Feature by Andrea Laurita Only about 40 to 50 persons of the 1 million population of Amdo-Tibetans are believers. These believers are scattered throughout the Tibetan plateau.

Back to Table of Contents | Back to Main Index Previous Features | Send mail to The Voice Student missionary serves Tibetan Buddhists in China Ellis plans to graduate from Multnomah and return permanently to the Tibetan people within five years. -Sarah Ellis, photo The final leg of the flight, Thailand to China, was only five hours, but it seemed an eternity. Sarah Ellis, a junior at Multnomah Bible College, wanted to take a nap, but a Chinese businessman planted himself in the seat next to hers. "I have never talked to an American," he said. "This is my lucky day." Ellis was excited to head back to China. She had been there for three months in 2000 and had almost missed her opportunity to return this past summer. "I had decided not to go because I needed to pay for college," she said. But she had applied for the trip anyway. "I needed to raise $3,500, but I was asking people for more because I needed money for school." Two weeks before her scheduled departure, she had no money for the trip. "I painted my grandpa's porch and earned $300," she said. And then money flooded in, including enough to pay for airfare and immunizations. As the plane touched down in Chengdu, China, Ellis gathered her suitcase stuffed with several shirts from Goodwill, three pair of pants, hiking shoes and a bag of goodies to give to children and joined her traveling companions in the immigration line. The team consisted of three American men, three American women and a Polish man. They would spend six weeks ministering to the Amdo-Tibetan peoples of the Qinghai Province. Ellis was the team leader. For the first few days, they stayed in Xining, a city of nearly 1 million people and studied the Tibetan culture. Each afternoon they talked with young Tibetans who were learning English. "Ni hao," the team said to the nationals as they walked by animals tied to posts, hides spread out to dry and carts of intestines for sale. People usually returned the greeting with a blank stare. "In that culture it is acceptable to stare, and since we were all very obviously foreigners, we got stared at a lot," Ellis said. Two weeks into the trip, the team split up for a few nights. Ellis and her teammates, Laura Meisenheimer and Susanna Ellis, accompanied two Tibetan girls to visit their nomadic relatives in the mountains. Nine people crammed into a minivan taxi for four hours, bouncing down unpaved roads littered with windblown papers and plastic bottles. When the minivan got stuck, the team members gathered their backpacks and hitched a ride on the flatbed of a coal truck. The truck climbed over rolling green mountains dotted with nomad tents before jolting to a stop at an elevation of 12,000 feet. Friendly Tibetans dressed in colorful robes emerged from their white canvas homes to meet their guests-- the first white people they had ever seen. Then the Tibetans continued their daily chores while the team set up a neon-pink tent on the grassy floor. Meisenheimer said, "We sipped yak milk tea and ate tsampa (ground barley mixed with yak butter) as we sat on the ground, gazing out at the mountains." Evening came, and the darkness brought a bitter cold. The women were tired from the long journey, and the thin mountain air was difficult to breathe. They huddled in their host's tent next to a stove fueled with yak dung. "We wanted to talk with them, but we couldn't speak the language," Ellis said. These simple nomads were not as religious as the inhabitants from the city. "We realized that these people have never heard the name of Jesus or of Christianity, and that no work is in place for missionaries to live among them and befriend them," Ellis said. After a long and uncomfortable taxi ride back to the city, the three women joined their team members to spend the remainder of the trip doing practical work. Ellis assigned herself to the latrine-building projects. The first latrine project was for a boarding school that housed 130 children and had no electricity or running water. The first day, the team shifted three 8-foot-long cement slabs to cover the hole that another team had previously dug. They gathered and sifted sand to mix cement and lay the brick walls, shadowed continually by curious children. "We worked from 8 a.m. until 9 p.m., except for our one o'clock and four o'clock tea breaks," Ellis said. "That was a really long day, a really long day." The team worked for four days despite stomach illness, exhaustion and sunburn. At night they stayed at the school. "We slept on mats on the dusty floors in a classroom," Pawel Kugler, the Polish team member, said. "The faces of Marx, Stalin and Lenin looked at us from large posters that hung on the wall." Ellis woke early every morning to pray before the team gathered for breakfast. One morning she cried out, "God, you have led me here specifically for these people. What is your message for them?" During her breaks she read the Sermon on the Mount with Tibetans in mind. "I could walk around the town in 15 minutes and see everything," she said. "They had prayer flags and altars for worship; this place is overcome with darkness. I thought 'God, is there nothing we can do for these people? They're completely lost. I can't speak their language, and even if I could, their culture wouldn't understand this message I have.'" Then Ellis said she remembered that the battle is already won, and the Tibetans must simply accept it. "I remembered that Christ has defeated the darkness," she said. Before leaving China, the team enjoyed a feast at a Christian family's home. While the family prepared the meal, Ellis played outside in a pile of hay with a group of small children. The team laughed when she came into the house covered in dust. "Whenever we met children, she would talk to them in Chinese or Tibetan, touch them, and smile at them," Meisenheimer said. "It didn't matter if they hadn't bathed or if they had snot running down their faces. She loved them, and they knew it." Now back at Multnomah, Ellis is preparing to return to China. "I am teaching Sunday school at a Chinese church. I need to keep myself involved in Tibetan culture here," she said. "The frustrating thing about this summer is that I began to build relationships with people, but then I had to leave. It is hard for me to stay away for very long." Back to Table of Contents | Back to Main Index Previous Features | Top Of Page Send mail to The Voice| Journalism department website © 2003 The Voice. No part of this publication may be reproduced in written or electronic form without prior written consent from the journalism adviser of Multnomah Bible College. All rights reserved.