The Border

One night shortly before a meeting I took off down a dark country road toward the nearby village in hopes of finding either a soy vanilla cappuccino, with an extra shot and whipped cream, or a cup of tea. I wasn't going to quibble about which, because I'm a Christian, and if I had insisted these villagers give me a cappuccino when they lacked the resources, that would have made them feel awkward and possibly compromised my witness (I think I read this in a book on evangelism.) I had just managed to make out from one of the local residents that chai wasn't a likely scenario that time of night, when a few of the guys on our ministry team caught up with me and dragged me back to the meeting. They told me I shouldn't have been walking alone at night because we were too close to the Pakistan border (five kilometers I was told). What's more, they're making chai back at the meeting, idiot. At least, I'm sure that's what they said in Punjabi.

After one night of meetings, after the aforementioned marriage wake, we drove to the Attari-Wagah border--the only road border crossing between India and Pakistan--where we observed that exercise in neighborly bellicosity, the Wagah Border Ceremony.



Unless you're invincible, don't try to skip over by land any other way than by this Grand Trunk Road crossing. Mines, guards, floodlights, barb wires. Offenders are shot on sight. As a stark representation of the political conflicts that led to its construction and the artificial divisions such conflicts have induced, the fence is grimly reminiscent of the Berlin Wall.