Brick Making & Lorry Blessing

Indians wake up early, and this morning I was enthusiastically reminded of my heritage. This reminder was not brought to me in the form of a gentle tap on the door or morning coffee (although I found my way to a cup of that shortly thereafter), but with a very lively ceremony just outside my window. This was not a ceremony for me, nor was it anything resembling that of a ceremony one might find anywhere else in the world. Only at the LAFTI headquarters in Kuthur, India at 8am would one be awakened to come outside and bless a truck. The thing is, this was not just any truck, it was a LAFTI lorry. A combination between several different donors, all LAFTI workers and staff were gathered around two small but highly decorated lorries that were sitting side by side on the dirt foundation between the main office and the kitchen. These two donated lorries are to be used for carrying bricks between LAFTI where the bricks are being made using a fly-ash brick-making machine (also donated), and the villages of the beneficiaries where the actual houses are being built. The lorries could not be used, however, until they had been blessed, and that’s where I come in. As an American, a guest, and as my Indian grandmother’s especially blessed and adopted granddaughter, together with Amma put our hands to a small bowl of fire, then immediately after to our face, dotted our foreheads with white and red powder, stood for a prayer, and then posed with the community and its newest lorries for a few photos. After this, I was informed that I should go back to my room and rest while those who had awaited my blessing would now go off and load bricks into these two newly blessed lorries.

From giving a speech on water filters to blessing a lorry, I went from feeling highly useful to completely useless. Although I enjoyed the honor of being such an important part of the brick making/lorry blessing ceremony, I must be honest and say that I was a bit frustrated with the possibility that I had come all the way to South India and to the LAFTI headquarters only to “bless things”. After some conversation with my parents in America who have spent much time in India and working with LAFTI throughout their years, I was informed that I was very lucky that I had figured out that this would be one of my main duties so early on in my stay. As my dad said during the conversation, “it took me 12 years to discover that blessing things was one of the best things I could do”. Talk about an internship description being changed, I decided to dive into the idea of being a “blesser” with an honest amount of hesitation, but with a big enough smile to make up for it.