Derhadun - Northern India

We left on the overnight sleeper train at midnight!. It's just now Saturday morning 6:30 am. The ground was wet before we arrived and it continued to rain all day. Rolling off from the train after an quasi night of sleep. The train made stops from about 5:30 am on we had little sleep. So adrenaline was working in my favor!

Several students from the Derhadun Ashram picked us up to assist with carrying our equipment. I remembered only two (2) from last year. Our luggage consists of eight (8) total dental pieces, four (4) are portable folding dental chains, the rest are luggage holding all of the dental supplies, suction equipment and heavy restorative machinery equipment. Along with 15 of us. (Dr. Homeshuaw an India joined us in Delhi, was also part of last years mendical team.) We also have all of our personal overnight bags. It is quite a site for only a 36 hour dental clinic mission. You can imagine the expressions on the people in the train station and those young fellows carrying all of the eqipment. They probably thought (hoped) we were staying for a month.

We then boarded a very old worn down questionable bus to take us directly to the Dehradun Ashram. Dehradun is the capital of the state of Uttarakhand. We were greeted by the Pastor Abdul and his wife. We had a brief breakfast consisting of toast, butter or jam and hard boiled eggs as well as coffee or tea with or without milk.

I just love Dehradun and would love to visit another time other than January. Because it is at the foothills of the mountains. Last year the weather was so perfect enough to tolerate with layers and set up out-side up our stations outside. So that not being the case we used their large worship. room. The rain came down all day in different degrees, sometimes small bits of hail and stopped about the time we were finished with a full days works. We left around 6:30 pm.

We then headed up the hill half way to an area they call Missouri, lots of mountains, they would call their Swiss alps. We stayed at a place called Torchbearers. It was beautiful and is now a used for the purpose of spiritual retreats.

tb continued