Jesuit Journeys
winter 2005

Risking all to walk with Christ

BY FR. MIKE KOLB, SJs

A young Maweit boy, young Maweit boy, First Day Diengngam, carries water to his school from a nearby stream, an errand the author lightly refers to as “running water" for the village.

He is a man of indomitable spirit, a Jesuit priest in the extreme northeast region of India known as Kohima where political challenges can put at grave risk anyone devoted to educating and empowering repressed peoples and, in the process, teaching them about Jesus Christ. Yet that is what Fr. Wilfred Kharpuri, SJ does with energy and enthusiasm every day of his life. The area and tribal people he serves are somewhat forgotten – no roads, no electricity, no running water, and few teachers in this part of the jungle. Meeting him was as humbling as his life is fascinating. After all, the biggest threat I have faced in the past three years as a guidance counselor and coach at Marquette High is too much nicotine and the occasionally disruptive or unmotivated student. I learned early on in my visit to Kohima last summer just how different his life as a Jesuit is from mine.

Four of us, Sr. Helen Albizuri, her helper, Fr. Wilfred of us, Sr. Helen Albizuri, her helper, Fr. Wilfred F and I, are crouched on a six-inch high bench, talking to the retired tiger lady. The conversation is spirited but laborious: Wilfred to Helen in Khasi, Helen to the tiger lady in Lyngngam, then back again. Occasionally Wilfred exclaims “My God! Unbelievable!” Occasionally he offers bits of the conversation to me. “She would go into a trance and send her shadow or spirit or something out and it would become a tiger.”

Fr. Wilfred Kharpuri, SJ (right) and Fr. Robert Pohrman, SJ.

The darkness in the village deepens, candles are lit; the conversation goes on. “Oh, my! Oh, my! This is amazing!” Wilfred mutters. I look around at the wet walls of woven bamboo, the bamboo floor, the old lady and her husband and her son crouched opposite us. “My grandmother would tell me stories like this,” Wilfred tells me, “but here I am talking to one of these people!”

“Do you believe it?” I ask.

Villagers from Mawmeirin gather outside their church with Fr. Robert Pohrman, SJ

“She believes it. That’s the important thing,” Wilfred replies. St. Ignatius Parish lies in Northeast India, as far west as you can go in the West Khasi Hills of Meghalaya. About a year ago, Fr. Wilfred was sent out to begin the parish, centered in the town of Maweit and serving maybe two hundred square miles of jungle villages. Most of the parish members are of the Lyngngam people, and most of them are desperately poor. When the Society of Jesus asked the bishop of Shillong to open their new novitiate in the diocese, he asked that they also take up some apostolic service there. Asked for the place the Society’s services were most needed, he mentioned Maweit and the Lyngngams. Fr. Kharpuri was sent out to get things started and was later joined by Fr. Robert Pohrman, SJ, fresh from ordination.

Vilalgers stand on the steps of a smaller church in an outlying village near Maweit that is also served by Kohima Jesuits

Maweit has a number of advantages: as a market town, people gather there every eight days – weekly in the Lyngngam calendar used in the region. A pair of Xaverian sisters has spent years serving there. Sr. Mary Wanbokshadap has run the grade school for 6 years; Sr. Helen has served for 11 years in the dispensary and making the rounds of the villages, preaching the gospel of mosquito netting, boiled water and pre-natal care.

A view of the church at Maweit.

It is July. The monsoon rains beat down on the tin roof of the residence for the seventh straight day. Wilfred brings out a charcoal brazier in an attempt to dry out the room. The conversation is lively and the pounding rain quite loud. “I was a city boyin the seminary, and there were about 10 of us from the Shillong area,” he says. “We looked down on the rest of the class as country bumpkins. These country fellows formed a choir, and I was a very good singer. They refused to let me join. I was crushed – though I probably deserved it because of how we treated them. I was in the hall crying and miserable and wanting to leave the seminary. Then I heard God tell me ‘I will be with you.’ So I got serious, changed my attitude, and was the best I could be.”

A villager modles a Khasi umbrella.

Fr. Wilfred is a Khasi, the dominant tribe of central Meghalaya. He overcame the opposition of his father and joined the diocesan minor seminary in seventh grade. After an early adjustment, he rose to consistently rank in the top of his class. A year or so before ordination, he made a retreat with a visiting Jesuit and was inspired to join the Society of Jesus. The bishop was furious, reluctantly granting permission but with the warning that he would not be allowed to return to the diocese if he left the Society. After completing his Jesuit formation he was ordained in 1996, the first native of the Northeast to serve in the region. After work in projects throughout the region, most recently as assistant novice master, he jumped in the jeep and headed west to Maweit.

Several hundred people, many walking for hours, have come to be at the Mass. Wilfred hears confessions for two hours, then at Mass preaches for about 45 minutes. “We get to see them so rarely,” he explains. “The area is just so big.” Later we visit families. He prays with a woman who is badly depressed over the loss of a child. A man is convinced his child has died because his home is built on a demons’ highway: Wilfred talks to him about thepower of Jesus over evil spirits, prays at great length, sprinkles holy water around the house and around the property. After the blessing, the man still looks terrified, doubtful.

Author Fr. Mike Kolb, SJ (center) posses with fr. Robert Pohrman, SJ and Sr. Mary Wanbokshadap, who runs the grade school at Maweit.

The people in the area eagerly embraced the new parish and the new pastor. Three or four came forth as leaders for the community. Someone provided the land at a giveaway price. More than 100 hundred people helped in the construction: men wove the bamboo walls; women and children hammered stones into gravel for the cement floor. Catholics in the jungle villages were excited to have Mass more than once every few years. Reality soon set in. Mass attendance at the main church flagged. The original leaders seemed to disappear. In an area where the main concern is surviving malaria and malnutrition, people willing to be catechists are rare. The school needs another grade, which means more construction, which means a lot of money. Most of the roofs leak, and there are no local folks to fix them. Teachers in the village schools need more pay than their current equivalent of eight or nine dollars a month. How do you ask for tuition in an area where the people eat once a day for about half the year?

Plans go on. Fr. Wilfred hopes the parish can begin self-help groups soon, circles of women who learn how to use banks, how to save, how to pool resources to invest in looms or animals or anything that will generate a little more income. He hopes that he can get someone to teach construction of terraced rice paddies to increase food production, and someone to teach weaving to the local women. The school needs to expand, perhaps as a farming and vocational institution as a first step. Model fields and model husbandry might help overcome the inherent conservatism of the people. It is a very large job that will take a lot of patience. Fr. Wilfred Kharpuri is not a patient man.

Students line up for lunch at St. Mary's School in Maweit.

We tour the property on a rare sunny day. Fr. Wilfred beats the bushes on the climbing trailside, hoping to dislodge the terrestrial leeches that lie in wait. Behind us in one valley the jeep trail stretches back toward Shillong and civilization. The parish property lies in the valley we face rising up to the Jesuit residence, the school, the dispensary, the church on top of the next hill. Fr. Wilfred describes where the new residence will be, where the boys’ dorm might go, which hill will be leveled for the high school, which valley filled for the new soccer field. “What a job to do!” he says. “What a job!”

Fr. Mike Kolb, SJ is a guidance counselor at Marquette University High School in Milwaukee. Contact him at mkolb@jesuitswisprov.org.

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