GongYi Home of Hope

Around the end of January 1999, a friend from home came to visit us. She was in South China teaching grade school on an exchange teacher program with her college. It was Spring break so we decided to all travel to Xian together and see the Terracotta soldiers that have become so world famous.

I made sure we got real nice seats on a first class train ’cause this was all new to Shannie. Armed with cameras and back pack, we took off! The train pulled out and we were all really into enjoying the trip.

Zhengzhou, the major city near where we live (population 2 million not counting the surrounding suburbs…) is a flat delta area off the Yellow River. Sometimes it looks a lot like the Mississippi delta basin area near St. Louis and Southern Missouri.

After about an hour by train I noticed we suddenly entered into mountains. I have always liked mountains so I was really watching the scenery now. I was startled to see people living in caves – holes dug out by human hands in the sides of the mountains. I was intrigued, as I had not known this kind of life existed here. Some of the caves had doors crafted to fit into the oval-shaped openings. Some had cloth or plastic hung over the openings.

I also noticed there was a definite “class” system between the types of houses. Some of had room additions. They actually kept the cave house but built a “brick” room addition in front of the cave house and continued to use the cave house as well as the brick room addition. (The brick they use is not brick as we know it… it is soft and crushes real easily.)

I was so intrigued I took a whole cassette of VCR film to send back to my Dad and Mom in the States. And I quickly began to feel this tremendous burden to do something for these people. We would see old people digging in little 10′ X 10′ patch gardens in front of their caves and sometimes we would see children playing outside the mouths of caves. In some of the more “affluent” neighborhoods you could see where the enterprising homeowner had managed to either find a fault in the formation above his cave or else drill a hole up to and through the top, as there were little chimneys just sticking out of the ground up there and little trails of smoke curling toward the heavens.

The longer the train wheels clattered through the mountains and the more I saw the more I knew THIS was where we were supposed to go.

We had a good trip. Nothing much there to write about. The soldiers were neat and to think that so many of them were done so many thousands of years ago and buried for so long is pretty cool. But I was really looking forward to the trip back home so I could see the mountain villages and cave dwellers again.

When we got home the drive and burden didn’t go away. It just became stronger and stronger that we needed to figure out how to go there. Upon inquiry I found that foreigners cannot go into those areas without government permission and special guides. Hmm… so how to get there? I needed a vehicle. I mentioned the need to some friends at home and the church there raised the money for us to buy a used station wagon.

Shannie was beginning to have back problems so I would take little trips alone into villages near where we lived to make friends and see what could be done to begin to start moving into this area of activity. I made a lot of friends, but it didn’t seem that I was making any headway. And I knew that the further west I went (toward the places I saw on the way to Xian) the more curiosity I would arouse. I slowly felt the vision begin to slip into the background behind other more pressing things.

There was a major political attempt to close down the university and I was smack in the middle of it as by now I was the Vice President in charge of foreign projects. Shannie was getting worse. Gradually my little trips to the villages slowed down and finally stopped.

We eventually won the victory in keeping the school open, and those people who were trying to do us in (both government and secular adversaries) were viciously criticized by the major government leaders. But Shannie was now bedfast and not able to move at all. Thoughts of the cave people had pretty much receded to the backs of our minds.

We went through three months of trying desperately to figure out what to do about Shannie. She was too ill to fly home without the medical flight thingy that is available but very expensive. We were trying all kinds of muscle relaxers sent from the States, and finally began to talk about either acupuncture or back surgery here in China.

We found a very good doctor — the number one back surgeon in the PLA was
assigned to her case. He was an awesome guy, and the only Doctor in China trained to use the Microscopic Surgery machine that comes from either America or Germany.

After numerous tests and pictures (this was on a Friday) surgery was scheduled for the following Monday. There were two discs in her back that very obviously had to be removed. They were so bad even I could see them without being coached.

The day before the surgery the Doctor came in and said he wanted to take a couple more shots with the CT (Cat scan) so he would know exactly where to locate the machine on her back. When the CT results came back the Doctor ordered more, including an MRI and multiple directional X-rays. There seemed to be nothing for him to operate on! <grin> The discs miraculously were completely back to normal.

Shannie came home and began her healing process. The spine and discs were OK but there was some residual nerve bruising that needed to heal, and because she had been bedridden for three months there was some loss of strength so special high doses of calcium and other various Chinese medicines were prescribed.

A little after Christmas in 1999, I received a card from a lady in Sri Lanka I had never heard of before. It was a nice Christmas card that had been made by the orphans she teaches there. I wanted to write this lady and ask her how she heard about me but I couldn’t make out her return address.

But I began to think about orphans.

One day I went downstairs in our foreign teachers building and there was an Australian lady there visiting one of the foreign teachers. We were introduced and I asked her what she was doing here. She told us that she comes to China once a year to work in a Chinese government-run orphanage, teaching them how to care for the orphans. I asked her if she had ever heard of a private orphanage before and she told me it wasn’t allowed in China.

I really begin to have a burden for orphans.

We heard about a couple in Beijing who had been trying for five years to get a permit to start their own orphanage, and finally succeeded. I decided that was what we were going to do. SOMEWHERE.

Then I was invited to a government-sponsored New Years party. I met a little American lady there who had started an orphanage about five years ago, with so much success. I picked her brain for about an hour.

Now I knew we were going to have an orphanage. But where? And when?

I was sitting at my desk one day and it hit me that I had lost my earlier vision, and had exchanged it for orphans. What about all those cave dwellers? What about the car we got so we could go into the mountains and reach them? Which burden/vision was the real one? How could we be given a burden for the villages and cave dwellers and then have it replaced by this burning vision and burden for the orphans?

At that moment the phone rang and it was the little lady from the party. She said that Mrs. Zhang, the wife of an ex-government official of Henan, wanted to meet me, that she thought she could help me get a permit to start an orphanage. I agreed to meet with her. When we met, she told me that if I would start the orphanage in this place called GongYi she could guarantee me permits and government assistance immediately.

I told her I would at least go meet with the officials to see what they had to say, so we set a date to go to GongYi and meet the Mayor, Party Secretary and the other leaders of the area. (GongYi is not only a small city but a county and province seat.)

I had never even heard of GongYi before so I had no idea where we were going. We started driving, with the lady giving me directions, and slowly the highway we were on headed into mountains. I realized we were headed West — toward Xian and the terra cotta soldiers. I began to notice holes in the sides of the hills. As the hills turned to mountains, we went through a tunnel and then there they were – cave houses, cave dwellers and cave villages! I pulled the car over to the side of the road and got out my map and found GongYi. I looked for the train line that goes from ZhengZhou to Xian, and there it was… and the first place the Highway and the train tracks come close together is where they are forced to do so by the mountains — a place called GongYi… Then I realized that GongYi was where, one year ago, I had started taking the movies to send to my parents.

The chills didn’t leave my back for several minutes… Man deviseth his way in his heart… but Someone Else directs his steps! Vision one and vision two both came together at GongYi.

At first we weren’t going to be allowed into the mountains because they didn’t want us seeing the conditions there. But restrictions fell away and now we are allowed. And when we do go into the mountains, we are not suspected of doing anything… except looking for children for the Home of Hope.