Sikh temple in Marysville reaches out to explain to others who they are and what they believe
By Theresa Goffredo
Herald Writer
MARYSVILLE — The sweet and musky smell wafts through the large dining hall. One hundred or so men, women and children sit scattered across the carpeted floor, munching on saffron-colored chickpea balls called laddu and sipping spicy tea. They speak in their native language of India, punjabi, and their voices rise and fall in singsong waves throughout the room.
At that moment, though, 8-year-old Navjot Sangha isn’t saying a word. He is thinking. Thinking hard about an answer to a tough question.
How do you explain to your friends what it means to be a Sikh?
"People think I’m Afghanistan, and sometimes I feel bad," says Navjot, his head covered in a white kerchief. "They think we are the same color, so we are the same, but we’re not the same. I’m not Afghanistan. I’m not Muslim. I’m Sikh."
Navjot’s older brother, Navi, adds his thoughts.
"Some people read books and others don’t care, and they don’t want to understand," the 10-year-old Navi says. "I want to show people how we are different and how we pray to our God."
The brothers are not alone in their desire to educate others.
Leaders of the Sikh Temple in Marysville opened their doors before theSept. 11 terrorist attacks. Their thought was to provide a place of worship for Sikhs who live north of Seattle all the way to Canada. Now, three months later, the Marysville temple is packed on Sundays with Sikh followers and non-Sikhs in need of a hot meal.
But after the terrorist attacks, the Sikhs at the Marysville temple find themselves playing a different role.
Now, the Sikhs don’t just offer food and spiritual comfort to outsiders, but feel compelled to enlighten their minds with the message that men who wear turbans and have long beards are not all the same.
Though the Sikhs are humble, the events of Sept. 11 have thrust them into the public eye, and their religion, based on equality and love, has possibly never been more on display.
They’re no longer shy about adopting that new role.
"Like Americans, all of us are not the same," H.S. Virk, a retired major in the Indian army, says after a recent Sunday service at the temple. "But Americans are uneducated about what our identification is and what country we belong to, and they want to paint us with a broad brush. It has to start with education."
Another worshipper, Daljinder Sekhon of Kent, agrees that education will help dispel people’s fears about Sikhs. His own family has been upset by those fears and have forbidden Sekhon’s mother, who always tries to revisit her homeland of India this time of year, from traveling.
"They only have a little thing in the news. The wire news is just like that, and the rest is just local," says Sekhon, holding up his thumb and index finger to indicate an inch. "I’m from India, and I know who is Muslim and who is Buddhist and who is Hindu — and Americans, they don’t know. No one explains it."
Local city leaders such as Municipal CourtJudge Larry Trivett want to help the less-than-diverse Marysville community embrace the Sikhs. Trivett attends Marysville United Methodist Church, and that congregation is trying to arrange an exchange between the two churches so members can witness each others’ service.
"We’re not going to succeed unless we all sort of understand each other," Trivett says.
To help with that understanding, Keith Snodgrass points out that the Sikh religion was born out of a response to the extremists of Islam and Hinduism in India 500 years ago. But Sikhs don’t follow any of the pillars of Islam.
"So people can keep in mind that the videotaped messages from Osama Bin Laden won’t be received well by the Sikhs," says Snodgrass, associate director and outreach coordinator for the South Asia Center at the University of Washington. "He’s not talking to them, and they’re not interested."
The Sikh temple, Snodgrass says, holds important significance as a community center where people in need can be fed and housed. It’s a religious obligation among Sikhs to provide this service, so Sikhs want to guard against any threat to that obligation not being fulfilled.
"It’s not just a place for them to go on Sunday," Snodgrass says.
The Sikh’s call their new place of worship Guru Nanak Temple. It is housed in the former Moose Lodge in southeast Marysville, which Sikh leaders bought for $650,000. The 10,000-square foot temple is an innocuous gray building on 61st Street NE with no obvious placards or signs.
Raj Sandhu of Everett, who owns a local landscaping company, says the committee that runs the temple is still updating the kitchen. But anyone can come into the temple during the week and be treated to healthy, nonfat food, all made fresh, Sandhu says.
But the big meal is after Sunday service, which draws a crowd from 10:30 a.m. to past 1 p.m.
And lately during those services, Sandhu says, people are praying for peace.
"Every day we pray for the people of New York, and every day we are praying, ‘God bless America,’ " he says.
Before the Sunday service begins, worshippers gather in the dining room for hot tea or a traditional Indian breakfast of candied orange and crispy corn-flavored cereal. Then they head upstairs for the service.
The Sikh holy book, the Guru Garanth Sahib, rests atop an altar shrouded under an embroidered maroon cloth. A large green collection box is before the altar. Sikh members walk along the gray runner to just before the collection box, make a contribution, kneel and touch their forehead to the floor with their hands clasped in prayer, and then arise to take their place on the floor.
Men and women remain separate during the service. The women create a collage of colors on their side of the room, their heads draped in silken scarves in a rainbow of shades, matching their layered garments of deep blues, pinks, salmons and lime greens. On the other side, the men’s gold, orange and yellow turbans highlight their more sedate clothing — mostly Dockers, jeans and sport coats. One traditional Sikh, Harbhajan Singh, from Canada, wears a brilliant blue turban, and under his robes a 3-inch dagger, one of the symbols of the Sikh faith.
During the service, the Sikh priest and two disciples sing and pray with the congregation. They play two small pianos, or harmonia, and a set of bongos. At one point, the congregation prays that God live in their hearts and help their minds always remember his name.
After the service, a sacramental food offering called parshad, made of flour, sugar and ghee (clarified butter), is distributed before everyone files into the dining room for lunch.
People sit on carpets strewn on the floor or at tables. In keeping with the Sikh faith, no one gets special treatment, Sandhu says.
"This tradition is — even with the rich — everybody will sit on the floor because we are all equal," he says. "Nobody is rich or poor. We are all equal and at the same level God gave us at birth as human beings, and we should respect the human being as all the same."
After the service, tall and lean T.J. Singh, 16, does the typical teen-age boy fidget when asked about how his friends at his Mill Creek high school react to his Sikh religion. T.J. said he tells his buddies his religion is just a "little more weird than theirs," what with going barefoot in the temple and wearing head coverings.
T.J. says he suffered a certain amount of prejudice and some insults after the Sept. 11 attacks, but it has died down now. Even so, his Sikh religion is important to him.
"I’ve been living in America for over 10 years now, but you don’t want to forget everything about your culture," T.J. says. "So this is good. It’s good to have your values and keep them."
Gagan Manhas, a thin and wiry 9-year-old, boasts of his Sikh religion proudly, saying Sikhs are "good and powerful because they are nice to each other and help each other out."
The Marysville Elementary School boy quickly tells the difference between Sikhs and Muslims: "The Muslims cut Sikhs in half."
The UW’s Snodgrass recognizes that some Sikh children might have heard these stories about their history. But Snodgrass cautions that education and acceptance of Sikhs does not mean discriminating against others.
"Because of where I work, I never really thought people needed to know more about Sikhs, but obviously people don’t know, and it’s probably a good idea to get the message out," Snodgrass says.
Trivett said he wasn’t aware of any overt discrimination or antagonism toward the Sikh community in Marysville. But when he visited their Sunday service, he recognized that the Sikhs would have to reach out to have the community understand who they are.
"Once the community knows them, then the community will see they are really no different than anybody else," Trivett says. "They are striving to be successful, that’s why they’ve come here for a better life. And the majority want the same things that we do —safety and security and to raise their children in good environment."
You can call Herald Writer Theresa Goffredo at 425-339-3097
or send e-mail to goffredo@heraldnet.com.
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