February 2002

Dear Friends,

Amity winter conference in Yunnan

During the week of January 2002, the teachers of the Amity Foundation gathered in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, in southeastern China, for our annual winter conference. Yunnan is one of China’s poorer provinces, mainly because most of it is mountainous. It is also inhabited heavily by minority people-groups such as the Miao, Yi, and Dai. We chose Yunnan as the site of our winter conference partly because Amity has a variety of poverty alleviation projects in the province, so we were able to take the teachers to
visit one. We also chose it because it provides an opportunity to expose teachers, at least briefly, to churches among China’s minority peoples. (Most of Yunnan’s 800,000 plus Christians are minority peoples rather than Han Chinese.)

Wuding county

During the conference we were able to take the Amity teachers for an overnight visit to projects in Wuding, a poor county a few hours northwest of Kunming. Wuding has a population of about 260,000 people, about half of whom are minority peoples, mainly Miao and Yi. The county is poor mainly because it is very mountainous, so there is not much arable land. One of the first things you will notice in the county is that virtually every hillside is terraced so as to make every possible foot of ground produce crops, even if that means digging into steep hillsides (often resulting in considerable erosion).
Another problem is that the area is subject to earthquakes, and there have been several severe quakes in Wuding over the last ten years. A final problem is that while Wuding gets a fair amount of rainfall during the year, it is concentrated in a short rainy season, so during much of the year rainfall is inadequate. When the rains do come, they come with such severity that they often wash away valuable topsoil.

There are more than 30 villages in Wuding county where Amity has multiple development projects, and many other villages where Amity has a smaller presence, for example, in supporting children who would otherwise be too poor to attend school.

Ganhaizi village

Taking seventy-some Amity teachers and sending agency representatives to visit projects in the mountains of rural Yunnan is no easy task, especially as most villages with Amity projects do not yet have roads passable by vehicles. However, at least a few villages where Amity has projects are also accessible by vehicle, so we were able to take everyone to visit projects in Ganhaizi village. Ganhaizi is a Miao village of about 200 people, perched on the side of a mountain. There is some arable land in valleys and on hillsides nearby, but relatively little land that is naturally flat. When the sun comes out the scenery is wonderful, with green mountainsides under clear blue skies. However, when clouds cover the sun the temperature drops rapidly and the starker side of mountain life is more evident.

Visiting a Miao village is always something of a spectacle, with a line of singing villagers to greet you, a home-cooked lunch served on a pine-needle covered clearing, and speeches and performances. However, the main point of the visit was to examine the projects Amity supports in the village. Over years of poverty alleviation work, Amity has learned that carrying out a single project in a village is not enough to put the village on the road to greater prosperity, so the focus of Amity’s rural development work has shifted to "integrated development projects," i.e. baskets of mutually supporting small projects that work together to make a significant impact of the life of a village. In Ganhaizi, the "basket" consists of the following small projects:

Drainage ditches to channel flood water from heavy rains away from fields on the hillsides and valley floor A small reading room with books on animal husbandry, veterinary care, medicine, farming, and so forth, as well as books to help students develop their reading and writing skills A small village clinic for Amity-trained "bare-foot" doctors from the village. This has given the village better access to basic health care services. With help from Amity, eight village households have installed bio-gas systems that use waste matter from people and animals to produce gas for cooking and lighting. This reduces the need to cut down nearby vegetation for fuel, at least from March through
November when the warmer temperatures enable the decomposition process in the bio-gas system to produce enough gas. Two large cisterns to collect and hold rainwater during the rainy season for use in irrigation and other purposes during the dry months of the year. Improved communication links, including improvements in the road to the village, laying of a power line, and the purchase of several TV reception dishes. (While much of Chinese TV programming is entertainment, a higher percentage than in the US consists of educational material, including a whole channel devoted entirely to agriculture.) Training sessions on agriculture and husbandry for local people, including two specifically for the women of the village.

Each of these small projects is a joint "tripod" project in which local villagers contribute one part (usually the labor— "sweat equity"), the local government contributes a second, and Amity covers the third. (The exact nature of each party’s contribution depends on the type of project. For example, for the cisterns, the villagers handle the labor, the government sends technical experts to design the system, and
Amity pays for the cement.)

Incidentally, the village also has a small school covering grades 1 through 3. Students who go on to grades 4 through 6 need to go to the school in a village seven kilometers away. There is also a small church in the village that is now several years old. As is the case in many Miao villages, most of the population of Ganhaizi is Christian. (Amity serves many villages that have few or no Christians, but also works in villages that have Christian populations.)

One final note on our visit: One of staff members from Amity’s Rural Development Division commented on how much the village has changed over the past several years. When he first visited the village three years ago, the villagers were afraid to interact with outsiders and avoided him. Now they have become more comfortable interacting with people from outside their region. Perhaps more telling, not only had their living standard improved, but they had begun to carry out improvement projects of their own, including one to improve forestation and reduce erosion.

Church in Wuding

Our visit to Wuding concluded with a visit to a church in the main county town. The county as a whole has 188 churches, many of which are small village churches. There are 227 pastoral staff members in the county, but only three ordained pastors. (In China, ordination only occurs after someone has worked successfully in a church for a number of years; it is not conferred upon seminary graduation or taking a church call. So many of these pastoral staff members would be graduates of short-term lay training courses.) As with the rest of the province, many of Wuding’s Christians are Miao or Yi minority people.

Our visit to the Wuding county church was special in that the church is newly rebuilt, having been damaged in an earthquake some years ago. It serves as the administrative center for all the churches in Wuding county, and also houses classrooms for a lay training center. Our visit took place on a weekday, so we could not attend a regular worship service there, but the pastor held a special service and presentation for us, the highlight of which was the singing of a Miao choir from a nearby village. In addition to singing Chinese and Miao hymns, they also sang the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah, a piece that is quite popular among both Miao and Chinese Christian choirs.

Don Snow

The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 179