Our first stop will be the Musahar people of India and Nepal. They are at the front of the line because the reasons for their neglect is the same for the other children. In them are embodied the recurring traits that obscure the children we will meet.
Two million Musahar people live in the northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in India and the Terai of Nepal. Though mostly unknown to the church, God watches over them closely. He finds great pleasure in their great beauty. He is pleased to see their creative talents glow. He knows what makes them delighted and what brings them sorrow. He built into them the natural closeness of their family and village life. Over generations they have shown a determined resilience and hustle in their survival.
That last comment gives a hint about their challenges, challenges that are extreme in the hurt and the destitution they have brought. All this is because these people, the Musahar, are known as the people who catch rats, as the people who eat rats.
We have to understand caste to see how eating rats lowers them in the Hindu world. Caste determines family and territory, but also work, status, and employment. These facets of life are immovable, fixed forever, generation after generation.
The caste of the Musahar stems from the single fact that they eat rats. Their resulting social profile would be: isolated, poor, malnourished, illiterate, unsanitary, and unskilled. Those who eat and chase rats deserve nothing but disdain and rejection. Their caste keeps them there. (They are not the lowest caste among the Dalits. That sad honor goes to the people who clean out toilets, and where there are not toilets, cleaning out whatever is used.)
The isolation comes from no one wanting to work alongside Musahar. That leaves them with the most menial jobs. What opportunities for advancement can they have when they have no money? Education is cut off because families cannot afford pens and paper for the children. Even if they could show up in school, the classes are not in a language that the Musahar speak. How can they find skilled labor when they cannot handle the simplest instructions? For their health, their life expectancy is below most other groups in Nepal. What can they expect when their diet includes rats, they are unable to afford good food, and health care is simply absent?
Translating that into a particular Musahar person, he or she would come across as grubby, ill-behaved, weird, smelly, awkward, and just plain repugnant.
The unspoken—but loudly whispered—conclusion by outsiders is that they don’t count, they are unimportant, they are unworthy for any outside efforts to improve their life. People’s vision goes right past them; they remain unseen.
This is what makes the Musahar people the prototype for what we will learn of “God’s Other Children.” These are the same reactions to the hungry, the slaves, the abandoned children of the world. They are so low, so deprived, so unable to rise up, they are simply unworthy.
Even to some Christian outsiders, the attitude is, “Why would anybody want to try to minister to those people?” That is not a hypothetical question. A friend of mine expressed her desire for the Musahar people to know the transforming love of Jesus Christ. The response she received from local pastors was that very question.
But we as Christians know differently. We know that our Savior, when walking along a road one day, encountered a man who fit the Musahar description to a T. He was a leper. And we know that Jesus spoke love to him, touched him, and healed him.
We know that the Musahar are considered despised, having no dignity and nothing attractive, no one taking notice of them, ignored as if they were nothing. But we recognize those words as the same words in Isaiah 53 that describe Jesus. Truly, they are worthy. God loved them so much he sent his son to die for them.
And that is what angels see.
For this profile and the others to some, we close with two responses: what we can offer to them, and what we can receive from them?
What can we offer: The Musahar represent the hundreds of ethnic groups that the church of Jesus Christ has looked past and just not seen. What would correct this vision? Research: research that uncovers ethnic groups who have no translation of the Bible, few if any workers, no local leaders. Research becomes their only their voice. Who else speaks for them? Their only voice speaking to the church is research. We can offer the church those resources of penetrating research on those unreached with the gospel.
What should we receive? What can draw us as individuals closer to the love of God for people like the Musahar? A deep, true, and thorough examination of our own hearts to see if, who, and how we look past, neglect, and count some or someone unworthy–someone who is dearly loved by our Lord.
