Eric's Beijing Diary

Finally bought a plane ticket today. For several weeks, I have been working on putting together some kind of team to go to Sichuan Province to help out. The first thing I did was to contact Red Cross China. But I kept getting a message that their email address didn't work. Finally, I contacted Joy in Shanghai, to see if she could help me. She tried to contact them too, but didn't have any better luck. Finally, she referred me to someone in her church who had been invloved , and seemed to know sonething about it. I wrote to this lady, and she contacted the local church in one of the communities outside of Chengdu. They were invovled with relief work, but were understandably ambivalent about taking help from a clumsy foreigner who didn't speak Mandarin that well, to say nothing of the local Sichuan dialect. I told Joy that I would just wait. God has been teaching me to wait patiently for the open door, and not try to pound down closed ones. I must admit I am not always the best student, but I think I'm slowly getting better at it.

Next I contacted Cindy, who is a house church Christian, and she referred me to a group of students who were going to be going out there. i met with them, and felt very positive about what they were doing. There are some unique advantages about going with a group of students. They tend to be a little more multicultural, and are infinitely less bureaucratic. "Sure, you can go with us!"