FROM AFGHANISTAN WITH LOVE

·FROM AFGHANISTAN WITH LOVE.

I am fine here. How about you? These days I continue to go to the school and to the orphanage. In the school, I take classes for class 4th, 5th and 7th standards. It's difficult to teach without knowing the local language, but it is a joyful experience at the end. Furthermore, I take English class for the girls and the boys of the returnee . So whole of the morning hours are packed with around 6 to 7-hour teachings. I m enjoying my stay and the little work I do here. This is the week of id here, so we have holidays. The election results are not yet out and now and then there is some trouble .However, we are safe. There are many well wishers around.
Life in the community is too good and the best thing we enjoy being , being in the community and cooking on Fridays when the cook is given leave. You may find the country is unstable but from here I don't see the way it is projected. The work of the school where I go is almost getting over. Almost 40 lakhs are being spent for 100 children, but we still hope to get many new families coming in the township. That’s all here. The days go on. There is a very little difference in the activities. We cannot do much because of the security measures. So we have to restrict to something that we do regularly.
From Afghanistan

Sandesh.G

Incarnational Approach to Theologizing

Incarnational approach to theologizing.
During the second year of my theological formation I tried utmost to theologize from the point of view of incarnational approach. I tried to make use of the week-end ministry in Sanand mission for that purpose. Besides having the week-end ministry, we were offered to spend a week long village exposure to learn contextual theologizing. I grabbed this opportunity to try my incarnational approach to theologizing in Sanand mission. The spirit was high but the body was weak, and I could not complete a week long stay in a village called Meital in the Sanand mission. However, with a renewed spirit I expressed my deep desire to the Dean of the theology Fr.Francis Parmar about my plan to do theology in the village setup and cover the topics of missiology and ecclessiology in the context of a mission village. I took Fr. Mangalam, a misssiologist and then the parish priest of Sanand as my guide and hence began my stay in the village, in the first week of our Diwali holidays.

Methodology:
There were three activities that characterized my initial stages of the contextualized theologizing.

1.Diary writing: At the end of each day, I used to spend an hour jotting down my observations related to the topics that I had planned with my guide.

2.Theoretical input: A continual theoretical input was made available through private reading, done in consultation with my guide.

3.Week-end meetings: Every week-end I would meet my guide to sort out things, to integrate what I was going through, to look at the theological perspectives and implications of the experience. Besides I would meet Fr.Darrel to nurture my spiritual life and look at my psychological growth.

Involvement:
I then felt the need to learn their customs, to learn their attitudes, to enter their world-view so to say, to enter their frame of reference – in short to identify with them as much as possible and in doing so knock of the spectacles of my frame of reference. I saw the ecological imbalance in the village – it being a year of severe drought, I saw plenty of dead cattle. Reflecting on this, I realized that man is in continuity with the creation. Man is no isolated being and the whole of creation is an extension of man and man is an integral part of it. If a part of creation is destroyed, man is maligned in the process. I saw a lot of waste land there and reflecting on this, I realized that perhaps ‘forestation’ was required.

A group comprised of mixed casts, having a special inclusion of people from the lowest rung of the society with the Koli Patels was formed with the help of the Behavioural Science centre Ahmedabad. Rural SEWA- a self-help women group who was working in the near by village too started approaching the government with the similar objective ‘Forestation’. The Mamladar of Dholka who had the power to allot the waste land for the forestation program, decided to award the waste land to the SEWA group. At the end I had to terminate the little initiative with a reluctant heart. However, a mixed cast inter-village cricket tournament met with a huge success. There were about ten youth teams with mixed casts participated in the tournament. Though it was a small initiative in the contextual learning and involvement during my theological studies in 1988, it made an indelible mark in my memory and my spirituality.
Fr.Lawrence Dharmaraj s.j