The eighth and final entry in a series of posts by Bob Massey, a Los Angeles screenwriter who traveled to India with a team from Ecclesia Hollywood. + Click here to read previous posts

Our final stop is Mussoorie, an hour's harrowing taxi ride up into the Himalayan foothills from Dehradun. And it's dazzling. The town spreads across the hilltops, often seeming to float above the clouds. A short walk over the hillcrest reveals a 180-degree view of snowcapped Himalayas. Beyond them lies Tibet.

Mussoorie is the opposite of Mumbai: serene, beautiful, quiet. Though we all loved our time in the cities this comes as a relief. There's a well-regarded Hindi-language school here, so the town hosts a lot of expats. (It also hosts a lot of monkeys, who tend to swoop down and steal the expats' food off the café table.) Some of them (the expats) attend the tiny church run by our friends, a couple we'll call Fred and Ethel.

Fred grew up in one of the villages that lie in the shadows of those aforementioned Himalayas. No power, running water, or driveable roads, if I remember correctly. His family's faith, while technically Hindu, might be more accurately described as animist. They worshipped household gods. They kept homemade idols.

As a teenager Fred was recruited by some missionaries to assist at a school and it was there that he came to believe in Jesus. (They thought he was already a believer. Oh, that wacky cross-cultural communication thing….) Though he'd never finished the equivalent of high school, Fred went on to get three master's degrees. Along the way he met and married Ethel, also the recipient of advanced degrees. And they felt called to Mussoorie.

If you believe in Jesus and the stuff he said, then the earthly pursuit of justice emerges from Jesus himself. It's Jesus who demands justice and it's Jesus who fulfills it, ultimately. That's a little thing they call the gospel, and what Fred and Ethel do is train guys to walk out to those inaccessible villages in the mountains and tell people about this gospel thing in their own language and cultural context. It's a job that Western folks couldn't do correctly, nor even folks from the cities in India. The villages are too isolated and their language too idiosyncratic for non-natives.

The young guys they train come from those villages and they walk for days to get back to them. Much like Paul, Timothy, and Barnabas. It's pretty grueling work. But these dudes are just filled with energy and joy, and if you ask them to dance (as we did on our final day), they throw down, Garhwali-style.

And at Fred and Ethel's church the songs are mostly in Hindi. It's a real homegrown service but the non-natives in the room are mostly trying to learn Hindi anyway, so it works out.

We had the privilege of driving out to a couple of nearby villages with Fred, Ethel, their three kids, and a few of the guys they train. Imagine unpaved one-lane roads without rails, winding above sheer drops.

Folks out in those mountains and valleys are mostly shepherds and farmers. The farming happens on terraces that stair-step the mountainsides. At one point we climbed to a peak about 12,000 feet up, which is pretty exhausting for lowlanders used to the thick air around sea level. We met a kid up there who was tending some cattle. And when he wasn't herding, he was doing his studies in a little booklet. But the place we met him had a 360-degree view of Himalayan peaks, which would be a little distracting to me if I were trying to study.

Up top there was a little shrine to some unnamed god. People had climbed up and left coins, combs, scraps of cloth and such. Halfway up we'd met a family known to Fred who had some adorable little pigtailed girls. We noticed a number of burn scars on the girls, which Fred had to explain to us. Evidently the local superstition holds that it's bad spirits that make babies cry, so you drive out the spirits with a hot brand. Some of Fred's trainees showed us their own childhood scars. One had been branded as late as age 12. The consensus was that there's pretty much no way to feel culturally open-minded about that. Yeah, don't burn kids: that's a superior idea.

But we gave the kids lollipops while Fred checked in with the parents, all of us aware that it's a long process, this spreading of good news. Note: lollipops help.

Bob's Top 5 Answers to Questions About India:

5. Yes, and don't hit the cow or you'll go to jail.

4. Every day. But Indians don't think of it as "Indian food."

3. Yogurt. Immodium.

2. Like when a ballgame lets out and everyone's fighting to leave the parking lot. But with colorful saris everywhere.

1. Once you get used to the dance numbers, they're probably no sillier than your average Bruce Willis movie.