The village of Ratanpur had a problem with ghosts.
That is how it was explained to me the first time I drove in: three children had died in the last year, all under five, all in the same neighborhood. The village priest had performed rituals. The elders had consulted one another. No one could explain why children kept dying.
I could. It was the well.
Our team tested the water and found bacterial contamination at levels that made the result sheet look like a mistake. We treated the well. We taught basic hygiene. We came back two months later and tested again.
The children stopped dying.
Word moved faster than we did. By the time we returned for a third visit, a woman named Savitri — a Dalit woman who would have been invisible in the caste hierarchy that still quietly governs rural Rajasthan — was waiting for us. She wanted to know about the God we served.
Not because of anything we had said. We had not preached once.
She had watched us treat Dalit children with the same care as upper-caste children. She had watched us touch people others would not touch. And she wanted to know: what would make anyone do that?
That conversation lasted three hours. It is still going.
Savitri has seven people meeting in her home every Thursday evening. They are working through the Gospel of John. They pray. They argue. They believe things about themselves — their worth, their dignity, their belovedness — that no one in their community has ever told them before.
I brought medicine to Ratanpur. I did not bring the church.
That was always going to be God’s work.