I went to church this morning for the second time in India and the first time in Hyderabad. They have a brand new chapel here and it is beautiful and sits right next to the YWCA, where it's fun for women to stay at and not men. I was expecting to see quite a few expats but the missionaries and I were the only non Indians there. The branch president was Indian, his councillors were Indian, one of the missionaries was Indian, everyone was Indian. Most of the members have been baptised in the last 5 years with completely varying degrees of gospel understanding. There seem to still be some big difficulties there, with about %40 of the members arriving after the sacrament had been taken and constant interruptions of mobile phones where people don't turn them off but they walk out of the room and answer them. I realise that some of them will be under pressure from work to answer them but it would set a good example to most of the YSA in priesthood that texting your mates and playing games on your phones is not really what we come to church for. I can't blame them too much because Priesthood was not the most enthralling experience on offer in India. The teacher just asked some generic questions and and read the odd section from the Joseph Smith manual whilst occasionally translating into Telugu (a local language). I have to blame a lot of India's problems on quite an obvious target: Lack of education. His partner in crime however I had not really occurred to me before I came here and that is a communicaiton problem. The constant battle to converse with Indian people, was I felt purely a problem arising from the fact that I was not Indian and therefore they did not understand me. What I have since realised is that they don't even understand each other. India is a country of 29 major languages which are often as diverse as English and French. This means that unless there has been very little migration in the area in which you live (which is never the case in major cities), you are likely to be conversing daily in a language that is not native to you. Then it is a toss up between Hindi and English. You would have thought that this would lead to everyone speaking excellent Hindi and English wouldn't you. Well wrong! when no one can speak it well there is no one to really learn from. I was trying to order a pizza at the reception here in the Bed and Breakfast. After struggling to order a Veg pizza I handed the phone to the receptionist who I thought would be far more capable of describing the address. Well, he had to repeat himself a number of times and the delivery man must have got lost as he arrived 45 minutes late with a cold pizza. Miscommunication in India is simply an accepted way of life and not an freak exception. It often feels like I am simply living in a world of "well, let's just see what happens." So, to bring me back to church, quite often you simply get a question asked very softly in confusing English which very few people have heard, let alone understood initiate a long silence (not awkward, as this is quite normal) which nobody can really answer properly in English. The result is quite often a completely unrelated answer of "pray" and "forgive people". At least in china I felt like the problem was one which I could fix by simply learning Chinese. Here I just have no idea and still do not really feel that I understand the people. I have decided to go out with the missionaries next week as I really think a mission gives you the best taste of what a country and people are all about.
