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DATELINE: GOING TO CHURCH WITH MANY FRIENDS FROM MUMBAI here in KUWAIT during THE SEIGE IN INDIA , Friday November 28, 2008
By Kevin Stoda
In Kuwait , many Christians go to church on Friday because:
(a) many have to work six days a week and Friday is the only official day off for non-Kuwaitis, and
(b) getting time off to drive in traffic jams to church on Sunday evenings wears them down.
My own particular small Kuwaiti church fellowship is made up of approximately 10 percent Americans, 50 percent Indians, and 40 percent Filipinos.
As fate would have it, on this past Wednesday night as the deaths murders and mayhem began in and around the Taj Mahal hotel and environs, I was watching a cricket match of the Indian national team versus Britain at the homes of my many Indian church friends from Mumbai.
However, that particular Wednesday evening, the media from India was blacking-out news of the horrible events in Mumbai until well after the British team was trounced.
It was only after I arrived at work the next morning that I learned of the horrible things that were occurring in India .
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081128/ap_on_re_as/as_india_shooting_150
Thursday afternoon, I called one of my church friends here in Kuwait , i.e.someone who had grown up and lived in Mumbai most of the past two decades.
His name is Pradeep and he had been trained to work in the hotels in- and around the Taj Mahal Hotel and in a hotel training school situated near there. Pradeep shared that luckily although he, himself, had walked those very streets for years, he had yet to hear any bad news from his internet contacts in Mumbai that day.
RESPONDING TO A CRISIS
By the time my Kuwaiti Church fellows had all gathered for Church on Friday morning, November 28, 2008, the Siege of Mumbai was now nearly two full-days old--and well over a hundred had been killed at 16 different locations in Mumbai.
The particular Indian who did "the welcoming message" in our church service had also lived a great portion of his life in Mumbai-his wife and kids are still there. This Indian's name is Hemant, and he noted that a friend of his brother's had been buried the previous evening-after getting killed in the first moments of shooting on Wednesday night.
