About Us

Welcome to our blog! We are Allison and Sara Pennington from the Lone Star state and we have been blessed with the opportunity to travel to Mumbai, India, to serve with a pastor and his wife for several months in the slums. We are currently planning on leaving in August, and returning late fall.

I (Sara) started this blog so that our friends and family will be able to keep up with our journey there and back, ask questions, and be aware of prayer needs that will arise.

Here are some facts about the treatment in India regarding women along with some other facts:

1. Young girls are sold into human trafficking as young as age 2.

2. A woman is viewed as "cursed" if her husband dies (whether from natural causes or from something as accidental as being mauled by a tiger while harvesting honey - true story). Her family views the death as her fault, and as a widow she is cast out of her family, never to marry again, usually having to provide for herself the rest of her life. Since she has no trained skill, the work that she has to do is usually back-breaking manual labor (for about $1 a day) until she is too old or weak to walk, and then she slowly starves to death, since no one will help her. Sometimes the girls get married when they're around 14, and then the husband will die within the first 5 years, and they have to live from that time on as a widow.

3. Wives are viewed as cursed/worthless when girls are born; they only want male children. One woman was forced into taking abortion pills by her in-laws when she became pregnant the third time because her first two children were girls.

4. Infanticide has been on the rise; the government has had to ban sonograms because once they found out the child in the womb was a girl, they'd kill her.

5. Because only boy children are wanted, there are now about 37 million more men than women.

6. 60% of the people that live in Mumbai (where we will be going) live in slums. Most of them are Dalits, the lowest of the castes, who have no hope because their religion teaches that they are that way because of their previous life.

7. Most of the fathers in the slums are drunkards, and spend the evening gambling with the other men and drinking, leaving the wife to scrounge in the garbage trying to gather up enough food for a meal a day.

8. If a man marries a woman from a lower caste, the man's family will try to kill the girl (and sometimes the man, also), because they view it as a loss of honor for their family for the castes to mix.

9. The dowry is still very prevalent in the Indian society, and if the husband does not believe he was given enough money as a dowry, he will threaten (and often kill) his wife if her family does not give him more money.
10. One out of every 10 persons in the world is a Dalit or OBC (other backward caste)
11. Mumbai is about the same size as Dallas. Except Dallas only has 2 million people living there - Mumbai has 20 million people living there.

These are just many of the facts of “normal’ life in India. It is truly a hopeless and spiritually dark land, despite their religious facade. But God! He is sending laborers and light is penetrating through the darkness, and the people are learning about true hope in Christ!