India Update #3

Greetings to my friends and family back in America. It is time to update you on my happenings once again. And I am pleased to say that all is well. My health is quite good. Several weeks back I had a viral cold, but it
passed after one week. By God's grace it didn't overpower me to keep me from my work. This letter is a compilation of many things that have happened in the last four weeks or so. The whole letter is in
chronological order.

Television Ministry

I had a meeting with the Assistant general manager, Phillip Augustine, from the Miracle Net Satellite network. He reviewed my progress on the program, and made suggestions. It was a great help to me and encouraging hearing about some of the other gospel programs that are out there. During the meeting, Yesupadam even arranged for another man who runs a Bible College here in town to come and give some input. The meeting was very helpful to me and I was greatly assisted from what I learned.

According to Phillip, all the programs he airs use green screens and some make up their own backgrounds from stock scenery footage. He strongly suggested that we follow suite, and I was happy to comply. I
am still in the process of setting up a green screen. The cloth has proved to be somewhat difficult to obtain here. However I was able to get a blue screen two days back. Setting it up is proving challenging, and I will spare you the details there. I am hoping that today I will be able to go to town to get the final supplies to set it up properly.
If that works out I will do some test shooting tonight to make certain that it will work. And if it is suitable, I will start the recording again of Yesupadam's messages.

Free time

I have been spending more time reading and studying during the last three weeks or so. I have improved my Telugu Phonetics by quite a bit during that time. The language is somewhat easy to learn to read
and speak once the alphabet is memorized. The words can be sounded out phonetically without rules so once you know the alphabet it can be read properly.

Monsoon Flood Relief

Love n Care recently sent a team of their pastors on a trip to help with the flood relief. I was invited to go and I went along with Dr. Janardhan, and Pastor Prasad. It was a 200 km road trip south. We left at 5:00am sharp, and made a stop for breakfast (Tiffin) about 8:00am. We then drove on for a few more hours and came to a large city named Rajamundry where we purchased Sarees (Indian dresses) for the flood-affected pastor's wives. We also purchased blankets, steel plates, cups and other eating utensils for the villagers in some of
the flooded areas.

I made an attempt to document the trip with the video camera. Pastor Prasad was my cameraman. Some of the pastors and I narrated what was happening. I quickly reviewed the video a few days back and it looks like you can get a good feel for the trip. There is some video bobbing due to my cameraman. But if you have a strong stomach you should be okay.

The trip was very neat. I really enjoy riding with Pastor Prasad and Dr. Janardhan. They are more adventurous with me than most of the Indians. Because of that I was able to try out about a half dozen different types of food I hadn't tasted yet. I really appreciate their fellowship. They are amazing guys.

Sovereign Grace Medical Team '06

The medical team from Sovereign Grace ministries came yesterday. As soon as they arrived here they unpacked some of their medicines and organized them and headed off to a village where they set up a free
medical camp and treated several hundred villagers. After they came back from the mission around 7:30pm they finished organizing all the medicine they brought. They had a big day and I think they were quite
beat by the time they went to bed.

Well I suppose I will stop here. Those are the main items of note, I will send out an update email when I send the first television program to Miracle Net. I think that will be soon, the momentum is building up right now and things are happening quickly.

To God be the glory,

Joshua