Pastor Nandu

Nandu and his son Nicolas

I wanted to tell you a little bit about our host and Asia's Hope regional director for northeast India, Pastor Nandu Gurung. Nandu has served as a pastor since graduating from the Kathmandu Theological Seminary in Nepal in 1998. He has served God in Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, the U.K. and the U.S. In 2010, Nandu received his Masters of Theology from the University of Wales and his MBA from Sikkim Manipal University.

...this guy is quite the under achiever...

Nandu and his wife, Anu, have two children, Appia and Nicolas. For the past decade, he and his family have taken orphaned children into their home. These are children he has met while evangelizing and training pastors in remote villages throughout the Northeastern region of India. Here's an excerpt from Sam Van Voorhis blog that tells Nandu and Anu's story so well.

"Nandu & Anu love orphans. And as Christians – they take their obligation to care for orphans so seriously that they seemingly can’t say no when there are children in need. Nandu started taking in kids years ago, before they had adequate resources to do so.  It didn’t matter. He went deeply into debt to care for kids orphaned to landslides, disease and abandonment.

Nandu and Anu didn’t simply sponsor children by allowing a few bucks to be drafted from their credit card each month, they took them into their own home and found a way to clothe and feed them.

When Nandu & Anu found some help from a church in North Carolina, I am sure that it eased their burden temporarily.  And when a US non-profit called Asia’s Hope stepped up and agreed to help fund two small orphanages in Kalimpong, it provided some much-needed stability.

But Nandu has a soft heart and an open door policy when it comes to orphans in the Himalayas. So when I arrived in Kalimpong to visit Nandu this week, Anu and the kids, I wasn’t too surprised to learn that he had already taken responsibility for another dozen orphans. We were welcomed by the kids in orange shirts were from Kalimpong 1.  And then we were greeted by kids in green shirts from Kalimpong 2.  But who were the kids in red shirts?

Soon we learned that the kids in red were new children that Nandu had taken into his care – without a funding source. How were they being cared for…I wondered…almost aloud….then actually aloud. Nandu explained that they were living at his father’s house and that members of the local church were “tithing rice” to feed the children. The people in Kalimpong weren’t writing checks.  But they would separate a handful of rice for the orphans when they prepared a meal for themselves.

Nandu calls these new orphans “provisional children…” They are Nepali, Bhutanese & Indian children from the hills just south of the world’s highest mountains. And I am sure that Nandu & Anu hope that there will be help from the U.S. to fund “Kalimpong 3.”

But for now, these 12 “provisional children” are being “provided for” by Indian Christian families giving sacrificially…by families who are “tithing rice.”