper manner, will yields four times the normal crop. Even if fertilizers are not available and water-control not possible, because the seedlings are further apart, the roots have more room to spread out and draw in nourishment.
On a later trip to New Delhi, Keith called on CFRA to request a loan to purchase seed. By this time, he had convinced the All India Christian Federation (AICF) that we now had a potentially viable project, which could easily repay a loan, given the number of irrigation wells that promised good crops, if only seed were available. To Keith's amazement, he was given fifteen thousand rupees in one hundred rupee notes. Such large currency notes were suspect in many rural areas where counterfeits had been circulating. Even the ten-rupee note was under suspicion. In fact, one of the many false charges that Daroga Faridamiya had tried to bring against Keith was that he was forging ten rupee currency notes!
Keith decided, therefore, to convert the whole amount into well-trusted one-rupee notes, but this is where the problem arose. Fifteen thousand single rupee notes were enough to fill a large suitcase! On this trip, Keith had decided not to fly but to use train and bus to see the countryside and assess the farmers' situation in other parts. As he travelled by overcrowded third class public transport, in a number of states, trying to buy rice, he never allowed that extra case to leave his hands. Battling to enter the over-crowded train's toilet with what fellow passengers may have thought to be a case full of toiletry gear and a change of clothes, was a major achievement, if not a miracle, in itself!
He searched in Nagpur, Bilaspur, Raipur, Aranchalganj and Daulatapur, but not a grain was for sale. It was in a newspaper that we read of seed for sale in Bombay. Hurriedly, we wrote off to the merchants to place a firm order, only to receive a request for three government border permits to enable the movement of the seeds interstate. Time did not permit us to get permits from three separate state governments of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. Once again we seemed defeated - back to "square one".
With all that money, we were not able to buy a single seed. With all that labour having been spent to make dams, wells, irrigation canals, paddy fields and roads, - a total of 443 separate and very successful FFW schemes - it seemed that there would be no harvest after all and people could still die of starvation, once the relief supplies were stopped. It was all so unreal. Nothing but a miracle could redeem the situation.
But God was working out his miracle and we were learning to be more patient. It is always wise to listen to people, all types of people, to get to know what they are saying, to learn to appreciate their wisdom, and from their point of view, however simple it may be. And so it was that the "little people" became our friends - ones with whom we could identify. These folk were the "peasants" and servants of the "big people" - the fat landlords, moneylenders, brewers, wine barons and liquor-shop extortionists. Human nature is the same throughout the world, which is why we also, in our primitive society, had our capitalists. These were the powerful, families, with caste connections in many parts of the province and sometimes interstate, whose sole ambition was to make money, whatever be the cost to their hapless victims.
As could be expected, these overlords were not the people who helped in any way at all with famine relief. Their servants were given the barest sustenance and mostly in the form of "paddy" (unhusked rice), along with two sets of the cheapest clothing each year. Somehow or other, Keith had to get that "paddy" seed if we were to save our people - an Impossible Dream!
In affluent Western nations, the Trade Union Movement often oversteps the mark in pressing its demands, to the detriment of the very industries that may be supporting the working class, at least with job-opportunities. However, in our part of India, most workers had never even heard of a movement to improve their wretched and miserable lot. Not only did the "big people" pay their servants in rice seed, also, they paid out this "paddy" for all their field cultivation, rice seedling transplantation and harvesting. The general public came to know that we, on their behalf, were desperately in search of rice "paddy" seed.
"Sahib," they said, "there is seed in the area. The "big people" have PLENTY of seed."
Actually, the rich farmers' stocks also were a little depleted but they still had more than enough to meet all our needs for planting in the seed beds and to cover other labour requirements, such as harvesting, husking etc.. Tragically, to get seed from such cutthroat extortionists would be like trying to get blood out of a stone. It would require a miracle to persuade these rapacious scoundrels to part with even a grain of their precious paddy stock. They actually thrived on drought and famine because that meant more and more debtors becoming ensnared in their usury and other forms of racketeering.
To love these people as Jesus did, positively and constructively, enough to die for them, with no ulterior motive, was perhaps the most difficult aspect of our ministry in India. But the Lord had a purpose, even for people such as these. They were to serve as another instrument whereby our area was to become a sight for sore eyes, with rich, verdant paddy crops extending as far as the eye could see. At this stage, however, it was all just a dream - an Impossible Dream - a hope that would dispel, once and for all, the hell through which our people were passing.
Almost every family in the community, including the rich, depended upon their neighbours, especially for fieldwork. The "big people", while having sufficient seed for planting and paying out as wages for other farm work, did not have other resources - the ability to do "menial work"!. These "high-caste" people could not even dream of dirtying their hands behind a plough. The "little people" had to realize that they, too, were rich with their strength and real resources secure in their labour skills and solidarity as a work force.
Years later, one of the reasons why our late son, Robert, came to be such a dynamic Trade Union leader, at top executive level, in Britain, was because he convinced the poor of their social wealth as a closely knit community. In our situation too, we had the power to bring the rich to their knees, by simply "withholding labour" -- a very dangerous strategy but it was our last card to avert mass starvation.
Such a daredevil campaign of "non-cooperation", had to be seasoned with the Christian ethic so, instead of using the word "Strike", we applied the non-violent Indian doctrine of "Ahimsa". If such a philosophy could drive the despised and powerful British Occupation Forces from India, it could redeem our people from imminent death.
Keith's proposal to CFRA was that we pay relief wheat to all field labourers, even those planting our seed in the fields of the "big people". In return for this, the rich farmers were required to turn over to us their stocks of "paddy" seed. This had never before been done and was unique in all India.
CFRA kindly agreed and, in public meetings, the well-to-do farmers consented to the exchange and thus help to make this massive FFW project such a great success. Hardly a field anywhere in our area was not planted and even the rich people, whatever may have been their motives, were made to feel that they, too, had a share in redeeming the situation.
Some of the "big people" even developed a friendly interest in the "little people" - a Miracle which can only be described as the "Gospel in Action". This was "Real" Christianity, which the world, in general, has yet to try, but it cannot be achieved without a price!.
That year, the monsoon was strong and the harvest one of the best ever. Some of the farmers, whose fields now had irrigation potential through the percolating tanks, had experimented with the Japanese Method of rice cultivation. Other farmers, who had saved some of their FFW ration wheat, experimented by planting it after the rice harvest, to prove whether their fields could yield other than rice. Although the imported US CFRA wheat was not ideally suited to Indian conditions, it nevertheless proved the feasibility and viability of a winter crop of wheat in Surgapam. Those who were fortunate enough to have a well, were given vegetable seeds and introduced to a diet that was once thought to be only for the "high caste" people.
Later, we were to make available hybrid varieties of rice, wheat, maize (corn) and vegetables. For those earthen darns that retained water right through the year, Keith brought in fish from the government fishery at Mandya. These tiny, baby fishlings, only half an inch long, were supplied by the hundreds of thousands in oxygenated plastic water bags and rushed by Jeep, within twenty-four hours, to the tank or dam concerned. The project had a profound effect on the local economy and there seemed to be no limit to the potential for further development.
It was now obviously possible for the farmers of our Surgapam area to supply fish, eggs, grains, fruit and vegetable produce to the local bazaars at Champapur, Bhednadi and Baliganj. Also, apart from grains, which were not allowed over the provincial border, Surgapam farmers could supply food to the larger markets at Bundi, Bhavnagar, Mandya and Daulatapur, in Bihar, however, before that could be possible, we needed public transport. In India's remote, rural areas, agricultural produce for sale in the markets, invariably, is carried on the roof of buses, along with farm inputs and any passengers who can't find t seat inside.
It had always been Keith's dream to have a bus service from our eastern part of Surgapam, to connect with Daulatapur or Mandya. But that was wishful thinking because the issue of permits to operate bus services was contingent upon several factors, not the least being that the road had to be safe enough for the movement of passengers. Secondly, the service had to guarantee a potential for economic viability. Prior to the famine, such local public transport would have been totally impossible and this is why Keith's appeal to the District Collector, on two previous occasions, was rejected.
But, again, to quote Dr. Donald E. Rutherglen, the famine proved to be a "blessing in disguise". All the work we had done on the road to keep our trucks rolling in the monsoon, made it suitable to take public passenger transport and the improved economy of the area demanded the movement of people with their produce for sale in the markets. People now on a higher standard of living, had to get to town to buy modern goods. At last we had qualified, so the Aramdey Bus Company was granted a road permit for a daily service between Champapur and Daulatapur - a Miracle, if ever there was one!
Our Surgapam program, along with that of the Burtons and Saunders, had become so well known that word of the success had spread even to the highest circles in New Delhi. Because of this, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, through its Films Division, resolved to include our Palamghat-Surgapam relief programs in a thirty minutes documentary film entitled "Bihar Revisited". The film crew of eight, led by Director Mr. Ashoka, shot a variety of schemes to show the many ways in which relief can be given through FFW which also included field-levelling, construction of irrigation canals and mud walls with tiled tops to protect field-crops from animals - the whole gamut.
Together, with Dr. Rutherglen, and other CFRA officials, we were invited as guests to see a private screening of the film in the Government Cinema, New Delhi.
We shall never forget that experience, which also we shared with our sons, Paul and Bruce, who were absolutely enthralled by the scenes in the film.
"Look Mum, there's the Karchand dam," shouted Paul. "Hey, there's Suresh giving an injection”, cried Bruce.
When the officer-in-charge of the cinema realized who we were, he remarked, "Do you mean to say that you people did all that for our country? It is unbelievable!"
"Bihar Revisited", in 35 mm, was produced in English and eleven regional languages and shown in cinemas throughout all of India. Also, many 16 mm. copies were produced and circulated throughout the world for screening through Indian High Commissions and Embassies. It was a sequel to earlier newsreels showing the stark tragedy of the famine at its peak, contrasting that horror with what can be done when people of Love and Compassion forget themselves and think of those less fortunate. Yes, it just had to be a Miracle.