Wet does not describe it...

It’s about 25 degrees centigrade outside on Easter Sunday as my team of five and I leave the fellowship gathering. Rachel, our long-term host is also with us. She is nervous, quite nervous. For the last three days she has been unwillingly drenched. We just arrived the day before and had a few spits and spots on the trek from the bus station to our temporary accommodation.

Rachel is trying desperately to hail a taxi, but they are all waving her away. So in the end, reluctantly, she joins us on our trek to the central square of town. We have got about a twenty minute walk home. By the team we get there, we have had scores of buckets thrown over us, balloons thrown at us. I have been winded and taken refuge in a bank. Three phones have perished, and the pages of our Bibles are permanently stuck together.

We are here in a Chinese border town only forty minutes from Burma. Our stay coincides very neatly with the Dai Water Splashing Festival. Although this festival is more famous throughout Myanmar and in Northern Thailand, the people group that celebrates it overflows into Yunnan in China’s South Westernmost province. Traditionally the major component of the festival is the right to gently tap someone’s shoulder with water in which has been sitting a mistletoe-like branch. This has evolved. Nowadays, rather than sweet old ladies tapping your shoulder, there are vibrant young men and boys with water guns and buckets. The shoulder is still a target, but so are your head, your back and your stomach. Particularly prized, it would seem, is the bucket of water down the back of a t-shirt.

Rachel, of course, knew what was coming. Last year, two other American residents had hired a truck and driven round with a bunch of friends and some massive waterguns. “Splash and run” is quite acceptable in the general merriment. Within fifteen seconds of arriving in the town centre, the seven foreigners were suddenly the favourite target of a few thousand local Dai people, and also the Han tourists who had flown in for the fun.

We purchased a few balloons, and water scoops, but frankly it was as if the might of India was invading the Scilly Isles. There was no let-up and there was no plausible defence or response.

We tried to understand the purpose of the festival. It is definitely a penitential event – the most likely mythical origin being an adulterer having to wash the Buddha for the rest of his life to make penance for sleeping with the Emperor’s wife.

The Chinese Dai take their Buddhism very seriously. A Dai-Buddhist background Christian may well find themselves ostracised from all aspects of village life, and from their own family. Rachel, among others, is providing a place for some young Dai Christians. She is part of a team performing HIV prevention skits around the county. The team are all young believers from various ethnic groups. They model Christ’s love in how they relate to each other, and the villagers they perform for. And they testify that forgiveness cannot be achieved through water-splashing, but only by the grace of Jesus Christ.