The week has just begun, but it seems I’ve heard this song a hundred times already. It would help if it wasn’t the same verse, over and over, time after time. No amount of adding hand motions changes the fact that it’s the same, monotone chant in constant refrain. On a day like today (clap, clap) on a daaaaay like todaaaaay (clap, clap) on a daaaaaaaaay like tooooodaaaaaaaayyyy (clap clap) oooooooooooooh, I need Jesus!

The children love it. Really, they love Matt, who leads the song with palpable joy, waving his hands and clowning about. Some people lead children’s songs with pasted smiles, but you can feel Matt feed on the laughter. His smile gets bigger, his arms swing wider, so wide that he clocks Sarah in the stomach as we finish a verse (she won’t stand next to him during the song for the rest of the week). His singing, unfortunately, gets worse, as he abandons the notes altogether and develops a tuneless yell for the last half of the song. ON A DAAAAAAAAAAY LIKE TOOODAAAAAAAAAY! Some of the older kids abandon the hand motions in order to stick their fingers in their ears.

Peter’s voice is reverberating off the pale blue paint of the cement walls, easily filling the room with his presence. He is a commanding figure by any measure, but especially so in this room, where the audience sits so quietly, with a resounding humbleness. Most of their eyes are aimed downwards as they listen, as if looking at the speaker is a privilege they haven’t earned yet. These are our conference attendees, the men and women we’re to spend the next three days teaching the basics of Christian leadership. Where I come from, attending a conference is, at worst, an inconvenience. For some of these, discovery might put their lives in jeopardy. People have lied to their families, their husbands, to be here. Our lesson plans seem an inadequate reward for that sort of daring.

A tuft of breeze fills my nose with an overpowering scent of flowers from the lei that hangs about my neck. It is an honor I will never get accustomed to, to have a hula hoop-sized wreath of marigolds dropped over my head just for showing up someplace. I’m treated like a visiting dignitary and seated at the front of the room, to be stared at curiously by a pack of people I’ve never seen before. I don’t want to be up here. I want to be standing in the back, where I belong. I want someone to give me back my camera. The light is coming through that back window at just the right angle to catch a red-and-orange sari back there, and I want to take a picture of it.

Peter removed his lei seconds after they placed it on his head.  Am I being perceived a prideful by keeping mine on? That I feel that I deserve the honor? Out of the corner of my eye, I see John moving in his seat against the wall. He slowly takes off the lei and lays it carefully over the arm of his chair. That decides it.

“I’m gonna take mine off,” I whisper.

Sarah’s fingers dig into my arm. “Don’t you dare,” she hisses.

The pastor talks in a steady stream, his tone neither rising nor falling. He is soft-spoken, and it’s hard to hear him out here in the morning air, so we lean in close. He does not sound emotional. He does not seem in distress. One would think otherwise, to hear his story.

He was a high official in his mosque, got saved anyway, stealthily began a local ministry.  Some of the other officials from his mosque found one of his church members worshiping one day. They beat the man within an inch of his life and locked him up in a kitchen.

The officials called a meeting to discuss what was to be done. “If we kill the leader,” they decided, “this movement will stop.”

The pastor knew they were coming. But he didn’t leave. He waited for them. He waited for death, and when they came for him, he told them about Jesus.

There’s a grinding of gears from the front, and the bus pauses, then jerks forward sharply, sending all of us lurching out of our seats again. One of my hands clutches the camera; the other holds a death grip on the seat back. I click frame after frame out the side window, hoping for maybe a miracle or two out of several dozen blurred nothings.

The bus swings to the right as we switch lanes again, this time venturing for a short period into the oncoming lane and threading between motorcycles and rickshaws that honkingly announce their displeasure at this sudden behemoth with “TOURISM” splashed on its windshield.

I surrender to the inevitable and stow my camera away as the bus finally wobbles back over into its rightful land, trying not to sigh as potential photographs slip below my window and whisk away down the road.

As we shudder to a stop at yet another checkpoint, the navigator scrambles out of his bucket seat and climbs into the cabin with us. We are perhaps halfway between Delhi and Agra, on our way to see India’s crowning jewel, the Taj Mahal. What we were assured would be a three-and-a-half, perhaps four-hour journey has proved to be much more than that, and our enthusiasm is waning.

Slashes of  sunlight are drifting slowly across the wood paneling of the hotel lobby. I have nothing better to do, so my eyes chart their course across the wall, across plastic Greek columns and printed hotel paintings shipped in from wherever they print hotel paintings from.  At night, the nightclub next door beats its insistent thump through this room, but in the morning, it is quieter than most funeral homes. Only the whisper of cloth as the hotel workers pass back and forth breaks the silence.

The sharp change that comes from traveling halfway around the world has yet again briefly turned me into a deeply unwilling morning person.  I found myself fully awake well before the sun rose, and a few hours of tossing the sheets about and burying my head under the pillow later, I was finally forced to admit that sleep will not return.  So I’m slumped sleepily on one of the alarmingly vibrant love seats that dot the lobby – they’re decorated with a fabric I have entitled “Dizzy Zebra” – and am now trying to motivate myself to face the day.