March 2004

Dear Friends,

An early highlight this year for us was attending the week-long teachers conference for Amity teachers during the school break in January. The Winter Conference is always held right before Chinese New Year, and this year we had it in the city of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, which borders Vietnam and Myanmar. Around fifty teachers (several countries represented among them) plus staff from Amity’s Nanjing and Hong Kong offices gathered for meetings, workshops and recreation. Kim’s mother and father came to spend time with us in Hong Kong and then in Kunming, and they brought along Benjamin’s cousin Jaime, 3½ (Ben is 4), and so Ben had lots of company while we were in our meetings.

A regular part of the Winter Conference is a day-and-a-half trip for the teachers to visit Amity’s rural development projects in the area. Amity has a lot going on in Yunnan Province, as there is a lot of need there. Yunnan is a region of China with a high concentration of indigenous minority peoples and, coincidentally, a high concentration of poverty.

The region is characterized by mountains and deep gorges, changing as you move west into rolling uplands, then the high plateau leading into Tibet. There are few large areas of level land, but the basins in central Yunnan around Kunming are very developed farming regions. And actually, once you’ve flown into Kunming, the surrounding mountain villages are at once both very picturesque and very accessible.

We were taken north to Wuding County where we visited a Miao minority village for whom Amity initiated various projects in 2003, including a new church building (it is a Christian village), a new three-room medical clinic, repairs on a hilltop reservoir, and a new village road. The village provided lunch for our group and then we remained for a while in the afternoon singing hymns, they in Miao and Mandarin, and we in English. We then left in our caravan of a half-dozen small buses to a hotel in the county seat nearby, where we spent the night and then returned to Kunming the next morning.

I had the opportunity to take lots of photographs during the Winter Conference, which brings me to another aspect of the current work. One of my new tasks in Amity’s Hong Kong office is seeing to the creation of an image database.

I have never tackled a project like this before, but it is something the Amity Foundation needs, especially now that they are approaching their twentieth anniversary and are focusing more on “commemoration” and promotional efforts. Maintaining a good and up-to-date library of images illustrating Amity’s multi-faceted work in China is an important part of making China and the ministry here “accessible” to people overseas like you who want accurate information about the needs, but also about the good things that are happening. And so, to this end, I have been “baptized” into the HK office photo collection—by immersion! And that’s not even counting the collections of the several other offices at the Amity Foundation headquarters in Nanjing! Needless to say, it’s a long-term project, but nevertheless a job that I feel is right up my alley. I feel blessed to be entrusted with it.

If you have not already seen our personal photo album on the PC(USA) Web site, you can go there for more images of our China experience (www.pcusa.org/missionconnections/photos/strong.htm), and then look through the album list for other PC(USA) workers in China. Also, please visit the Amity Foundation’s Web site (www.amityfoundation.org) to read more news about the Church in China, and Amity’s English Teachers Programs, among many other things.

John and Kim Strong

The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 86