The Kothapallimitta/St. Peter's/St. Alban's Companionship: A Short History

by Kitty Ferguson

It all began in the winter and spring of 1999. Zachary Fleetwood, then Rector at St. Peter's, was searching for ideas for a truly significant project that would engage and inspire the St. Peter's congregation the way the South African Companionship had some years before. As part of this process, he asked Prince Singh, then our Pastoral Associate, to give a Lenten adult education series on the tragic Dalit situation in India. Prince knew it first hand. He had close acquaintances working for the Dalit Campaign for Human Rights (centered then in Chittoor), in the Christian Seminary in Bangalore, and at Pravaham - a Christian retreat center not far from Chittoor. Furthermore, before he had come to the U.S., Prince had been the Pastor (Church of South India) for three years in Kothapallimitta, a desperately poor, remote, rural, Dalit ("untouchable") pastorate with one pastor, one main church, and thirty-eight village congregations spread over 3850 square kilometers. The region had been "Christianized" by Australian missionaries early in the twentieth century, and those Australians had been the first ever to tell the "untouchable" people of Kothapallimitta that they were human beings - and not only that, but children of God. It had not been a plum assignment for Prince Singh. "The Bishop sent me there because, frankly, he didn't like my face," said Prince. "It was Siberia." But Prince fell in love with the Dalit people of Kothapallimitta, and they with him.

Following the Lenten series, Zack and Prince began putting ideas in place for a Companionship between St. Peter's and India. After some worrying about whether getting involved would be throwing our know-it-all American weight around in a culture and religion that are not our own, a group of us were won over by arguments that the human rights situation of the Dalits was grave enough to be a worldwide concern and that our own particular mission would not be to try to convert people of other religions to Christianity. These Dalits were already Christian. We Americans could actually learn quite a bit by looking at our faith from the vantage point of these despised, oppressed people. Prince drew up a chart in the form of a cross, with Pravaham, Kothapallimitta, the Christian Seminary in Bangalore, and the Dalit Campaign for Human Rights at the four points, and we set about trying to decide with which one we would try to have a companionship. I recall a meeting in Zack's office, with Buzz Shaw (who had been hugely involved in the South Africa Companionship), Prince, Zack, and Grace Terwilliger. At one point in the discussion Grace looked at me and spoke like an oracle, "Yale and Kitty should go to India and they should take Caitlin." And so it happened.

The decision about where our Companionship should focus (at which point of Prince's cross diagram) had not yet been made when Prince and his wife Roja took Zack and me and my husband Yale (then rising Senior Warden) and our daughter Caitlin (then 20) to India in January 2000. It was, however, an intentional, clear sign of the strong level of commitment St. Peter's already had for this project that the church sent two of its clergy and one of its wardens on the first delegation! In India, though we visited and considered all four "points" Prince had drawn on his cross chart, we, as Prince had earlier, fell in love with the people of Kothapallimitta -- a people of grace and nobility, but living on the brink of starvation. Caitlin summed up our visit in a speech for our congregation when we got back, "No matter how different our lives and our cultures are, I have never before had as much of a sense of God bringing together people who were meant to be together as I had there."