Mother Teresa's beatification has recalled for many her work in Calcutta. Katherine Meyer has witnessed the work of other church groups in India.
It is is Nana Chowk, Mumbai, India. Motorised rickshaws buzz and honk in and out of traffic which swarms through the crowded intersection. Along the roadside carts are piled high with fruit.
Just past the intersection, in a house shaded by trees whose dark leaves are green from the recent monsoon, the Rev Viju Abraham talks about the work of ACT, an inter-church agency which trains and supports congregations who are working among the poorest of Mumbai's 16 million urban dwellers.
We have just returned from a visit to Kanjur Marg, population 500,000, north of the city. It is a bright and breezy day after the rain.
Children had gathered after school in the dusty open space around a water pump to fly a kite.
Behind them, in the narrow, shadowed alleys and dark doorways of the crowded settlement, women from the local community, trained by ACT, moved quietly from door to door, visiting their neighbours. At each home, they paused to ask after the children, to inquire about the health of the woman and her family and to offer information about HIV and its prevention.
Back in Nana Chowk, Viju pauses as he reflects on the enormity of the tasks being undertaken, door to door, family to family, by the little church in Kanjur Marg. No one knows precisely what percentage of the Indian population is HIV positive, but there is no doubt that education for prevention and care is of critical importance now and will continue to be for many years.
Viju leans forward and speaks slowly, so that there is no possibility of his being misunderstood. "If the church is doing its work properly," he says with quiet conviction, "you will have HIV among you."
Back at my desk in Dublin, half a world away from the steady heat and slowly rotating window fans of Mumbai, my mind keeps returning to the two weeks I spent in India last month. I was visiting HIV/ AIDS- related development projects run by Indian partner churches and agencies and supported by the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, among many others, through Christian Aid Ireland and Tear Fund.
All of the partners we visited are engaged, among other things, in community or peer education programmes, especially among young women and men. Much of what they are teaching is simple and basic: how HIV can be spread, what it means to be an HIV carrier and what it means to live responsibly in the face of the virus.
At another level, though, there is something else going on here. What is also being taught is that our choices, whether thoughtless or wise, not only give shape to our own lives but also make us real in the lives of others. In the choices we make, we mark the lives of others, irrevocably, with our presence.
Thus the young adults who embark on peer education programmes are being encouraged to think not only about their own lives and families and how they might secure or protect them, but also about the kind of community in which they want to live.
The peer education programme in Herbertpur, north of Delhi, is called Waves of Change, because the young women who participate are taught that their lives, like pebbles which are dropped in a pond, will ripple and wash out over the lives of others.
Or as another partner said to us, this time speaking of the (Compre- hensive HIV/AIDS Services in North India project (CHASINI) : "Our aim is to create communities of resistance" resistant to new HIV infection, resistant to rejection of the ill, resistant to all those things which undermine our belonging together in this human community. Which brings us back to Nana Chowk and Viju Abraham, who said: "If the church is doing its work properly, you will have AIDS among you."
Back in Dublin, surrounded by my photos and notes and memories, I am eager to tell anyone who will listen about the commitment and the generous hearted intelligence with which our Indian partners do their work. Most of all though, I want to say that I am grateful to them for their quiet clarity about the moral purposes of education, in both Christian and civic contexts.
Here in Ireland, it goes without saying, our greater economic resources do not guarantee that we will not short change our own young adults in this regard. So I am grateful to our Indian partners, above all, for their reminder to their Irish visitors and especially those of us who love and work with young adults, that the conversation about what education is for, after all, is one that we must not fail to nurture.
Dhanyavaad, India. Thank you.
The Rev Katherine Meyer is Presbyterian/Methodist chaplain at Trinity College Dublin.