From my journal:
4/03
6:45 AM
Hotel
"Eye has not seen nor has ear heard nor has mind conceived the things God has planned for his people" 1 Corinthians 2
Yesterday we spent around eight hours driving on the minibus through the mountains. The roads swerrved at every turn. They were filled with foot pedestrians. As the bus made its way, the driver would honk the horn every time we neared anyone, which was all the time. This was to give them fair warning no to enter the road. Our road followed the river which cut its way into the mountains. Every mile that we drove took us deeper and deeper into the mountains. The faces on either cliff stretched high into the sky. The sun shone just on the top half of one side as it slipped slowly below the mountain range.
All along the way we saw people hard at work. They were busy doing manual labor. There were large boulders being broken by hand with sledge hammers. There were ten foot deep holes, ten foot in diameter being dug in the sand by shovels Erosion and landslides left huge piles at the bottoms of the mountains to be cleaned up. Platforms had been built into the sides of the mountains to try to stop some of the erosion and to provide some areas for farming. These unfortunately only worked some of the time before giving way to erosion and leaving that portion of the land useless.
I couldn't help reflecting on how people's lives were shaped as well. There some houses built into the sides of the mountain. I can only imagine walking out of my house on a brisk April morning, smelling the freshness of the air, seeing the river below and the mountain ranges that surrounded me, and feeling overwhelmed and inadequate to be in such a beautiful place. I can only imagine the joy that would inspire within me. And yet there are other forces shaping people as well. The hardship of the work it takes to survive. The constant day in and day out physical exertion. And I thought that this was something the whole of the human race faces. In the same way the river and the rains had shaped the sides of the mountain, people's lives are shaped by their circumstances. It is a mixture of joy and hardship that over time carves out who we are. I guess the question is if we have enough joy in our lives to make the carved out mountains look grandeur?
We arrived after 8:00 pm last night. The first thing we did was to put our bags in the room and then head immediately to dinner. At dinner we met the county leaders. They served us a wonderful meal. I was encouraged to eat pig fat. It is just a sqare piece of pig fat. The government projects officer for the region was rooting me on. I put the whole thing in my mouth and continued to add rice and it started to go down. This seemed to find favor with everyone that was serving us.
From there we moved to the police headquarters for a beuracratic type meeting. Everyone was introduced and tok turns sharing pleasantries and hopes for the partnership. The county leaders shared with us the problem in their eyes. This included trafficking as well as urban migration. They seemed to point to the greatest need as being poverty alleviation.
The next day we headed towards the village. We drove about an hour before we arrived at the trail to the village. We had come a long ways to get to this village. What would we find there? About forty five minutes into the climb up the mountain we began to realize the altitude was going to make this climb much tougher The weather was cool and yet I was POURING sweat. For some time we ascended a rocky trail but then came to flat concrete walking wall. This was a good reprieve only about a third of the way up the mountain. Once passed this we were back on the rocky trainl and it began to rain. The rain made the trip more difficult as it became muddy and slippery.
We continued upward around another hour and fifteen minutes. We passed some workers farming the mountainside. We passeed a temporary camping site for men building a power station.
We came to a place where there were four costume dressed girls and an older man. They were waiting on us to carry our bags to the village. They greeted us by singing, "To God Be The Glory" in their language. This was the biggest shock of our trip yet. What a blessing to be standing so far up on this mountain in the middle of China and be greeted by such a familiar and fitting song. We had learned that the villagers were Christians from an earlier debriefing. Some English missionaries had come and given them a written alphabet. Until then their language had not been written down. I was anxious to see what role Christianity was playing in helping to sustain their village.
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