South India – Day 3, part 2
Friday, February 7, 2025
A visit from an apostle
After a hot shower I went down to the living room and immediately got into a conversation about Christianity in Kerela. Feel free to skip over any of these “Thomas Mathew” lessons. It’s just that I find them interesting and wonder if you might too. Also keep in mind that I am relating these stories just as I hear them. Thus, they may be different from what you see on the news, read in Wikipedia, or even hear from someone else in India!
When the British came to Kerela in the 18th century, they brought Christianity with them, ready to spread the Word. The only thing was, the Word had already been spread, centuries before. Maybe not to everyone, but there was a large community of Christians and Christian churches already in Kerala. These were started by none other than Thomas, a disciple of Jesus, back in 52 AD. Thomas traveled to South India to share the Gospel with an enclave of Jewish traders, pepper merchants, living in nearby Cochin. It is said that he started 7 ½ churches, the half church being very small. In time, he began preaching to Hindu Brahmins as well, and traveled as far as Chennai, where his teaching and his life abruptly ended at a spear point. He was martyred. Today there is a large and thriving church, known as Mar Thoma (St. Thomas), or more accurately, Syrian Mar Thoma, centered in Kerala, but with members throughout India and the world. This is the church of Thomas Mathew and his wife, Sally.
More (yawn) history
Getting back to colonial times, the first Europeans to come to India were the Portuguese. When they found Christians in Kerela, their idea was to convert them to Catholicism, labeling them Syrian Catholics. Then the Dutch came along, but they were more interested in commerce than religion. When the British arrived, for what would become 250 years of colonial rule, they did not have any inclination to change the already established churches. Instead, British missionaries helped those churches start schools and hospitals specifically to serve the low castes. To this day, nearly every Christian church is linked with a school.
At that time the caste system was very strong in Kerala and low caste people could not go to the government schools or hospitals, but they could attend the new mission schools started by the British. These were scorned by the upper caste, until they found that the quality of education was much higher than the government schools and that knowing English was extremely useful. Although Christians are not part of any caste system, they were looked at by the locals as upper caste.
I’m not sure if I’m getting all this right and there are certainly dozens of details that need to be sorted out, but this is a living room conversation. Feel free to fact check and send me corrections! The thing I found most interesting in this discussion, though, was that the first sign language school in India was started around here about 150 years ago. Then, at the same time we were talking about that, two deaf people showed up at Thomas Mathew’s front door. These fellows needed help with some government paperwork that had to be submitted by their church. Thomas Mathew greeted them in sign language, provided the needed assistance, and they left. But that is not the end of that story. Stay tuned until Sunday to get the rest. It is an experience I will never forget.
Who is my neighbor?
The fact is, people are always showing up at Thomas Mathew’s front door, or at his office, or sending him texts, or calling him, for help. He never turns them down, no matter the difficulty or even danger of their request. Years back, he was the only person in the area with a car, and would be asked to rush people to the hospital, day and night. There was a time when laborers who wanted to work abroad would ask him to help them complete their passport forms. They even struggled to fill out their names, not knowing which was their “first name” and which was their “last name.” When he was just 28, he was elected president of the local agricultural cooperative, the youngest to have done so. He served three terms, until the bylaws required him to step down. The bottom line is that people trust him. I didn’t know it at the time, but spending the next three days with Thomas Mathew would provide me with a living example of, “Who is my neighbor?”
SEEDS India
The hot afternoons are meant for rest, followed by tea, and today, tea was followed by a visit to SEEDS India, the NGO that Thomas Mathew established in 1990. It is a walkable distance under the tall trees of Kerala, but to save time, we took his car. Most of the houses we passed along the way are filled with uncles, aunts, and cousins, as this is all ancestral land of the family going back to his great-great-grandfather. Even SEEDS India was built on family land!
I had been hearing about SEEDS India through all my years at ARI and when we passed through the gate I felt a strange sense of familiarity. The compound is only half an acre with an office and three buildings for activities. Naturally, there is a great number of trees, many of which Thomas Mathew planted at the same time he planted SEEDS (pun intended). When you stretch the acronym into words it becomes Socio Economic Educational Development Service and while great value is placed on education, you will soon find they do so much more. Essentially, wherever they see a need, they address it.
Painting leaves
In the first room we entered, three women were seated at tables, deftly creating paintings on leaves. They greeted us with quiet smiles and then got on with their delicate work. The vivid color palette and the skill with which they applied paint to leaf was captivating. It was a pipal leaf they were using, with its elegantly curved tip. These leaves fall, of course, from the Pipal tree, which is the tree under which the Buddha received enlightenment. This is the work of the deaf community, and they have been doing it for more than 30 years. Each hand painted leaf will be made into a greeting card and sold, and that is how they earn money.
There are three stages to the leaf painting process. (1) Prepare the leaves by soaking them in water for forty days and then dry. Many get damaged, so maybe 200 are usable from every thousand. Leaves are fragile, after all. (2) Use a screen to put the basic line design on the leaf. They have a set of standard designs that match their customers’ tastes. Many are Christmas themes as that is the high season for sales. They also paint Buddhist motifs for some clients. (3) Paint expertly with oil paints. The ladies can do the painting anywhere; at home, at their church, or here, but screening is always done at SEEDS because this is where the equipment is kept.
Currently there are 21 painters, mostly deaf women and a few men who are disabled. Interestingly, men in the deaf community mostly work as house painters! So, everyone is painting, and all are Dalit villagers. One lady, with the name of Radhamony, has been painting greeting cards here for 30 years and teaches the others. When she proudly signed to Thomas Mathew about the toilet she had recently built, he signed back, teasingly, saying people don’t usually talk about building toilets, but rather of buying nice cars or houses. For her, a toilet was important, an indulgence almost, because a village will normally share just one, and you can imagine what that must be like. No, she had no qualms about bragging about her new toilet!
Leaf painting started in 1990 as one of the initial activities of SEEDS. The first teacher was a deaf artist who painted leaves for Christmas. Training takes six months and includes how to mix paints, prepare leaves, and painting techniques. Most of the cards are sold to churches at Christmas time. When one university in Japan learned about this project they began placing yearly orders for 12 thousand cards. That is a lot of cards, when you consider it takes a trained artist from half a day to a day to paint each one. That university has since dropped their order to about 4,000, but there are many other markets. The ladies can sell their cards directly as well. All income goes to the painters and SEEDS provides the required materials for free.
Thomas Mathew claims his signing is not very good. Judging from the laughter and liveliness of the room, however, he seemed to be doing fine. It was these very people who taught him.
Foot power
In the next room we met four Dalit girls, donned in saris, as almost all women are, seated at foot pumped sewing machines. These are more practical than electric since Dalit communities generally don’t have electricity. Today they were learning basic sewing skills and tomorrow will be embroidery. Embroidery work brings in good money, but to deal with those hundreds of stitches in each design, an electric machine is preferred.
Preschool
Downstairs was a room set up as a preschool. Today five children were present, of the ten enrolled. Lucky for them, because Thomas Mathew was handing out sweets. I got the sense that enrollment at the preschool is down as the overall population of Kerela is decreasing. Thomas Mathew remarked that even the Muslim families who are usually bursting with children, are becoming smaller. All five were seated in a row on one bench, notebooks opened on the single long table in front of them. I’m not sure if they were meant to be learning their English or Malayalam letters, but it didn’t make much difference as our presence had become an overwhelming distraction.
The teacher made the most of it by encouraging them to practice their English with me, which for these four- to five-year-olds was both scary and exciting. She also served us two intruders a sweet spherical Indian snack composed of ragi (millet), jaggery (sugar) and coconut. I felt uncomfortable eating in front of the kids, but was informed that they had just had the same snack! I think it is all part of a devious plan to boost their nutrition.
Dalit families are not assured the luxury of eating every day. Thomas Mathew is well aware of this and of the effect it can have on childhood development. That is why SEEDS provides pregnant mothers with five bags of nutritious foods, such as the millet and jaggary we just had, as well as wheat, every month for five months after birth. Mind you, these five bags are specifically for the mothers, not the whole family. For the children and the rest of the family a monthly food set is given, which includes staples and lots of fresh vegetables. This is all connected with the family sponsorship program I will talk about later.
Incidentally, “very tasty” in Malayalam is “nalla ruchi.” The nalla ruchi snack I had been given necessitated the quick learning of these words.
