The India Group

Mission

Following the inspiration of St. Francis Xavier, who proselytized and is buried in India, we will build bridges of friendship with individuals and individual families who are so marginalized that they fall outside the social safety net.  We will provide direct support for these poorest of the poor in the areas of education and health care.

Vision

Really believing in the words of the Saint of the Poor in India, Mother Teresa, who wrote, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love,” we hope to improve the lives of as many of the individuals and families we meet as our finances will permit.

“Moving Forward:  Living the Values” Responses   

TIG "officially" began almost exactly a year ago, in February 2012, though the idea for the group had been geminating for at least 4 years after 2 St. Francis Xavier (SFX) parishioners made a trip to India.  On that trip, people were literally coming out of the wall--or at least hovels--and begging for help.  Of course, being India, this type of “coming out” and “begging” were hardly unique.  But what were people who called themselves “Christian” to do in the face of such overwhelming need?  They decided to ‘adopt‘ a child and send her to a private Catholic school for $250 a year (tuition, uniform, books, the whole school deal).

In 2008, one of these parishioners lost a high-paying and -ranking job he thought he could never lose.  Devastated, he turned to a former spiritual director/counselor who knew nothing of his India experiences, but knew he liked to and had traveled a great deal.  The advisor noted that the letters of Mother Teresa had just been published and suggested that the newly unemployed read the letters, go to India, and see where Mother had lived and worked, and where the Spirit lead.  The parishioner did, and ended up volunteering at one of Mother’s homes for physically and mentally disabled boys and men.  One morning at the volunteer breakfast he met a group of medical students from Japan, and the conversation he had with one of the students made him think of the people and values of St. Francis Xavier parish as he understood them. 

When he returned home, he spoke with his original traveling companion and they determined to try to involve others in the parish in their India experience.  They advertised in the bulletin and last year one of the original India travelers and 3 other parishioners went to India.  During that trip, they began a process of prayerful discernment and discussion among themselves and with families they met. Through this process they determined what might be done in the face of such need.  The expertise of members of the group, education and health care, coincided exactly with two areas the families identified as areas of need.  Illiterate or semi-illiterate, the families wanted their children to get an education, and they often needed health care they couldn’t afford to pay for.  The travelers called themselves The India Group (TIG) and decided to raise funds for the education and health care of the families they were meeting in India.

The group created a website (https://sites.google.com/site/newyorknewdelhi/home) for getting information out about the work in India and as a means of raising funds.  The 7 students in last year’s St. Francis Xavier Confirmation class each adopted one of the 7 TIG scholarship students (now 8--6 girls and 2 boys) and raised funds to help with their schooling. See:

http://www.crowdrise.com/confirmationprojectxaviergo/fundraiser/confirmationcandidates/donate 

TIG hopes to continue raising money through this website for scholarships.  Because the scholarship students’ schools can be identified and money given directly to them, the fiscal accountability issues are relatively straightforward.  This is not the case on the health care front.  There is no one hospital or doctor the families go to, and there is no predicting what the health needs will be.  Therefore, TIG has tried to make a clear distinction between funds raised for education and those for health care.  The legitimate auditing needs of the parish and the legitimate, indeed pressing, medical needs of the poor are not synchronous.  TIG welcomes any and all parish oversight of its health care funds, but realizes that the education and health care funds need to be kept separate in light of the parish’s fiscal auditing requirements. 

The above, perhaps too lengthy, preamble is meant to address the questions raised in the “Moving Forward” document, at least by implication.

Parishioner-driven Parish

As explained above, TIG is decidedly “parishioner-driven” as it was conceived and created by 5 members of the parish.  Indeed, the values of the parish made those parishioners turn to the parish for help and, hopefully, a home base.  We want to continue, “to seek out those in the parish community” who wish to experience the plight of the poorest of the poor in India firsthand and/or want to understand and be a part of our efforts stateside.  Our approach to the families in India is  “to be a listening ear” in that we had them define their needs and then looked at what our areas of expertise are; thus, we came to the areas of education and health care.

Spirit of Collaboration

Certainly, one of the things that made the TIG members think that SFX might be home was the precedent set within the parish by the Honduras Group.  We know that there are some who worry that organizations like the Honduras Group and TIG will compete for limited funds, but we believe that such groups will complement each other and raise the awareness of the community about global needs, just as the Pilgrimage to India lead by Fr. Joe and the TIG trip to India complement each other.  They may speak to different needs, temperaments, and charisms within the community, but the awareness, prayerfulness, and charity each evokes are consonant with the values we are discussing:  “There are many gifts but the same Spirit.”  A coalition of international outreach groups within the parish could share experiences and expertise on how to successfully support the poorest of the poor in a “foreign” culture.  Certainly in a parishioner-driven parish, adult believers can decide which, how many, indeed if any, outreach ministries, be they domestic of international, they will engage.

Ignatian Spirituality

Because its work is centered in India, as was much of St. Francis Xavier’s, TIG feels a special closeness to “the Jesuit tradition.”  That we have seen a side of the world and poor that we had only previously read about makes the “Incarnational” of Ignation Spirituality very real and at times even overwhelming.  We are called to love and even eat with that Untouchable who is cleaning out the sewer with his hands. 

His child is one our Mission calls us to find funds to educate, and his hand is one we must shake when meeting with him and his family.  Our Faith calls us to see Christ behind the smell, “to find (or encounter) God in all things” and people.

Because we are working with such marginalized people, there is a great need for discernment.  “Through prayer and guided by God’s grace,” there are, at times, literally life and death decisions to be made:  If we pay the hospital bill of this boy who is in a coma with encephalitis, will we have funds to have the girl’s cleft palate repaired?  If we don’t, she will likely never marry or, perhaps worse, end up married into a family that resents her and the fact that they could not find an “unscarred” girl for their son.  There is also the challenge to discern which requests are legitimate, especially when we must often deal long-distance and through language and cultural barriers.  We pray that we are “discern[ing] God’s will and thus mak[ing] good individual and communal decisions always for the Greater Glory of God (AMDG)” and the people we have been sent to support.          

Catechesis & Evangelization

The mission of TIG is not the evangelization of those whom we seek to assist, though there is some wonder among those we support about why we are doing what we are doing.  Our explanation is that we are “spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ,” though we may not always use these exact words.  Those whom we work with are quite aware that we are a part of a “temple” in the United States.  As one of the fathers said, “You treat everyone alike,” which was his way of saying we work with him and his family “in a spirit of welcome and respect for the other.”  Of course, we feel we get as much as or more than we give.  Certainly through these families we feel we have come “to know the person of Christ” in their humanity and the way they bare extreme poverty with much joy.  Also, we hope that the existence of TIG and the Honduras Group will give the larger Xavier community a heightened awareness of the needs of the poor and marginalized beyond our borders. Perhaps this growing awareness will lead to something like parish International Nights during which we can discuss some of the pressing issues facing the poor outside our borders and discern how an affluent Christian community can best respond to them.

Faith That Does Justice

If TIG were to have a motto “Faith that does Justice” might well be it.  We are certainly “working on behalf of the materially poor and marginalized,” “who are victims of structural injustice” because they were born into a low caste, and we are “advocating for those who have little or no voice” in the schools they attend and in the hospitals they find themselves in. The pity is that we can do so little because we have so few funds.  We are educating only 8 children, but, remembering the quotation from Mother Teresa in our Vision Statement, we accept with reluctant humility that “not all of us can do great things”; and perhaps when you’re committed to working with individuals and families rather than for institutional change (a change that Mother did not actively seek and for which she was criticized), your impact is going to be “great” only in the lives and eyes of the relatively few you touch, but for them that impact can indeed be life-changing.  We certainly hope that the children we are helping to educate will be able to bring to their children financial, emotional, and spiritual resources their parents were not able to give to them.  We also hope that we can share our TIG experiences with our fellow Christian travelers here at Xavier in the hope that we can educate each other “about issues of social justice” not only in the domestic but also in the global arena.