INNER VISION

Shunned by their families and burdened by their physical disability, a group of visually impaired men and women congregates in a church at a slum rehabilitation scheme near Pune to find the strength and inspiration to live

IT is a church with a difference. It hardly fits in with one’s definition of a church, one that conjures images of pews arranged neatly on either side of the aisle leading up to the altar with its high arches and stained-glass panels. Instead, it’s only a 10 ft by 10 ft room with an adjoining kitchen. The congregation is also quite unlike any you might have seen.
As the sun sets on a blistering day and dusk sets in, they start trickling down the lane, sometimes a lone man, sometimes a bunch of three or four. The churchgoers take steady, measured steps as they make their way forward. Finally, by 7.30 pm, they all climb up the narrow staircase leading to the apartment that is to be their church this week.
It neither matters to them that the stairs are unlit nor that the lone 100-watt bulb provides only dim light in the room for the 40-odd people who are packed in there. All of them, except a group of children present, are visually impaired.
The Sabbath Day service lasts about an hour. Starting off with a few hymns sung aloud in Marathi, the congregation moves on to reading the Bible in Braille. Before winding up the church service with a prayer for the happiness they’ve been given even as they continue to feel their way around in a dark world, it is time to give their testimonies.
And speaking with unbridled passion is 50-year-old Arun Kurne. He has reason to be thankful —he was cured of Stage II leprosy a few years ago and since then has only this brotherhood to depend on after his wife and children deserted him. He feels doubly blessed since he knows lepers being cured marked the ministry of Jesus in the Bible, just as giving sight to the blind did.

THE credit for setting up this Church in Ota, a slum rehabilitation scheme in Nigdi, around 20 km from Pune city, goes to Sunil Agale and his wife. Agale came to Rupee Nagar, Nigdi, in 1997 as the pastor of the local Evangelical Church of India. “It was a big church with very low attendance,” recalls Agale. “On the way to the church I would see dozens of visually impaired men and women walking across the roads and I began thinking about them. I started thinking that this was where my calling was,” he adds.
It was in early 2001 that Agale and wife Swarupa began spending time with the afflicted people. Over the next few months, the young pastor got 14 people from some six families to start attending informal Saturday meetings.
“It was tough to convince them that I wanted nothing from them as they had never experienced someone actually making an effort to spend time with them, shunned as they were by their families and society. In November 2001, I decided to cut my strings with the Evangelical Church where I was being paid about Rs 2,000 a month and start working on my own with these people, building up a ministry among them,” says Agale.
To make ends meet, Agale began talking in other churches about his work with the blind. Some responded, some didn’t. Says his wife Swarupa, who has a bachelors degree in Theology from Bible College, Nagpur: “I also began to spend time with women who had a host of problems. But the graver issue was about the difficulties a visually challenged couple had in bringing up their children. It is often a difficult task and that is where I am trying to make a difference.”
The Agales tried to align themselves with the Chennai-based Mission to the Blind, with Agale signing up in 2004 as their Maharashtra coordinator for the next three years. “It didn’t work out as they had a larger canvas and my concern continued to be the plight of the blind in the Rupee Nagar colony. In 2007, we decided to do the work on our own and started the New Life Centre for the Blind.”
Though the Agales keep teaching the blind the word of God and have a following of about 40 men and women, they are also trying to take care of the 115 or so children of the 70-odd blind families in the region.

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