My interest in India goes back to my mother's Great-Aunt Hazel. My mother grew up in the hills of northeastern Appalachia, which her great-great grandparents had settled just after 1800. Her family were small farmers and coal miners. My grandparents struggled to feed their children, and their eldest son went to work in the mines at 14, earning $1 a day alongside his father.

Hazel was born in 1900 and died c. 1985. She was my grandfather's aunt, but her father, Caleb, had remarried late in life after his first wife died, and their children were actually younger than some of his grandchildren. The 2nd wife also died very young, so Aunt Hazel and her brother were raised by her older half-sister, my great-grandmother, alongside my grandfather and his brother. Additionally, her father's family and my great-grandmother's husband's family were very close, with more than one intermarriage and cousins related several ways. So Hazel was more like my grandfather's younger sister than his aunt.

There is a long history of Christian ministry in my mother's family. Hazel joined the Metropolitan Church Association, a mission-oriented church founded around 1920, which operated schools and orphanages and did social work in Appalachia and inner-city slums in the mid-western United States (and perhaps Europe; they had European churches), as well as sending missions to India, Africa and Mexico.

Throughout her youth, Hazel worked in the U.S. operations. Nevertheless, despite living hundreds of miles away from her family, she developed a close relationship with my mother. However, Aunt Hazel had long felt God calling her to work in India, and in the early 1930s, she approached the committe that made decisions about missionary vocations. They rejected her, saying that at her age, she was too old to learn Hindi.

Rather than take their word for it, Aunt Hazel added Indian languages studies to her workload in the seminary, school and orphanage. She also managed to remain involved with her family, and when my mother found it necessary to leave home immediately after graduating high school at 16, Aunt Hazel found a place for her in the MCA seminary. My mother began working toward following in her footsteps and becoming a missionary in the domestic operations.

About that time, Aunt Hazel went back to the overseas-mission committee, and demonstrated that she had learned not only Hindi, but Urdu, Telegu and a 4th language, the name of which I have forgotten. That being quite an accomplishment for anyone over 35, the committee decided she was correct about her calling and sent her to work at the Delhi mission.

She stayed for 32 years. She and one of her fellow missionaries imported the first grapefruit into India. Grapefruit is high in quinine, an effective malaria preventative and treatment. She saw the people were suffering from diseased teeth, so she studied basic dentistry so she could help them. The (British) government had land in the area where they (the government) had been trying to find a water source. After many attempts at drilling wells, they gave up and gave the barren land over to the mission. The missionaries promptly found an underground river running underneath, and were able to build wells and establish irrigated land for farming.

Incidentally, I can't see Aunt Hazel requiring anyone to attend church services or listen to a sermon before they got their grapefruit, had their teeth pulled, or got a drink a water.

I believe Aunt Hazel would have preferred to die in India, but in 1968 (when she was 72), she broke her hip and the church required her to come back to the U.S. After her hip healed, she lived in a house trailer near the family for a short while. My mother took me to visit her then during our annual trip "up home", and she visited us in Washington for Christmas. I still have the brass reindeer she brought me from India.

After a year or so of recovery, the church sent her to pastor a congregation in the mountains of Tennessee. She did that for few years, then "retired" to the church headquarters in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. By that time (1970s), responsiblity for the mission churches had largely been turned over to native-born pastors, many of the U.S. congregations were affiliating with other denominations, most of the missionaries were over 50, the schools and orphanages were closed, and the work of the Association was winding down. Headquarters had been moved to a former hotel, which was operated as a retirement home for the aging missionaries as they returned.

Until about 1984 or so--I saw her last in 1981--"retirement" for Aunt Hazel meant she "only" had responsibilities for helping run the retirement home  and care for residents more elderly/disabled than she was (there was a nursing home elsewhere for those who needed skilled nursing care, but those who merely needed "assisted-living" stayed at headquarters) and, on at least one occasion, taking the Greyhound bus down to the Mexican border to sort out issues with the mission there. (Long after Hazel's death, my youngest aunt was griping enviously about how much Hazel had "gotten" to travel--but an 800-mile bus trip at 85 doesn't sound like a privilege to me).

Sadly, in 1985 or 1986 (probably after a series of small strokes) she became bedridden and unable to recognize those around her. She was moved to the nursing for a year or so, until she passed away to be with her Lord.