Earth Day in Puri, Orissa, India

This April, I was invited to come on a climate change immersion trip with the Lutheran World Federation. Together with the other twenty-three delegates from many countries, we traveled to Calcutta and to Puri, Orissa state. We visited several farming and fishing communities along the Bay of Bengal and talked with the people there. Sometimes, people would guide us to the beach and would point to a sandbank far out in the ocean – this was where their village, their fields, their livelihood had been, before floods took everything away. If one listened carefully, one could hear the pain that remained branded on the people’s hearts. If one listened carefully, one could also hear the hope and the determination to live and to re-build their community.

Having contributed my share to the increasingly rapid progression of climate change that have cost my Indian hosts so dearly, it was hard to listen to them speaking first of all about their guilt in bringing about devastation to themselves. And it was perhaps even harder to listen to their reports of how they are now changing their society, economy, and agricultural practices to build a healthy environment and a better life and to, perhaps, save themselves from another catastrophe … the sea, the local goddess, once more traveled from afar and it is close to their doorsteps.

Sitting together in the community meeting house, Peter Matthews, a pastor of the Methodist Church, asked the people o the village: “How does climate change affect specifically the women?”
A woman stood up and said: “We do not care so much about ourselves. Our children are the most important thing for us. It is for our children that we care the most. We notice that our children get a heat stroke more often then before. It is getting so much warmer now. We are planting trees now; we take care of our trees now. We used to cut trees down, until there were no more trees. We think that our gods have punished us for this, with the super cyclone and now that it is getting so hot. We did wrong with the trees. Now we plant trees. And we do not cut them for firewood; we collect only dry branches or dry leaves for our kitchen fires. The trees give shadow for our children. They can be under the trees. The trees are life for us. That is one way of how climate change is affecting us women.”

Asking myself what I do to change my lifestyle, except for changing light bulbs, I hear a stabbing silence – as one of the women took me by my hand and led me into the sea for a refreshing footbath, I realized with clarity that enduring that silence won’t do any longer.

The blessing at the conclusion of the Eucharist at Puri:
May God, the mother of the village well and the village women, help you draw water for life and laughter. May God, the father of the outcaste poor and deserted Dalits, meet you waiting in their streets and teach you hope. May Jesus, a son to malnourished mothers and a brother to unwanted daughters, teach you to be a midwife who brings new life from the risen one. May the Spirit who seeks justice for Earth oppressed by the ways of the past, lead you to open new eyes to see the path beyond evil to freedom. Amen

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