… One Sunday sermon and Jinghui Niu fulfilled a lifetime dream

By Jinghui Niu

After the pastor had challenged our Sunday afternoon congregation to consider going on short mission trips as part of our church’s PEACE pilot program, a group of six from my Thursday morning Bible study group all turned to me the next time we met and said, “Let’s go to China.”

China is home for me, although I relocated to the U.S. 20 years ago. My Bible study group has been aware of how deeply I care and the passion I hold for my fellow Chinese countrymen. The aim of our trip was to bring the Gospel to an unengaged people group.

Another reason our small group chose China as our destination was because Ed, our small group moderator, had adopted his daughter, Hope, from China several years ago when she was a small baby.

At our next meeting, we decided to locate a people group called “Tianbao” which is a subgroup of Zhuang. Several months before our scheduled departure, members of our small group, including the supporting members not going to China, began daily prayers for the trip and for the Tianbao people we were going to meet. Much of our initial research was through the Internet.

The more I learned, the more excited I became while doing my research. When I found out what they looked like and where they lived, my Chinese background came in handy. I was able to surf the Internet in Chinese and discovered in-depth information about them.

THE TIANBAO PEOPLE GROUP:

--Immigrated into this region from Tianbao County not more than five generations ago (100 to 150 years).
--Reside in Funing County, Yunnan province (currently about 16,000 living in community).
--Have blended in villages with other people groups and mostly live along rivers and hillsides.

After much research and numerous phone and e-mail conversations with some earlier missionaries in the area, not much detailed or solid information was available regarding where we would find this people. We narrowed our designation target to Funing County, which is a remote area with more than a hundred villages.

My small group is part of the business and professional groups at Saddleback Church in Orange County, California. Our small group consists of attorneys, engineers, and business owners. In making decisions about a PEACE journey to an unreached group of people in a foreign land, the three lawyers in the group gave us a unique perspective. We all came with different expectations for the trip, and other than me, none of the members had been to China.

Our journey began on May 23, as we departed from LAX at midnight. The first stop was Hong Kong, the gateway to the mainland. It was my first time to visit Hong Kong and I was attracted by its mixed culture, the city’s skylines, and the overall natural beauty of the bay.

After a short tourist experience of wandering around the city, our journey continued to Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan Province. Kunming enjoys a pleasant climate and does its best to live up to its title of the City of Eternal Spring. Kunming is also the gateway to the celebrated Silk Road that facilitated trade with Tibet, Sichuan, Myanmar, and India.

Up to this point, we had been traveling with modern transportation and accommodations and, of course, we were sampling the delicious local dishes. We celebrated when we met a pastor and his wife from a local church in Kunming. Since it is illegal to start homegrown churches and gatherings without government approval, churches in China are registered with the local government. After explaining the purpose of our mission, the pastor was very helpful and introduced us to local connections for transportation.

Life is visibly different as you move through the countryside in China. Modern city life begins to disappear in just a few short miles away from the cities. Paved highways become little bumpy dirt roads—little bumpy dirt roads with no signs.

A hired driver and a minivan carrying the six of us (and our luggage) became our home during the next couple of days. It was not always clear where our next stop would be and how far we would be traveling each day as the road conditions varied drastically. All along the way from Kunming, we started asking people about Tianbao. Most the people we talked to had never heard of Tianbao, and others might have heard about them, but had no idea where they might live or even if they were still a people who stayed together as a group without disseminating into the culture that surrounded them.

Road trips in the China countryside are not quite like the RV experience we enjoy traveling on Interstate 80 across America. As you move away from the few major freeways constructed during recent years to connect major cities it is not uncommon to have a broken down truck on the road blocking both sides of traffic for several hours.

Our ride to Funing County had a good share of scare and panic. Part of the way to Funing was traveled on a narrow dirt road that had a treacherous cliff to a river below on one side and half the road on the other side was used for temporary housing for construction workers. While traveling on the bumpy road filled with deep horizontal ruts that ran opposite the direction of the road, we were all so tense and anxious that every time a car passed on the other side it was like an Indiana Jones adventure to continue down the road.

We reached Funing on the evening of May 27, after several days of a long, tiring, and very bouncy ride. Our driver had become our trip assistant by this time since I was experiencing difficulty understanding the local dialect. Our previously made arrangements were to stay at a local hotel in the county. As a group, we slowly became more and more anxious about finding the Tianbao.
We began asking one person after another as we walked along the road and, like in Kunming, most of them didn’t have a clue about the group of people we were searching for.

Our plans centered around a travel itinerary that we needed to adhere to and concerns began to be voiced questioning whether we should decide to stay or return home.

At this time, we had become rather desperate. We’d run out of places to look and were at the end of our time before starting the journey back to Beijing. Funing was where we thought the Tianbao people lived. Our research showed that everyone in this city would be Tianbao or at least there would be someone who could direct us to the Tianbao part of town.

After dinner, we met in our room to pray, asking God for wisdom and discussed what we should do next—stay or leave to return home. I was sad at the thought of coming so far and returning home without finding this people group. I went downstairs to pay for our evening meal and while chatting with the hotel cashier, I was focused on the fact that we would be packing to leave soon. As I handed her the money, I asked the last person for the last time, “Have you ever heard about a people group called Tianbao?”

She grinned and told me, “I am Tianbao.”

It felt like every drop of blood in my body rushed to my head and my heart was pounding out of my chest. I managed to ask, “Any way you could show me where the Tianbao people live?”

“My name is Wei Li and I come from a village called Na-Chang,” her soft voice continued, “…and everyone in the village is Tianbao.”

I soared up a couple flights of stairs to get back to our group and deliver the exciting news. When they opened the door, I was so short of breath that I couldn’t speak. Glancing at each other, they waited for me to talk. They knew something was up but didn’t know if I was having a nervous breakdown or trying to tell them something exciting.

The trip to the Tianbao village was not easy. It took more than half a day to cover the short distance from Funing to Bo-Ai town. Bo-Ai is a small town where we had to stop to get directions to Na-Chang. At that time, Bo-Ai town was in the process of being relocated to a new area due to the construction of a dam. The old town was scheduled to be submerged as part of the reservoir construction. Not many people were still around in the area because of the construction work. After consulting with several locals, we found the road to Na-Chang late in the afternoon.

It was difficult to contain our excitement, and we were in a constant state of joy until the driver told us that he couldn’t drive us to the village due to the extremely poor road conditions. We would need a 4-wheel drive vehicle to get us to the village. Not knowing what to do, the group decided to stay at a nearby small town called Zhe-Sang. After some discussion, we decided we were prepared to walk to the village if that was what we had to do.

After traveling thousands of miles from the U.S. to get there, Na-Chang was only a couple of miles away from where we had been the night before. Where we had decided to give up and return home.

Our night out at the little town of Zhe-Sang became a highlight of our trip. The town is not much more than one street with small shops that lined along each side of the road. We checked into a “local hotel” where there was no air conditioning, no shower, and not much of a sanitation facility. The town had never experienced Western visitors before; therefore, the arrival of these strange white people quickly became the top news around town.

Guy smiles a lot and the children gathered around him as he tried to “converse” with them. Once he began handing out the candies we had packed in advance to share, his efforts to communicate turned into a huge success. People started assembling around each one of us. Some children tried to practice a few words of broken English while others just wanted to touch the strangers from a different world they had only seen on TV. The children asked me if Guy was Santa Claus.

I am Chinese, and as a group they decided I was a translator from Beijing. No one would believe that I also came from America.

We learned that most children were attending school in that town because so many villages do not have their own schools. Children stay in school, away from parents and family for weeks and sometimes months at a time.

It is common for children to stop going to school at an early age due to travel difficulties and the need for labor back home. We saw many “Hope Elementary Schools” in the region and were later told that they were all funded and built by donations from all over the world to bring education to low income regions.

To our delight, we were invited to a town-hall dance party that night held in front of the town-center building. It was a hot and humid night, but the people were so full of energy and excitement. We headed back to our rooms very late that night with the promise of a 4-wheel drive SUV to transport us to the village the following morning.

Breakfast that next morning in Zhe-Sang cost less than $2.00 for the seven of us. The food was simple but well prepared and very well intended.

Na-Chang is located along a river and hillside. Rice was the main crop we saw. Houses were all built with local red clay mixed with hay straw. Some villagers told us that many of the clay houses had been standing there for more than 50 years.

Tianbao people live a verysimple life in the village. Most houses have little, if any, furniture and were not much more than a place to cook, eat, and sleep. Life seems sparse, but simple.

We saw a woman carrying her baby and homegrown goods to the local market for an exchange of life necessities. Locals informed us that most of them walk miles over mountainous terrain to the market, some trips take more than a day. I can’t imagine how such a small person carrying her baby and all her goods, traveling for days could make it to the market.

Compared to people living in town, the Na-Chang villagers were much more timid and shy. They were very friendly and showed us around the village, the farms, some cattle, and several houses. We asked many questions and tried to learn what their life was like. Hope Elementary School was the nicest building in their village.

The first time I went shopping at Costco after coming back from China, as I pushed a big cart of stuff, the image of the woman with so far to walk and the weight she carried, I couldn’t stop the tears running down my cheeks. I can’t forget the people in Na-Chang who walk miles and miles to get their basic life essentials. Because of this travel experience, I am much more aware of how rich my life is in America.

Before leaving America our plan was to find a people group and somehow provide them assistance. Coming back from the trip, we realized that we were the ones that had been helped by this amazing experience.

Without seeing how people live in other parts of the world, we often fail to realize how blessed we are and how much we can do to help the less fortunate.

Jinghui Niu owns a successful environmental engineering consulting firm in southern California, USA. His company specializes in environmental assessment, remediation, engineering and construction services throughout California. For further information, visit the company Website at www.environstrategy.com. Niu became a Christian in 1999 and can be contacted at niu@environstrategy.com.