Thoughts on Beijing
Today was our first day at Grace Minority orphanage in Beijing. We walked into the home with two dozen kids running up with arms wide open. Most of the children in the home are between the ages of 3 and 9, along with a few teenagers. I’d say half of the kids had some sort of special need, either a physical disability or a mental disability. These kids were so easy to love. We started out the morning with songs and dancing! Man these kids like to dance! Our team is teaching on the life of Joseph this week, so we taught the first lesson with skits, memory verses, and art projects. During nap time we were able to begin painting a safari mural on the play room walls. Tomorrow will be lesson 2 and more fun art projects for the kids, and I’m sure more dancing and singing! :)
Some thoughts on Beijing….
Beijing is interesting to me. It is strikingly eerie. Never before have I ever gone to a city without seeing some sign of poverty….but in Beijing, there are NO poor people. I keep looking out the window just in shock, wondering how a city could be so clean, so polished, so affluent through out. There is a working class, but even they have nifty uniforms for their jobs, so it looks put together. This is “saving face” at its prime. Apparently when the Olympics came to Beijing, “they” (I keep hearing about a distant group of people in power that seem to make all the decisions in this country referred to as just “they”) cleaned the city up by displacing all the poor people and moving them outside the inner city limits. This is fascinating….usually the “poor” people end up in the middle of a large city and the “rich” find their way to the nice suburbs on the outskirts. On top of this clean, efficient, modern, constantly building city, what I find most eerie are the faces of the people. I see an emptiness behind their eyes. A longing for purpose, for an identity, for something more. I haven’t found joy outside of the walls of the orphanage and a few select friends that we’ve met along the way. This is so sad to me. Maybe I haven’t been here long enough to see the happiness outside. What keeps me hopeful is the knowledge of a thriving underground church in this country…growing at a rapid rate, restricted yet moving.
Something else I’ve noticed in just the few short days I’ve been Beijing is the overwhelming onslaught of consumerism. As Benjamin says “they have new idols now.” There is stuff everywhere. High end fashion stores (Hermes, Prada, Valentino…), chaotic and crazy knock-off markets with hundreds of vendors pulling at your arm to offer you great deals on fake products, Shopping malls going up on every other corner. Audi's and Mercedes and BMW’s. Consumerism has seeped into this culture in an alarming way.
I think if I were to come back to China on my own I would want to venture outside the city of Beijing to the countryside. I envision a quiet mountain village, sipping jasmine tea on a little corner tea shop, reading a book. I think that is the kind of China I would love. Next time! :)
Some thoughts on Beijing….
Beijing is interesting to me. It is strikingly eerie. Never before have I ever gone to a city without seeing some sign of poverty….but in Beijing, there are NO poor people. I keep looking out the window just in shock, wondering how a city could be so clean, so polished, so affluent through out. There is a working class, but even they have nifty uniforms for their jobs, so it looks put together. This is “saving face” at its prime. Apparently when the Olympics came to Beijing, “they” (I keep hearing about a distant group of people in power that seem to make all the decisions in this country referred to as just “they”) cleaned the city up by displacing all the poor people and moving them outside the inner city limits. This is fascinating….usually the “poor” people end up in the middle of a large city and the “rich” find their way to the nice suburbs on the outskirts. On top of this clean, efficient, modern, constantly building city, what I find most eerie are the faces of the people. I see an emptiness behind their eyes. A longing for purpose, for an identity, for something more. I haven’t found joy outside of the walls of the orphanage and a few select friends that we’ve met along the way. This is so sad to me. Maybe I haven’t been here long enough to see the happiness outside. What keeps me hopeful is the knowledge of a thriving underground church in this country…growing at a rapid rate, restricted yet moving.
Something else I’ve noticed in just the few short days I’ve been Beijing is the overwhelming onslaught of consumerism. As Benjamin says “they have new idols now.” There is stuff everywhere. High end fashion stores (Hermes, Prada, Valentino…), chaotic and crazy knock-off markets with hundreds of vendors pulling at your arm to offer you great deals on fake products, Shopping malls going up on every other corner. Audi's and Mercedes and BMW’s. Consumerism has seeped into this culture in an alarming way.
I think if I were to come back to China on my own I would want to venture outside the city of Beijing to the countryside. I envision a quiet mountain village, sipping jasmine tea on a little corner tea shop, reading a book. I think that is the kind of China I would love. Next time! :)
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