Imphal, November 02 2008: Girls living in an orphanage in Bangalore, India, were each given 500 rupees to shop with by Sue Albin of Belton, a former teacher at Central Texas Christian School.

After buying a dress in the suburb of Yelahanka, the girls were at the equivalent of a local dollar store spending the rest of their money.

The need for education, dealing with civic unrest, bombings and upcoming elections are all on the mind of Sue Albin of Belton.

While those topics easily fit into American interests, she was talking about India after returning from a five-month trip there.

Ms.Albin is affiliated with Southeast Asia ministries for The Lord Will Provide, a Christian ministry based in Temple (www.

the LORD will provide.org).

During her time in India, the former teacher at Central Texas Christian School in Temple has done a myriad of things, including teaching at an orphanage in Bangalore and helping to build a home for orphans and widows in Manipur, a state in northeastern India.

There are a variety of factions involved around the country, she said, mentioning communists, Muslims, Christians and the majority Hindus.

The latest unrest saw bombs planted in cars and rickshaws Thursday in crowded markets in Gauhati in northeast India, killing at least 76 people and wounding more than 300 .

Some of the violence is related to politics, Ms.Albin said.

But what seems like a simple breakdown of one group against another is not always that way.

In one area where she was, Ms.Albin said there were basically two sets of people.

The converted Christians had become a little more prosperous in an area where people had very little, so the non-Christians were jealous not because of the Christianity but because of the relative prosperity.

In another area, even though communists said they killed a Hindu swami, some right-wing Hindus attacked the Christians anyway, Ms.Albin said.

"It's mob violence".

Radical Muslims have bombed Hindu shrines, leading some radical Hindus to throw rocks at Christians.

Elsewhere, a motorbike bomb was traced to a woman with the BKG party, a radical Hindu group.

Some Christians flee to areas more receptive to them, forming large refugee areas.

"It's just a powder keg," Ms.Albin said, although she never felt in personal danger.

Most people in India don't have a lot, and the poor are angry with the government.

With a rigid caste system, many young Muslims can't get jobs so they are drawn into violence instead.

One thing that happened seemed to make people say this is enough, Ms.Albin said.

One of the two Muslim families in a small village of about 500 were burned to death after someone set a fire at 2 in the morning.

There were small children involved, and it was just a family trying to make a living and the incident hit a lot of people the wrong way, she said.

"I think some people had the same reaction that I did, 'That's too much,' and things quieted down," Ms.Albin said.

She and Stephen Burke of Temple, the founder of The Lord Will Provide who has also been to India, said there's benefit from the oppression as well.

The government sent two police officers to every church to protect people, meaning that two Hindu police who probably had never been exposed to the gospel heard it something Burke noted was a good thing out of the bad things happening.

While there is unrest in the country, Burke said, one of the things that keeps both him and Ms.Albin from worrying is how God "protects us when we are in the country of His will." Authorities in India don't really want to admit that things are happening with churches, Ms.Albin said, because that makes people curious.

She said that she hates sounding critical of a place that she loves and is called to serve, but that India has some areas it needs to address.

Ms.Albin said 42 percent of the people in India live below the poverty line, which is $1.25 a day.

Four of every 10 children in India are malnourished, she quoted from a United Nations report printed in the Times of India.

One-third of the world's poor, 456 million people, live in India.

"It's just overwhelming," Ms.Albin said.

Ms.Albin saw much of her efforts, besides raising money and helping the orphanages, as being a support person to the small groups of Christians in India.

Both Burke and Ms.Albin said they personally did not feel in danger, even though they casually mentioned being places where bombs had gone off at different times from when they were there.

Ms.Albin spoke of a place where she often had to wait in line for hours for government permits where they were "lobbing bombs" and Burke talked about waiting across the street in an Internet caf� because an official wasn't there yet.

They get some support from officials as well.

Burke said three officers from an area sheriff's department came to check him out when he was staying in Maram.

After Burke prayed for the top officer, the man told him through the translator that if Burke needed security, he should call the officer and he would send men to protect him.

Ms.Albin pointed out that people there wanted to see a "white lady sent from God" and often asked her to pray for them "just in case you're right".

She called it planting seeds, noting that it is God who converts anyone to Christianity.

When she goes back to India, Ms.Albin said, there will be work to do on the building in Manipur.

It is a slow process, she said, with government regulations often holding up the process on things as simple to Americans as getting a water system set up.

She thinks that educating more people something else she has a strong faith in will help solve the poverty and other problems.

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